Occupation / job
Exercise Physiologists
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
A $59,460 midpoint puts Exercise Physiologists $9,440 above the $50,020 typical American job — a 19% premium paid for the training, the licence or the conditions. It is not free money and it disappears the moment you stop meeting the requirement.
8,560 people work as Exercise Physiologists. That is enough for a functioning national market and not enough for a functioning local one — in most metros this is a few employers rather than a field you can move around inside.
Clinical practice suits people who can decide under uncertainty with a patient in front of them, and who are steady about the documentation, the shifts and the liability that come attached.
How long it takes to become one of the 8,560 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.
Who should not do this
The middle half runs $49,620 to $67,230 — $1,467 a month between the quarters, a 1.4x ratio. Spreads this narrow are usually set by a grade or a scale, so the negotiation you are imagining probably is not available.
Even the 25th percentile pays $49,620, $400 more than the $50,020 typical American job and $23.85 an hour. The floor, not the median, is the strongest financial argument for Exercise Physiologists.
Avoid it if you could not carry clinical responsibility for an outcome that goes badly through nobody’s fault.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 8,560 people employed as Exercise Physiologists; it did not count the people who trained for it and are doing something else, and a rate built without that denominator would be a number we made up.
What the spread tells you
The quarters are $49,620 and $67,230, a ratio of 1.4x. In a distribution this narrow, the biggest single lever on your pay in Exercise Physiologists is the cost of living where you do it.
Put in money rather than ratios: $49,620 at the 25th percentile, $59,460 at the midpoint, $67,230 at the 75th. $17,610 separates the quarter of Exercise Physiologists at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Between $49,620 and $67,230 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $59,460. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $7,770; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $17,610.
The fall from $59,460 to the $49,620 bottom quarter is $9,840; the climb to the $67,230 top quarter is $7,770. Slightly more of the range lies below the midpoint than above it, so the downside is the bigger movement here.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Exercise Physiologists is $28.58 an hour. The quarters sit at $23.85 and $32.32, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $59,460 figure is what employers pay employees. It is before tax and before deductions, it excludes the self-employed entirely, and it says nothing about anyone who does this work on their own account.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Exercise Physiologists, the hourly figure is $59,460 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else