Health and care
What does a Physiotherapist do?
Looking after people directly, often when they are at their worst.
What the day is like
- Indoors, under a roof.
- Tools, materials, your body.
- People all day.
- Right or wrong, to a standard.
- Answerable for your own work.
The facts
- Pay
- $102,760 a year, median
- Physical Therapists, May 2025
- Usually needs
- Doctoral or professional degree
- Several years, and usually a formal qualification.
- Jobs
- +12% projected change in jobs, 2025-2035 projections
- Demand looks growing
What is good about it
- It pays well against the rest of the work on this site.
- You answer for your own work rather than for other people, which suits more people than admit it.
- You can see what you did at the end of the day.
What people find hard about it
- Repeating the same advice
- Patients who do not do the exercises
- Physically demanding days
It needs a doctorate in the United States and a degree elsewhere: a long road in.
Will machines take this job?
Hard for machines to take over. Notes and scheduling are automating. Being in the room with a frightened person is not.
How to find out whether it suits you
Shadow a physiotherapist across a full clinic list, not one session.
Would this actually suit you?
CareerDNA works that out from what you choose rather than from what you say about yourself: two minutes of choosing between real jobs, a few puzzles, and some questions about what you are like. It is free, it saves as you go, and it will tell you plainly where the answer is thin.