Occupation / job
Occupational Therapists
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
$100,330 against a $50,020 national midpoint is 101% more, or $24.18 an hour. Almost nothing pays this much more without a long, expensive or restricted route in — read that route before reading the number again.
National employment is 162,450. At that scale hiring is continuous, the market rate is well established, and your leverage comes from being credibly willing to go somewhere else.
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.
No verified preparation time is on file for Occupational Therapists. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
Between $82,510 and $116,670 there is $34,160, a ratio of 1.4x. Tight distributions are predictable, and predictable cuts both ways: little risk of being badly underpaid, little prospect of doing much better.
Even at the 25th percentile Occupational Therapists pays $82,510, $32,490 clear of the $50,020 national midpoint. Almost the entire distribution sits above the typical American wage, which is rare and worth weighing against the entry cost.
Avoid it if you could not carry clinical responsibility for an outcome that goes badly through nobody’s fault.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 162,450 is a headcount of the employed, which is a numerator without a denominator — everyone who qualified and never got hired is missing from it, and we will not estimate them to complete a percentage.
What the spread tells you
Top quarter to bottom quarter is 1.4x. In a band that narrow, $100,330 is a genuinely representative number for Occupational Therapists and the main variable left is where you live.
The middle half of this field earns between $82,510 and $116,670. That is $34,160 of range, with $100,330 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Getting to $116,670, the 75th percentile, is worth $16,340 a year more than the $100,330 midpoint and $34,160 more than the $82,510 a quarter of Occupational Therapists settle for.
There is $17,820 between $82,510 and $100,330, and $16,340 between $100,330 and $116,670. The lower half of the range is marginally the longer one — worth knowing if you would be entering Occupational Therapists at the bottom of it.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $39.66 at the bottom quarter, $48.23 at the midpoint, $56.09 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
This is payroll data: it comes from employers, about people they employ. Anyone doing the work of Occupational Therapists for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $100,330 describes them.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Occupational Therapists, the hourly figure is $100,330 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