Physical Therapy Salaries are an Absolute Disgrace

Cash-Pay Private Practice Pricing

In 2024, The average outpatient PT salary in Denver, CO, the closest city to me, was around $80,000, which is close to most other areas for outpatient. The setting requiring the highest level of skill as a PT pays the least, go figure. Since the APTA appears to really make an effort to fuck up as much shit in our profession as humanly possible, this should surprise zero people.

In the year 2000, a Physical Therapist with a 4-year Bachelor’s degree and 14K-60K in debt was making $7,892 MORE than a Doctor of Physical Therapy in 2023 with 7 years of schooling and 157K-265K in debt!

Average Cost of a Bachelor’s Degree in 2000 (DPT degrees did not exist yet)

• Average Public = $14,004
• Average Private = $61,880
• https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year

Average Cost of a Bachelor’s Degree in 2023

• Average Public = $39,000
• Average Private = $140,992
• https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year

Average Cost of a Doctor of Physical Therapy Degree in 2023

• Average Public = $118,371, plus $39,000 for undergrad = $157,371
• Average Private = $124,664, plus $140,992 for undergrad = $265,656

Average Bachelor of Physical Therapy Salary in 2000

• $57,540
• https://www.bls.gov/oes/bulletin_2000.pdf (Bottom of page 11)

Average Doctor of Physical Therapy Salary in 2023

• $99,710
• https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes291123.htm

Adjusted only for inflation, $57,540 in 2000 = $107,602 in 2024

• https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

 

$107,602 – $99,710 = $7,892

 

Yes, this is the math: With twice the education and like 400X the cost, we are currently making $7,892 dollars LESS per year than we made 24 years ago, on average.

For reference, when you sign your loan repayment terms upon graduation, the government website gives you a minimum salary you should make for your loans to NOT be a significant financial burden. The number it gave me was $150,000, just about double your max possible career-long yearly earning potential in outpatient, and $50,000 more than the average PT salary across all fields in 2023, which was 99K.

At $80,000 a year, you are making $38 an hour. For reference, and this should make you vomit all over yourself, you make significantly more than that working as a middle manager at a gas station, zero education required. In Denver in 2023, the average labor cost for a mechanic to work on your car was $138/hour. That is $100 dollars more per hour and 3.5 times more per year than a DPT in Denver.

So, if you are working your ass off for $38 an hour, which not a single PT in the country should accept, in an 8-hour day you make $307 before taxes. I made significantly more than that when I worked as a fly-fishing guide in Alaska, by the way.

The absolute minimum cash price any DPT should charge for an hour-long treatment is $150. And I would set up my schedule to have 2 people paying me every hour, without ever splitting my attention between them. I leave needles in people for about 45 mins, which makes this set-up super easy. Then you are making $300 an hour. About what you make in a full 8 hours of work in a typical outpatient clinic.

This is a massive area of confusion for PT’s, because the APTA and the universities manage to brainwash people into thinking we should be working for free, or some such insanity, but the result is that most of my students look stunned when I say $150, as in too much.

I have past students who charge $350 an hour to treat people’s dogs. Not use dogs for treatment of humans, they are treating the dogs, which I love! Their schedule is booked solid for over a year out. Many other students I have helped go into private practice charge around $250 an hour for their human patients, and they are also booked far out in advance.

At $150/hour, you only need to work 2 hours and treat 2 patients a day to equal what an outpatient PT makes in 8 hours. Meaning you can work 25% of your current hours and make the exact same money. Acquiring 2 patients a day is something any of you can manage in a month of prep work of free social media marketing, with our help.

Just imagine for a second how much better your life would be if you could keep your current wages and work 1/4 the time. If you work 40 hours a week at $150/hour, that is an annual wage of $312,707 dollars, which is what you would make in 4 full years of work at $80,000 a year.

• In 2025, you cannot support a family on a PT salary in any major city in the US. ZERO!
• You can support yourself on 80K/year, $38/hour in only 8 cities.

Salary Needed to Live Comfortably in U.S. Cities

https://smartasset.com/data-studies/salary-needed-live-comfortably-2024

As far as I know, 100% of the 30 or so people I have helped go into private cash practice over the last 4 years have had a full schedule of patients within the first 3 months of practice. The most recent of my students I worked with in NJ got so busy, so fast, he had already hired 8 full time employees at month 8 of his business! And he had done ZERO online marketing, 100% word of mouth.

This is another awesome thing about cash business. Word of mouth referrals from current patients to their family and friends are much more powerful. Now, this makes it 100% mandatory that your clinical skills and ability to help your patients far exceed that of your typical run-of-the-mill insurance practice. This is very easy.

Dry needling is the most powerful tool we have, by far, to improve health. Dry needling treatment has exponentially increasing efficacy the longer the needles are allowed to sit in your patient, up to a point. On average, improving efficacy probably stops after the needles have been left in place for 60-90 minutes, depending on the patient. This has never been studied, as far as I can find, but this is something I pay very close attention to, and have done so for the last 10 years.

What I am trying to get at here is, just the simple fact of not having absurd time limits placed on your treatment and clinical judgement by incoherent people at insurance agencies who care nothing for you or your patient, when properly performing dry needling with our autonomic nervous system-centered approach, this is all you need to be able to fix things better and faster than any possible outcome at an insurance-based practice. You add nutrition and joint manipulation into the equation, the other things we teach, and your business will dominate!

The most common comment I get from the patients that fly to see me from all over the country is this: Are you fucking serious that this problem could have been fixed anytime over the last however long this has been going on? All it took was a different approach with needling combined with not being hamstrung by time regulations you must follow with insurance simply to not go bankrupt? I have had numerous doctors try to fix this for years, with no success, and you just totally cured my problem in 1 treatment, or 4, or whatever.

You get a couple local patients in your area like this, and your business is already on the path to success. If you combine this with the marketing techniques we will help you learn, you can become a relatively large cash-pay operation within a year. Or you could just be totally packed full as an independent practitioner. Either way, both your clinical and financial success will skyrocket with just a few simple changes. Changes not possible to make when working with insurance, which to me is the equivalent of flushing your money and your patient’s health directly down the toilet, not to mention the ability to properly use you education, ability to positively impact people’s lives, etc.

The bottom line is this: If you are trained by us to sharpen and improve upon your existing skills as a clinician, AND you are not crippled by counterproductive, nonsensical regulations, this alone will put you in the top 1% of PT’s in the country. If you fix someone who has been struggling with a problem for a significant period of time, who has been treated by numerous other doctors in different fields with the same result, that being minimal or no improvement, then you completely resolve their problem in a handful of treatments, they will be bragging about you to everyone they know with a problem, and people will be calling you left and right.

Trust me, when I was a traveling PT for 5 years, this was my experience over and over again. This also happens with my students in class with “unfixable” problems on a weekly basis. This is a large part of the reason I have been able to get my company to over $500,000 a year within the first 4 years of operation. We are going to break a million in revenue in 2025, the fifth year my business will have been operating.

When you work for yourself with cash, you are not beholden to the insane nonsense of having to get a certain number of certain units so you actually get paid by the criminal insurance companies. That is, if you get paid at all. Insurance companies have it as their standard operating procedure to always do everything possible to simply not pay you for the work they promised to pay you for. Because of reasons, and stuff…

Stop Indentured Doctoring in 2025 & begin to thrive clinically and financially with your independent, cash-pay practice!