Benchmarks
Physical Therapy financial benchmarks
How does your pt practice compare? Below is what is actually published for this specialty, with the source sitting next to it — and, for the metrics nobody publishes, how to work the number out from your own books.
These ranges are directional, not prescriptive — a starting point for diagnosis, not a target. Where a figure comes from a published source, that source is linked on the page; where it does not, it reflects Sorso's own compiled experience.
Linked sources carry their own publication dates, shown with each citation. Unlinked ranges were last reviewed August 2026.
What is actually published for physical therapy
A number appears below only when a published source states it and you can click through and check it yourself. 5 of these 9 carry one for physical therapy. For the rest, no source we could verify publishes a figure, so instead of printing one we cannot stand behind, we show you how to work it out from your own books.
Profit Margin
19.2% gross profit at clinic level, 11.1% operating income after corporate cost
U.S. Physical Therapy Inc. (NYSE: USPH), FY2025 Form 10-KTwo different numbers for two different questions. 19.2% is what a clinic throws off before head office; 11.1% is what the business keeps. FY2024: 18.5% and 9.4%. An owner-operator comparing their own P&L should look at the 19.2% line, because their own salary is not in it the way a public company's executive cost is.
- How to calculate it
- Net income divided by total collections, for the same period. Decide up front whether owner and provider compensation sits above or below that line, and keep it consistent. It is the single biggest reason two practices quote wildly different margins.
- What it tells you
- What is actually left after the practice pays for itself. Margin moves for only two reasons: the revenue per visit changed, or the cost of delivering that visit changed. Working out which one is the whole diagnosis.
- Where practices get it wrong
- Comparing a margin measured before owner pay against a published figure measured after it, or the reverse. Association surveys usually report owner income after compensation, which runs materially lower than an operating margin. The two are not the same number and should never be compared directly.
Overhead Ratio
80.8% of net revenue in clinic operating cost (salaries 59.1%, rent/supplies/contract labour/other 18.0%, D&A 2.7%)
U.S. Physical Therapy Inc. (NYSE: USPH), FY2025 Form 10-KUSPH is a ~1,000-clinic operator, so read this as the cost structure of PT delivery at scale, not as a single-site median. Corporate office cost is a further 8.9% and sits BELOW this line — a single-location owner carries that work themselves rather than paying for it, so their comparable clinic-level figure should be lower, not higher. FY2024 was 81.5%.
- How to calculate it
- Total operating expenses divided by total collections. Use collections, not production or billed charges. Billing what you never collect flatters the ratio.
- What it tells you
- The share of every dollar collected that is consumed before the owner is paid. It is the fastest read on whether a revenue problem is really a cost problem.
- Where practices get it wrong
- Running the ratio against production instead of collections. A practice with a collections problem then looks efficient, because the denominator includes money that never arrived.
Revenue per Provider
Nobody publishes this for physical therapy.
- How to calculate it
- Total collections divided by clinical full-time equivalents, not headcount. Two half-time providers are one FTE, and counting them as two halves the figure for no real reason.
- What it tells you
- Whether capacity is the constraint or demand is. If revenue per provider is flat while headcount grows, you are adding cost without adding throughput.
- Where practices get it wrong
- Counting non-clinical or supervising staff in the denominator, and mixing provider types with very different reimbursement in one average.
Revenue Per Visit
Nobody publishes this for physical therapy.
- How to calculate it
- Total collected revenue divided by total completed visits for the same period. Use collections rather than charges, and count the visit only if it happened — no-shows belong in a different metric or they will quietly inflate this one.
- What it tells you
- What an hour of clinical capacity is actually worth. It is the cleanest way to see whether a revenue problem is a volume problem or a pricing and payer-mix problem, because it holds volume constant by construction.
- Where practices get it wrong
- Reading a blended figure as though it described every visit. Concentra's own filings show the same centre earning $210.15 on a workers' compensation visit and $92.84 on an employer-services visit. A blended $147.42 describes neither. Break it by payer before you act on it.
Visit Volume
Nobody publishes this for physical therapy.
- How to calculate it
- Completed visits divided by the number of days the site was actually open. Use business days, not calendar days, or a clinic closed at weekends will look half as productive as it is.
- What it tells you
- Whether the constraint is demand or capacity. Rising volume with flat revenue per visit means you are busier without being better paid, which is usually a payer-mix or contracting problem rather than an operations one.
- Where practices get it wrong
- Comparing your throughput against a purpose-built high-volume operator. A model built around short, protocol-driven encounters carries staffing and layout a general practice does not, so its visits-per-day is not a target you should be measuring yourself against.
Collection Rate
50–65% net collection rate
WebPTRead the formula before you use this. WebPT computes net collection as payments divided by payments plus adjustments. If you compute it as payments divided by the allowed amount, which is the more common definition, your figure will be far higher and the two are not comparable.
- How to calculate it
- Payments received divided by what payers actually allowed, after contractual adjustments. That is the net collection rate, and it is the only version worth tracking.
- What it tells you
- How much of the money you were entitled to actually reached the bank. It isolates a billing-and-follow-up problem from a fee-schedule problem.
- Where practices get it wrong
- Two different formulas share this name. Payments divided by payments-plus-adjustments produces a much lower number than payments divided by allowed amount, and figures computed the two ways are not comparable. Check which one a published benchmark means before measuring yourself against it.
Charge Realization
Nobody publishes this for physical therapy.
- How to calculate it
- Allowed amount divided by submitted charges, for the same payer and period. This is NOT net collection rate. Net collection measures what you collected against what you were entitled to; realization measures what you were entitled to against what you asked for. A practice can run 98% net collection and 30% realization at the same time, and both numbers are fine.
- What it tells you
- How far your chargemaster sits above the fee schedule. On its own it says almost nothing about billing quality — it is mostly a pricing decision you made once and probably have not revisited. Its real use is as a control: if realization moves and your payer mix did not, something changed in your contracts or your coding.
- Where practices get it wrong
- Panicking about it. Owners who discover they collect 30 cents on the billed dollar often conclude the billing team is failing. CMS's own 2024 provider-level data shows median realization of 28.2% for orthopedic surgery and 51.0% for podiatry — the spread is structural, driven by how each specialty prices against the fee schedule, not by how well anyone chases claims.
Denial Rate
Under 10%
WebPTStated as a target rather than an observed average. The same page puts first-pass claim acceptance above 95%.
- How to calculate it
- Claims denied on first submission divided by total claims submitted, in the same period. Track first-pass specifically. A claim that is denied, reworked and eventually paid still cost you the rework.
- What it tells you
- Where revenue is leaking before it ever becomes A/R. The denial reason codes matter far more than the headline rate: a rate driven by eligibility errors is a front-desk fix, one driven by coding is not.
- Where practices get it wrong
- Measuring denials against claims paid rather than claims submitted, which understates the rate, and counting a reworked claim as never having been denied.
A/R Days
Fewer than 35 days, within a range of 20 to 40
WebPTWebPT attributes this to its in-house experts rather than to a study. The same page puts receivables over 120 days at under 10%, which is the more useful of the two to watch.
- How to calculate it
- Total accounts receivable divided by average daily charges. Read it alongside the share of A/R over 90 and 120 days. The average alone hides a tail of old claims that will never be collected.
- What it tells you
- How long your money sits with someone else. The aged buckets are the actionable part; a respectable average with a fat 120-day tail is a worse position than a slightly higher average that is clean.
- Where practices get it wrong
- Leaving long-dead claims on the ledger so the aged buckets look survivable, and mixing payer types with structurally different payment speeds. Workers' comp and personal injury run far longer than commercial and will distort a blended figure.
Where the money goes
No published cost breakdown exists for physical therapy that we could verify, so here is how to build your own. Take twelve months of P&L and group every expense line into staffing, occupancy, clinical supplies, equipment, marketing, insurance and everything else, each as a percentage of collections. Run it monthly rather than annually. An annual view hides the month a locum, a lease renewal or an equipment failure blew a hole in the number, and those single months are usually where the story is. The useful question is not whether any one line matches another practice. It is which line moved, and when. Staffing is almost always the largest line and the one worth attacking first: an overhead problem that looks like rent is usually a staffing-ratio problem.
Payer mix
We are not going to show you a national payer split, because one would tell you nothing useful. Payer mix is set by your market, your contracts and your referral pattern, and the national average is an artefact of averaging practices that have nothing to do with each other. Pull your own instead: collections by payer for the last twelve months, as a share of the total. Then do the part most practices skip and put net collection rate and average days to pay beside each payer. Concentration is only a risk when it sits with a slow payer or a low one. A practice at 60% commercial with a 40-day cycle is in a stronger position than one spread evenly across five payers where two of them take ninety days to pay.
What separates the strongest practices
No industry body publishes a top-quartile study for outpatient specialties, so this page will not print one. What we can tell you is what the gap tends to be made of, and it is rarely the fee schedule. It is usually visibility. A practice that measures its net collection rate against the allowed amount can see leakage; one that measures against billed charges cannot see it at all. Denials worked by reason code inside two weeks get appealed, while the same denials reworked at sixty days hit windows that have already started closing. Revenue and cost per visit tracked by provider will surface a weak provider or an underpriced service line, and the aggregate number never will. Then there is the aged A/R: a respectable average sitting on a fat 120-day tail is a worse position than a slightly higher average that is clean, and only the buckets tell you which one you have.
KPIs specific to physical therapy
| KPI | Benchmark | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Visits per Therapist per Day | 10–12 | Daily patient volume per full-time therapist, and the primary driver of revenue capacity. No published source states this figure. APTA Private Practice collects visits per FTE but publishes results to members only, and we could not verify a public figure we were willing to stand behind. Treat it as directional, not an industry statistic. |
| Units per Visit | 3.0–3.8 | Average billable timed units per encounter. Directional, not a published benchmark: it follows from CMS 8-minute-rule arithmetic on a typical 45–60 minute outpatient visit rather than from a survey. |
| Plan of Care Completion Rate | 70–80% | Share of patients finishing their full prescribed plan of care. No published source states this figure. No association publishes a national completion rate. Treat it as directional, not an industry statistic. |
| Cancel/No-Show Rate | 7.8% | Private outpatient clinics averaged 7.81% (±5.92) in a national survey of US outpatient physical therapists; the all-settings mean was 10.4% (±7.43), pulled up by hospital-campus (14.53%) and pediatric (12.86%) clinics. Use the private-clinic figure if you are one. |
Each row’s description says where its figure comes from. Rows that name a source are linked under Sources at the foot of this page. Rows that say no published source states the figure mean exactly that: treat them as directional, and check the number against your own books before you act on it.
From Sorso
PT clinics Sorso works with live or die on visits-per-therapist and cancel rates; when we see overhead above the 85% median it is nearly always staffing ratio, not rent.
Go deeper on pt
Sources
- WebPT — Essential Billing Benchmarks for Your PT Practice. Supports the A/R days figure: WebPT tells practices to aim for "fewer than 35 days—with a range of 20 to 40 days", which the page attributes to its in-house experts rather than to a study. It does NOT support the collection rate below — WebPT defines net collection rate as payments divided by payments plus adjustments and puts that at 50 to 65 percent, a different calculation from the one used here.
- APTA Private Practice — KPI Benchmarking Program (member-only; collects visits per new patient, arrival rate, visits per FTE, cost and revenue per visit, and net income — it does not publish denial rates). Because it is member-only it cannot support the visits-per-therapist figure in the KPI table, which is why that row is labelled as our own estimate.
- Bokinskie, Johnson & Mahoney (2015), "Patient No-show for Outpatient Physical Therapy: A National Survey", UNLV. Supports the cancel/no-show row: nationwide mean 10.4% (±7.43), private clinics 7.81% (±5.92).
Collection rate here is the standard net collection rate: payments as a share of what payers actually allowed, after contractual adjustments. That distinction matters, because the other figure circulating for physical therapy — WebPT's 50 to 65 percent — is computed as payments divided by payments plus adjustments, and the two numbers are not comparable. Profit margin, overhead and revenue per provider are Sorso's own working estimates from client work: no association publishes them for physical therapy, and APTA Private Practice's KPI benchmarking programme is member-only. We would rather name that than imply a citation we cannot show you. The same applies to the four figures under 'What top performers look like': those describe the top end of what we see across our own PT clients, not a published top-quartile study, and no association publishes one. In the KPI table below, cancel/no-show is the only row with a public source behind it (the UNLV national survey, linked above); the other three say in their own description whether they are directional arithmetic or our estimate.
Founder of Sorso and a CFA charterholder. Before Sorso, Stan spent 19 years in corporate finance at institutions including UniCredit and Société Générale — managing a $450M loan portfolio and making senior partner at a major mezzanine lender by 29 — then built a fractional CFO firm exclusively for outpatient healthcare clinics.
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