Occupation / job
Physical 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
How many people are qualified for this, and how many are doing it
The pay figure above only describes people who got the job. This is the part it leaves out.
There are 322,992 unique physical therapists holding an active US licence (2025). Federal employment records account for 267,330 people working in Physical Therapists — 82.8%.
The remainder is a ceiling, not an unemployment rate. Holding the credential is not the same as wanting a job with it, and the remainder also holds everyone who moved into management or teaching, retired without giving the credential up, or works self-employed in a way the employment survey misses. What the pair does establish is that the pay figure above is a survivor's figure, and roughly how many people it is silent about. Everything else that gap contains
Denominator: unique physical therapists holding an active US licence = 322,992 (Standing count of people holding the credential, as at 31 December 2025) · FSBPT, Census of Licensed PTs and PTAs in the USA, 2025 · view
Who this suits
$102,760 is $4,395 a month above the $50,020 the typical American job pays. Differences of that size in Physical Therapists are held in place by a barrier — a licence, a residency, a clearance — and the barrier is the real subject of this page.
267,330 people work as Physical Therapists — large enough that the occupation is always hiring somewhere and always losing people somewhere else. Constant demand is security; it is rarely leverage.
This work suits people prepared to spend years qualifying for a scope of practice they then hold for the rest of a career, with the accountability that comes attached to it.
No verified preparation time is on file for Physical 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
The middle half runs $86,160 to $121,160 — $2,916 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.
The 25th percentile is $86,160, $36,140 above the $50,020 typical American job. When even the floor is this high, the thing to investigate is the entry requirement rather than the pay.
Avoid it if the length and cost of the training would be unbearable if you changed your mind halfway.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 267,330 people employed as Physical Therapists; 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
Top quarter to bottom quarter is 1.4x. In a band that narrow, $102,760 is a genuinely representative number for Physical Therapists and the main variable left is where you live.
Put in money rather than ratios: $86,160 at the 25th percentile, $102,760 at the midpoint, $121,160 at the 75th. $35,000 separates the quarter of Physical Therapists at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Getting to $121,160, the 75th percentile, is worth $18,400 a year more than the $102,760 midpoint and $35,000 more than the $86,160 a quarter of Physical Therapists settle for.
$102,760 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $16,600 above the bottom quarter, $18,400 below the top one. A symmetric distribution like this is the case where the median genuinely does describe the typical person.
Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $49.40 at the midpoint for Physical Therapists, $41.42 at the 25th percentile and $58.25 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $102,760 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.
The hourly number on this page is $102,760 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Physical Therapists, so it is arithmetic rather than an effective rate.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else