The team at UpDoc is pleased to present the 2024 edition of the Job Market Pulse Report!
As usual, we are very proud to make available this free salary trends report that focuses on Physical Therapy; and, also hosts information for Occupational Therapy, Speech Therapy, Recreational Therapy… and, even has some data in Pharmacy and Nursing!
This edition of the report hosts the ever popular state by state comparisons against cost of living.
Key features to this edition:
- There are many maps we’ve provided that help you discern economic macros on where you are and/or want to be.
- We also provide a trends analysis of pay for the professions listed in the Pulse with statistically significant samples to provide a meaningful projection to where pay should be going at an R² > 0.99.
- Within the report, we also dive into congruence and discongruence – an important effect only recently observed and measured within physical therapy jobs.
Here’s a sneak peek one of the trends we laid out for this edition. PTA pay is indeed within the report.
Major Data Points to Attend
- Recruitment revisited – this edition investigates once again where are people looking for jobs? And, where do they prefer to do so?
- There is a Manager’s Pay and there is a “Manager’s” Pay
- Most settings had an increase in pay compared to the last time span of reporting; however, there were some losses for PTAs in Inpatient and Home health.
- An appreciable positive skew in the distribution, meaning that our industry follows the macro norms by which the mean lie above the median. This can lead to a certain feeling of indigence, depending on where ones reference point lies.
Cost of Living vs. Level of Pay
- This 2024 edition compared for both PTs and PTAs, a tabulated and map representation of where each region exists in quartiles.
- High Pay with High Cost of Living, to Low Pay with Low Cost of Living, and everything in between.
- For the specific profession and state numbers, please reference the PDF of the report.
Regarding Methodology
We dive into this with great detail as to how COLI was smoothed across three open sources, and that quartiles – being utilized to create four quadrants of COL vs. Pay:
- High COL + High Pay
- Low COL + Low Pay
- High COL + Low Pay – “Sad Quartile”
- Low COL + High Pay – “Happy Quartile”
Each of these, being existent within quartiles, only represents a snapshot as to where each state or territory might be for a specific standard role – there are far more details to consider; particularly, if one sees the visual representation and finds themselves disgruntled that their personal circumstances lies outside of stated statistical range.
The Issue of Discongruence
This leads us to the conversation of discongruence and congruence in pay between PTs and PTAs.
For a very long time, it was anecdotally accepted that there is a certain percentage of pay that PTs are paid more than PTAs; or said another way, there’s a certain pay dock that PTAs experience compared to PTs.
Either way, we found through the regional analysis that this effect is actually not the norm. There are just over 10 states/territories that have congruence within 5 ranks of each other, and many more than lay outside of 20 ranks.
What else is in the report?
- Tabulated breakdown of pay versus role.
- Tabulated breakdown of staff versus managerial pay.
- Visual breakdown of pay trends and linear regression over time.
- Tabulated breakdown of pay versus setting/specialty.
- Additionally, for specific state and position based details, you will find them laid out all within the report – freely downloadable below as an e-periodical.
Ready to read the full report?
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