Respiratory Therapists
What the pay figures show
- Two answers for respiratory therapists. Best paid: the District of Columbia, at $111,950. Tax does not change that. Best off: Alaska, at $76,427 once local prices count. Tax was not what separated them. Rent was.
- The District of Columbia's $111,950 median for respiratory therapists survives the tax adjustment intact, so state income tax is not a differentiator in this occupation's geography. It does not survive price deflation: Alaska takes the top position at $76,427. Housing is where regional price variation concentrates, which is why the reordering appears at this step and not the previous one.
Compare this career across states
Choose your filing status and local taxes, compare pay, and keep a shortlist.Compare wage and personal-pay outcomes by state, with selected resident local taxes and saved career choices.
Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$82,280
People doing it
139,790
Highest paid
$111,950
DC
Best off, really
$76,427
AK, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$63,660
Highest tenth
$118,050
Lowest, really
$57,942
MS
States with data
51
National average
$87,300
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
101.72%
AK, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job is fairly steady around the country. Count tax and local prices and the states bunch closer still, from $57,942 to $76,427. For work like this, where you live changes your life more than it changes your pay.
- About 139,790 Americans work in this job, on a middle wage of $82,280. Big enough that where you live changes the arithmetic.
- No gaps here — all 51 jurisdictions publish a number for this job, which sits at $82,280 in the middle.
- Geographic dispersion in respiratory therapists is moderate by national standards. Tax and price adjustment compress the distribution further, to a real range of $57,942 through $76,427. Where nominal spread is this contained, relocation decisions in the occupation turn on non-wage factors, because the wage differential does not survive the adjustments in a form large enough to drive them.
- With 139,790 workers, respiratory therapists sits in the middle of the BLS headcount distribution. The state-level spread described above therefore applies to a meaningful population rather than a niche one.
- 51 jurisdictions report respiratory therapists, giving full coverage. The extremes quoted above are therefore the true reported maximum and minimum.
Pay band: Respiratory Therapists
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $63,660 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $82,280 |
| Top tenth earn over | $118,050 |
| This salary | $82,280 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Respiratory Therapists
The national median for this job
$82,280around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $63,660 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $82,280 |
| Top tenth | $118,050 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Respiratory Therapists, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Mississippi · $63,270 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $111,950 |
| Spread | $48,680 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $79,540 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $81,852 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| AK | $97,950 | $77,738 | $76,427 |
| MN | $98,710 | $73,084 | $74,259 |
| ND | $81,230 | $65,651 | $74,121 |
| NY | $107,810 | $79,352 | $73,729 |
| WA | $101,130 | $79,975 | $73,668 |
| DC | $111,950 | $81,040 | $73,138 |
| NH | $95,940 | $76,324 | $72,451 |
| WY | $79,330 | $64,639 | $71,150 |
| NV | $85,480 | $68,965 | $71,113 |
| MA | $102,170 | $75,918 | $70,140 |
| NE | $81,590 | $63,220 | $69,952 |
| MT | $81,190 | $62,721 | $69,501 |
| NJ | $100,810 | $75,518 | $69,357 |
| OK | $78,800 | $61,220 | $69,343 |
| WI | $84,210 | $64,527 | $69,312 |
| OH | $79,920 | $63,572 | $69,242 |
| DE | $91,080 | $68,125 | $68,637 |
| CA | $104,820 | $76,915 | $68,319 |
| OR | $100,560 | $71,325 | $68,110 |
| IN | $79,730 | $62,598 | $67,905 |
| LA | $75,240 | $59,890 | $67,791 |
| AR | $73,870 | $58,523 | $67,650 |
| MO | $78,390 | $61,230 | $66,727 |
| IA | $74,760 | $59,195 | $66,685 |
| TX | $79,540 | $64,786 | $66,670 |
| VT | $83,820 | $64,376 | $66,617 |
| ID | $78,460 | $60,722 | $66,417 |
| NC | $80,090 | $62,486 | $66,377 |
| GA | $83,700 | $64,135 | $66,324 |
| RI | $86,900 | $67,125 | $66,191 |
| MI | $79,850 | $61,862 | $65,682 |
| KS | $76,970 | $58,972 | $65,550 |
| CO | $86,220 | $66,400 | $65,495 |
| UT | $80,650 | $61,978 | $65,239 |
| SC | $77,740 | $60,681 | $65,125 |
| MD | $88,960 | $67,551 | $64,975 |
| IL | $84,090 | $63,970 | $64,711 |
| SD | $68,240 | $56,837 | $64,518 |
| ME | $82,470 | $62,593 | $64,465 |
| TN | $72,140 | $59,580 | $64,401 |
| HI | $94,210 | $69,390 | $63,890 |
| FL | $81,160 | $65,926 | $63,726 |
| KY | $72,750 | $57,581 | $63,648 |
| PA | $78,490 | $61,638 | $63,219 |
| VA | $82,910 | $63,150 | $62,681 |
| AZ | $79,780 | $63,363 | $62,671 |
| CT | $85,230 | $64,852 | $62,544 |
| WV | $68,670 | $54,883 | $61,136 |
| NM | $68,870 | $55,209 | $61,081 |
| AL | $66,150 | $52,477 | $58,327 |
| MS | $63,270 | $50,579 | $57,942 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for respiratory therapists, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $82,280 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- Take-home figures for respiratory therapists assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In the District of Columbia, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $81,040.
- Levelling out prices for respiratory therapists is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — Mississippi sits at the bottom on $57,942.
- All wage figures for respiratory therapists are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $82,280. Within-state dispersion typically exceeds between-state dispersion in this data, so an individual's expected wage is determined more by experience, sector and employer than by the state comparisons presented here.
- Take-home calculations for respiratory therapists assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $81,040, in the District of Columbia. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- The price deflation applied to respiratory therapists uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is Mississippi at $57,942. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Mississippi anchors the bottom at $57,942 — and the two source series are dated independently.