Occupation / job
Respiratory 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
$82,280 against a $50,020 national midpoint is 64% more, or $15.50 an hour. Almost nothing pays this much more without a long, expensive or restricted route in — read that route before reading the number again.
With 139,790 in the occupation, Respiratory Therapists is a big field with a visible internal market. Big fields reward moving: the pay you can negotiate on arrival usually beats what the annual review will give you for staying.
These roles suit people who want responsibility for the whole of a patient’s problem rather than a part of it, and who can carry that home without it consuming them.
We carry no verified training length for Respiratory Therapists — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
$24,210 separates the bottom quarter at $74,520 from the top quarter at $98,730, a ratio of 1.3x. In a band that tight, moving up inside Respiratory Therapists pays less than moving out of it would.
The bottom quarter of this field earns $74,520 — $35.82 an hour, $24,500 above the $50,020 national midpoint. When even the worst-paid quarter of Respiratory Therapists is this far ahead, the barrier to entry is doing the work of keeping it there.
Avoid it if you cannot do nights, cannot carry medico-legal exposure, or need to be finished thinking about work when the shift ends.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 139,790 figure counts people already working as Respiratory Therapists, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
A 1.3x spread means the top quarter of Respiratory Therapists is not doing a different job from the bottom quarter, just a slightly better-paid version of the same one. Between $74,520 and $98,730 is the whole of the negotiation.
The middle half of this field earns between $74,520 and $98,730. That is $24,210 of range, with $82,280 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Getting to $98,730, the 75th percentile, is worth $16,450 a year more than the $82,280 midpoint and $24,210 more than the $74,520 a quarter of Respiratory Therapists settle for.
The upper half of the middle range — $82,280 to $98,730, or $16,450 — is far longer than the lower half at $7,760. In a shape like this an average would flatter Respiratory Therapists considerably, and would describe nobody.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $35.82 at the bottom quarter, $39.55 at the midpoint, $47.46 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 Respiratory Therapists for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $82,280 describes them.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Respiratory Therapists, the hourly figure is $82,280 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