The Short Answer
At the national median, a travel PT contract pays $2,280 a week and a travel PTA contract pays $1,460 — a gap of $820 a week, or about 36%. That is the number most people quote, and on its own it is misleading. Inside any single setting the gap is narrower: about 31% in skilled nursing, about 32% in outpatient, about 29% in inpatient. The national figure is wider than any of them because PT and PTA contracts are not distributed across settings the same way.
Figures throughout are median weekly gross — taxable wages plus non-taxable stipends, before tax — from ProTherapy Staffing's own contract book as published in the ProTherapy Pay Index, August 2026 issue, drawn from 823 live contracts. Where a slice has fewer than five contracts, no median is shown, because five is the minimum this dataset will publish on.
Median Weekly Gross, Nationally
| Discipline | Contracts | Median | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| PT | 334 | $2,280 | $2,130 – $3,500 |
| PTA | 197 | $1,460 | $1,200 – $2,240 |
Median weekly gross. ProTherapy Pay Index, August 2026 issue.
Two things in that table are worth sitting with before the setting breakdown. The PTA range tops out at $2,240, which is above the PT floor of $2,130 — so the top of the assistant market and the bottom of the therapist market overlap. And the sample sizes are close enough (334 against 197) that neither median is a thin number.
Where the 36% Actually Comes From
Split the same contracts by setting and the picture changes.
| Setting | PT median | PT contracts | PTA median | PTA contracts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Skilled nursing | $2,130 | 207 | $1,460 | 175 |
| Outpatient | $2,480 | 90 | $1,680 | 12 |
| Inpatient | $2,570 | 31 | $1,820 | 9 |
| Home health | $2,630 | 21 | — | 3 |
Median weekly gross by setting. ProTherapy Pay Index, August 2026 issue. Home health PTA shows no median: three contracts is under the five-contract minimum, and a median of three numbers is not a market rate.
Now count where each role sits. 175 of the 197 PTA contracts are in skilled nursing — just under nine in ten. For PTs it is 207 of 334, closer to six in ten. Skilled nursing is the lowest-paying setting in the book for both roles, so a population concentrated there carries a lower median regardless of what any individual contract pays.
That is what the headline 36% is measuring: partly the rate, and partly the fact that the two roles are not standing in the same rooms. Compare like with like — PTA against PT inside skilled nursing — and the gap is about 31%, not 36%. Inpatient narrows it further.
This matters when you are judging an offer. A PTA looking at a $1,460 skilled-nursing week is being paid the median for that setting. A PTA looking at $1,460 for an outpatient week is being paid roughly $220 under the outpatient median, and the number that would tell them so is not the national one.
The Honest Limit on That Lever
Setting is the strongest lever an assistant has, and it is also the thinnest. Look at the contract counts again rather than the medians: 12 outpatient PTA contracts and 9 inpatient ones, against 175 in skilled nursing. The higher-paying settings exist for assistants, and they pay what the table says — but they are a small share of the work, and with fewer of them posted, they are likely harder to land.
The realistic version of this advice is not “refuse skilled nursing.” It is: know the setting-specific median before you answer, start looking earlier than you think you need to when you want a setting other than skilled nursing, and treat a below-median offer in a low-volume setting as the one worth negotiating rather than the one worth taking on sight. An assistant who knows that outpatient runs around $1,680 has a different conversation than one working from a single national figure.
What Does Not Change: the Stipend Half of the Package
The mechanics of a travel package are the same for a PTA as for a PT. A weekly package is taxable hourly wages plus non-taxable reimbursements for housing and meals, and the rules that govern the non-taxable half do not vary by credential.
Two published sources define that half, and both apply to assistants exactly as they apply to therapists:
IRS Publication 463
Sets out the travel-expense and tax-home rules that determine whether reimbursements can be paid without tax being withheld. It is written about travel for work, not about any particular profession.
GSA per diem rates
The federal government publishes lodging and meals-and-incidentals rates by location. Agencies commonly use them as the ceiling for what they will reimburse untaxed, which is why the same contract is worth more in an expensive county than a cheap one.
The practical consequence for a PTA is that the location lever works the same for you. Because the stipend portion is set by where the assignment is rather than by what you are credentialed to do, a higher-cost location moves an assistant's package by a similar dollar amount as a therapist's — which is a larger share of a smaller package. The stipend guide covers how the two halves are built and what to ask for in writing.
Nothing on this page is tax advice, and every figure here is gross — the whole weekly package before tax, not what lands in your account. Whether a particular reimbursement can be paid untaxed depends on your tax home, which is a question for your own tax preparer.
Licensure: the Compact Covers You Too
A common assumption among assistants is that interstate licensure compacts are a therapist-only convenience. They are not. The PT Compact covers physical therapist assistants as well as physical therapists, and a compact privilege lets you work in another member state without going through that state's full licence-by-endorsement process.
Two caveats that are easy to miss and both cost time:
- Compact membership is a moving list. States join, and there is a gap between a state passing the legislation and actually issuing privileges. Check the current status for the specific state before you commit to a start date.
- A compact privilege is not a licence. It rides on your home-state licence, so if that lapses, every privilege built on it goes with it.
Occupational and speech-language therapy have their own compacts on their own timelines, which is why a COTA and a PTA can face quite different lead times for the same state. The licensure guide tracks the current position state by state, which is the right place to check rather than any number written into an article.
Five Questions Worth Asking Before You Sign
1. “Which setting is this rate for?”
The single highest-value question on this page. The same $1,460 is a fair skilled-nursing week and a poor outpatient one. Ask the setting before you judge the number.
2. “Split the package for me — hourly, housing, meals.”
A package quoted as one weekly figure cannot be compared to another package quoted the same way, because the split between taxable and non-taxable differs. Ask for the line items in writing, and compare gross to gross.
3. “What are the guaranteed hours, and what happens if the building cancels them?”
Assistant caseloads in skilled nursing move with census. A weekly figure that assumes 40 hours is a different offer if the guarantee is 32.
4. “Who supervises, and is that person a traveler too?”
An assistant's work depends on a therapist being there to evaluate and write the plan of care. A building covering both roles with travelers is a building whose schedule can come apart. This is a working-conditions question, and it is fair to ask it.
5. “Is my licence or compact privilege in place for the start date?”
Ask for the date the privilege was issued, not the date it was applied for.
The Read
The gap between assistant and therapist travel pay is real and it is structural — a PT or OT can evaluate a patient and write a plan of care and an assistant cannot, and bill rates follow that difference. But the number most often quoted overstates it, because it compares two populations working in different places rather than two rates in the same place.
If you are a PTA reading a PT-worded advert and wondering whether the pay described applies to you: it does not directly, but the mechanism behind it does. Setting moves your package. Location moves your stipend. The compact travels with you. Those levers are the same ones, and the setting lever is the one most assistants are leaving unpulled.
For the full discipline table, including OT, COTA and SLP, see pay by discipline. For how to use these numbers in a conversation with a recruiter, see negotiating pay.