Physical Therapist Salary

Physical therapist salary in the states can vary widely based upon your employer.  If, perhaps, you own your own physical therapy office then you are likely to see a higher income in the long run.  But in the beginning money may be tight.

Let us assume you are working as a physical therapist in the United States.  Depending upon which region of the country you are working and for what type of employer, those things will play a part in your physical therapist salary.

For instance, if you are a PT and work in a physician office you can expect to make around $72,000 per year.  If you live in California and work as a physical therapist your earnings would likely be higher than Georgia.  So the physical therapist salary will vary, but many times this 10-20% difference in pay is negotiable.

A PT that works in a nursing home will likely be pulling in a physical therapist salary closer to $76,000.  And a physical therapist that works in a home health care situation will likely make a little more than that.  This fact is likely due to the additional driving that is required to go from home to home treating patients.

The real way to make some decent income as a physical therapist is to own your own physical therapy office.  The issue with that is start up costs.  You will need access to credit and money.  It costs a lot of money to rent good office space and hire people to help you out.  In the long run it can really pay off.  If you are able to set up an efficient office with excellent office staff you will likely be more successful. And this will lead to a higher physical therapist salary.

The key to really making a high profit is two fold.  One, you will need to get reimbursed on your patients that have insurance and medicaid.  The trick is some types of treatment pay more money and others less.  So you want to advertise your business for the treatment you provide that you get paid the most for.  The second thing is patient volume.  If you can treat more patients, you will hopefully get paid more money.  That is the idea anyway, but you are only one person.

You can hire another physical therapist to help you build your volume.  But the best option is to try to hire as many good physical therapy assistants as you can find and your space can accommodate.   You can pay them $25 per hour and hopefully make $100 per patient.  That is how you can really ramp up and get your physical therapist salary to rise.

Other thoughts about raising physical therapist salary ranges:

Other strategies for increasing one’s physical therapist salary is to open up multiple locations when the PT has their system down.  If you have a spouse that is a good business person it may help to have them be the business manager and that way you can focus entirely on treating patients. And that will help you increase your physical therapist salary.

This endeavor to create a successful physical therapy office is one that many are succeeding at now.  If you have a good reputation and more patients than you can handle then you stand a good chance at having a physical therapist salary that you can be proud of earning.

These tactics can help you raise your physical therapist salary to well over six figures.  With that being said you must understand that the road will be long.  There are  many other offices out there that want the therapy business in their office.  If you are truly hungry for a higher physical therapist salary you will do the work needed.  But a high physical therapy salary isn’t all you will get out of this.  You will be happy that you can help patients.  And the high physical therapist salary isn’t a bad bonus.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 15th, 2011 at and is filed under Physical Therapist Salary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.