Physical therapist salary in 2026: the range and the settings

A physical therapist earned a median of $102,760 a year in May 2025 - $49.40 an hour - according to the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook. Half the profession earned more than that, half earned less. What the rest of this post covers is the part a single number hides: a spread that runs from under $77,140 to over $135,140, and a $17,580 difference between the setting that pays this job the most and the one that pays it the least.

What a physical therapist earns, from the 10th percentile to the 90th

Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, Physical Therapists, May 2025 estimates. BLS counts 283,700 physical therapist jobs in 2025.

How to read this. The median is the middle of a list, not an average - a handful of very well paid clinic owners at the top do not pull it upward the way a mean would. The 10th and 90th percentiles are the useful part, because they describe the shape of the range rather than its center: the bottom decile ends at $77,140 and the top decile begins at $135,140, so the middle 80 percent of the profession sits inside a band $58,000 wide. This is a compressed occupation.

Compressed relative to what, though, is a fair question. Registered nurses - a healthcare occupation with a comparable median, $97,550 in May 2025 - run from less than $68,940 at the 10th percentile to more than $137,470 at the 90th. That is a $68,530 span against physical therapy's $58,000, on a slightly lower midpoint. A nurse's earnings depend heavily on shift differentials, overtime and specialty; a physical therapist's depend on fewer moving parts, which is why the tails are closer in.

What this number is not: it is a wage estimate for people already employed as physical therapists across all experience levels, not a starting salary for a new graduate, and not the range on any particular posting. A new DPT graduate should expect to start nearer the bottom of that spread than the middle of it, and BLS publishes nothing that separates first-year therapists from twentieth-year ones.

Which setting pays a physical therapist the most?

Median annual wage for physical therapists by industry, May 2025

The four industries BLS reports separately for this occupation. Highest to lowest.

Home healthcare services		$114,740
Nursing and residential care facilities		$110,460
Hospitals; state, local, and private		$106,800
Offices of physical, occupational and speech therapists, and audiologists		$97,160

The outpatient therapy office - the setting most people picture when they hear "physical therapist", and the one most new graduates enter - is the lowest-paying of the four, at a median of $97,160. Home healthcare services pays a median of $114,740.

That $17,580 gap is the single largest lever in this occupation that does not require another credential. A physical therapist with the same DPT, the same license and the same five years of experience can cross it by changing employer type, not by going back to school. The work is genuinely different - home health means driving between houses, treating in kitchens and hallways, and carrying your own documentation load rather than working from a clinic schedule - so it is a trade, not free money. But it is a trade priced at more than the entire distance between the physical therapist median and the occupational therapist median.

Two cautions on reading the bar chart. The first is coverage: BLS reports these four industries on this page and does not publish how many of the 283,700 physical therapist jobs sit in each, so the chart tells you what each setting pays and not how many therapists have the option. The second is composition - these are medians within each industry, which means the industry mix of experience is baked in. If home health tends to hire therapists who already have a few years behind them, some of that $114,740 is seniority rather than a setting premium, and the BLS table cannot separate the two.

Is there a physical therapist salary table by state?

Not one you can read on the BLS site any more. The per-occupation OEWS page for 29-1123 now resolves to a data-tables index - it lists the May 2025 release as national, state and metropolitan downloads and shows no wage figure for physical therapists, or any other occupation, on the page itself. So the state numbers exist; they are in spreadsheets, not on a page. Anyone publishing a tidy "physical therapist salary by state" table in 2026 either opened those files or made the table up, and you cannot tell which from looking at it.

PT, PTA, or OT: what each rung actually pays

Physical therapist, assistant, and occupational therapist, May 2025

Wages are May 2025 medians; employment is 2025; growth is the BLS 2025–35 projection. Each column is taken from that occupation's own OOH page.

	Physical therapist	Physical therapist assistant	Occupational therapist
Median annual wage	$102,760	$68,380	$100,330
Lowest 10 percent	less than $77,140	less than $47,750	less than $71,690
Highest 10 percent	more than $135,140	more than $89,510	more than $131,950
Jobs, 2025	283,700	114,100	169,600
Projected growth, 2025–35	12%	23%	15%
Typical entry education	Doctoral degree (DPT)	Associate's degree	Master's degree

Three things fall out of that table. The first is the size of the assistant gap: $34,380 between a physical therapist and a physical therapist assistant, which is what the doctorate and the license are worth in annual pay terms. The second is that the assistant role is projected to grow faster - 23 percent against 12 percent for physical therapists, both on the 2025–35 vintage - so the cheaper credential is attached to the faster-expanding job.

The third is the one worth arguing about. If you are choosing between physical therapy and occupational therapy on pay, you are optimizing the wrong variable. The two medians are $2,430 apart. The gap between home health and an outpatient office inside physical therapy alone is more than seven times that. A prospective student weighing two programs on salary is making a decision the data says is nearly a coin flip, while the decision that actually moves the number - which kind of employer you work for five years from now - is one they have not made yet and will not make in an admissions essay.

The rung below the assistant

There is a fourth job in this chain that the ladder table leaves out, and it is the one the numbers argue against. Physical therapist aides had a median wage of $35,240 in May 2025 from a base of 49,000 jobs, and BLS projects the aide role to grow 4 percent from 2025 to 2035 - against 23 percent for assistants over the same decade. The entry requirement is a high school diploma or equivalent plus on-the-job training, so it is a genuine door into a clinic. It is a door, not a step: nothing about the aide role accrues toward the associate's degree an assistant needs or the doctorate a physical therapist needs, and the wage is roughly a third of the physical therapist median.

The two tiers also barely touch. In May 2025 the highest-paid 10 percent of physical therapist aides earned more than $47,780; the lowest-paid 10 percent of physical therapist assistants earned less than $47,750. Thirty dollars a year separates the top of one distribution from the bottom of the next, which means an aide who does well at the aide job does not arrive anywhere near assistant pay - the associate's degree is the only route across, and BLS says all states require assistants to hold one from an accredited program.

What the degree costs before the first paycheck

BLS lists the typical entry-level education for this occupation as a doctoral or professional degree - the Doctor of Physical Therapy - and states that all states require physical therapists to be licensed. It lists no work experience requirement, which is the rare BLS entry where the barrier is entirely front-loaded into school and the exam.

O*NET's survey of people working as physical therapists (29-1123.00) reports the credentials actually held: 47 percent a doctoral degree, 38 percent a master's, 8 percent a bachelor's. That distribution is a snapshot of a profession mid-transition, not a description of what a 2026 applicant can enter with - the master's holders are largely people who qualified before the DPT became the standard entry route, and the bachelor's holders earlier still. O*NET places the occupation in Job Zone Five, "extensive preparation needed", its highest category.

If you are searching listings, the adjacent titles employers use for related work are worth knowing. O*NET's related-occupations list for physical therapists runs to ten entries. The four a job search should also cover are occupational therapists (29-1122.00), physical therapist assistants (31-2021.00), physical therapist aides (31-2022.00) and recreational therapists (29-1125.00); the rest of the list reaches into medicine - clinical nurse specialists (29-1141.04), physical medicine and rehabilitation physicians (29-1229.04) - where the credential is not interchangeable with a DPT. A search for "physical therapist" alone will miss postings written under the first four.

What 13,400 openings a year does and does not tell you

Physical therapists: size, growth and yearly openings

283,700Jobs, 2025

12%Projected growth, 2025–35

13,400Projected openings per year

BLS projects about 13,400 openings for physical therapists each year, on average, from 2025 to 2035, against a 2025 employment base of 283,700 and projected growth of 12 percent over the decade. BLS puts that 12 percent at about 33,800 new jobs across the decade - roughly 3,400 a year. So about three quarters of those 13,400 annual openings are replacements: therapists retiring, moving into management, or leaving the field.

The neighboring occupations are projected on the same 2025–35 vintage, which makes them directly comparable. Occupational therapists: about 10,000 openings a year from a base of 169,600 jobs. Physical therapist assistants and aides together: about 24,900 a year from a combined 163,200. That last figure is the one to sit with - the assistant-and-aide tier is a smaller workforce than physical therapists and turns over roughly twice as many positions a year, which is what a lower wage and a shorter credential produce at the same time. Higher churn is more chances to get in and more people leaving once they are.

That matters for how you read a slow month. Broad hiring data does move: BLS's July 2026 JOLTS release put total job openings at 7.3 million and a 4.4 percent openings rate, with quits at 3.1 million and 1.9 percent. Those are all-industry, all-occupation figures, and they say nothing specific about physical therapy - JOLTS does not publish an openings count for this occupation, and the projection is a ten-year annual average, not a forecast of any particular quarter. Neither number can tell a physical therapist whether the three clinics within driving distance are hiring this month.

If you are applying for this role

Search the title variants. Postings for this work appear as physical therapist, staff physical therapist, and outpatient or home health physical therapist, and the adjacent-title postings O*NET names - occupational therapist, recreational therapist - are different jobs with their own licenses, so filter them out rather than applying wide.

Expect a range anchored near the setting, not the national median. If the posting is an outpatient office, the relevant BLS midpoint is $97,160, not $102,760. If it is home health or a skilled nursing facility, the relevant midpoints are $114,740 and $110,460. Quoting the wrong one of those in a negotiation costs you real money in both directions.

Treat a state line as a cost. BLS states plainly that all states require physical therapists to be licensed, so an out-of-state posting carries a licensing step that no wage table prices - and with the per-occupation OEWS page reduced to a download index, checking what the destination state pays now means opening the May 2025 state spreadsheet yourself.

Ask one question about productivity expectations. Visits per day, or units per day, is the variable that decides whether a home health premium is a raise or a longer working day at the same effective hourly rate - and it is almost never in the posting.

Then apply to more than one setting. The whole point of the industry table is that the same license is worth $17,580 more in one column than another, and you cannot learn which employers pay toward the top of their band without being in a few processes at once. If retyping the same license number, graduation date and clinical rotations into every hospital system's form is what stops you doing that, HeroApply fills those fields from your resume.