Respiratory Therapists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($61,900) to the 90th ($108,820). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 136,420 people in May 2024, 0.09% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 18,310 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 28.6% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in West Virginia, whose location quotient of 2.16 says this work is 2.16 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

One in ten workers in this field earns $61,900 or less, and one in ten earns $108,820 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 1.8 to 1 and the annual gap is $46,920. The mean ($84,260) versus median ($80,450) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is District of Columbia at $104,240; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Respiratory Therapists stands number 221 by employment and number 204 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations, the group median wage is $98,340 across 71 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 18% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.4% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 20 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $80,450, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 7,010 jobs, 5.1% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $32,290 a year, against $140,650 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $80,450 a year is $6,704 a month gross, $3,094 every two weeks, $1,547 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($68,410) to the 75th ($95,530) is worth $27,120 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $6,704 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $88,495 would sit between the median ($80,450) and the 75th percentile ($95,530), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $68,410, is $12,040 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations

Sibling occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations: Podiatrists, Acupuncturists, Nurse Midwives, Exercise Physiologists, Neurologists, Dentists, All Other Specialists. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.