Credential
Athletic trainer certification (ATC)
A master's degree is now required, and only about half the people who hold the certification are employed as athletic trainers.
No verified cost figure.
Months of training, full time. Part time takes longer.
No payback period — there is no cost figure to pay back. The premium is below.
Where no figure above could be verified we publish none rather than an estimate.
Why there is no cost figure here
Athletic training programmes sit inside CIP 51.09 with physician assistant studies, respiratory therapy, surgical technology and several other allied-health courses, and the Department publishes no split. The blended master's figure for that code is dominated by physician assistant programmes, which cost and pay far more, so applying it here would be a number about a different profession wearing this page's label.
Since 2022 the entry-level degree has been a master's: two years of accredited graduate study including clinical placements, after a bachelor's, then the BOC examination.
Certification is maintained on a two-year cycle with continuing education and an annual fee; most states also require a licence.
How many people hold this, and how many are working in the field
The number the pay figure leaves out
Of the 58,646 people holding a current BOC athletic trainer certification counted in 2025, federal employment records account for 30,500 working in the occupations it is for — 52.0%. That leaves 28,146 holders it does not account for.
That gap is an upper bound, not an unemployment rate. Holding a credential is not the same as looking for work with it. The gap contains everyone who moved into management, teaching, sales, inspection or a related job that federal data files under a different occupation; everyone who retired or left without surrendering the credential; everyone working part time, agency or self-employed in a way the employment survey does not capture; and everyone holding it as a second string to another job. So the gap is the CEILING on how many trained people are not working in this field — the real figure is lower, and it is not a count of anyone who is unemployed. What the pair does establish is the size of the pool the published pay figure is silent about, which is the thing no pay site shows you.
Both sides are standing counts. Holders on a date against employment in a period — the same kind of quantity, which is the only reason the two may be divided at all.
What that count includes: People holding the ATC credential at the end of 2025. The Board of Certification is the only certifying body for athletic trainers in the United States, so this is a person count rather than a licence-record count. It includes people not currently practising and a small share based outside the United States — BOC put those at 6.2% and 1.4% in its last published demographic breakdown, which covers an earlier cycle and cannot simply be subtracted from this year's total.
Denominator: people holding a current BOC athletic trainer certification = 58,646 (Standing count of people holding the credential, calendar year 2025) · Board of Certification for the Athletic Trainer, 2025 Annual Report · view
The gap here is one of the wider ones on the site for a clinical credential, and part of it is structural: athletic trainers employed by schools and universities are sometimes filed under teaching or coaching occupations, and those working in industrial and military settings are filed elsewhere again. BOC's own last published breakdown put about 6% of certificants as not currently practising.
What it lets you do
The pay belongs to the job, not to the credential. These are the occupations it qualifies you for.
| Job | Is it required? | Median | Employed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Athletic Trainers | Legally required to hold the job | $62,520 | 30,500 |
Median pay and employment: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025.
Does it pay for itself?
The job this unlocks pays a median of $62,520, against an employment-weighted median of $50,020 across every occupation we publish — a premium of about $12,500 a year before tax. We cannot turn that into a payback period, because no credible figure exists for what this costs to obtain — half of the calculation is real and published, and the other half we do not have.
Read that as a comparison to an average job, not to your job. What that baseline is, and what it leaves out
And it assumes you get the job. Every payback figure on this site is conditional on being hired into the work. That is the assumption the credential-holder count above exists to test, and it is the assumption every other pay site makes silently.
What you need before you start
- A bachelor's degree with prerequisite coursework
- A place on a CAATE-accredited master's programme
- A pass in the BOC examination
Do not do this if
- you need predictable hours — the work follows the sports calendar, which means evenings, weekends and travel
- you are expecting the master's requirement to have raised the pay; it raised the cost of entry and the pay sits below the typical US job for a graduate credential
All credentials, by payback period · How this is calculated · Look up something else