Reported by occupational therapists · 99 new grads
New grad occupational therapist salary
99 new graduate occupational therapists reported their own starting salaries. The median is $80,000, with the middle half earning between $74,775 and $86,500. These are clinician-reported figures, not job postings.
What new grad OTs actually earn
$74,775–$86,500
is what the middle half report. Median $80,000 · accurate to about ±$2,146
These are national figures. Check your own metro.
New-grad starting pay can vary significantly by your metro area. Click the link below to reach the full salary tool and see what clinicians near you report.
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Why every site gives you a different number
Search entry-level occupational therapist pay and you will get figures more than $40,000 apart. They disagree because they are measuring different things, and most of them are not measuring new grads at all.
| Source | Says | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| ZipRecruiter | ~$94,000 | Job postings. Advertised ranges skew high, and travel and contract roles are mixed in. |
| Content roundups | $50,000–$75,000 | Usually uncited, often years out of date and repeated between sites. |
| BLS 25th percentile | $82,510 | Payroll data, but it is the bottom quarter of all OTs, not new grads. BLS collects no experience variable. |
| This page | $80,000 | 99 occupational therapists in their first year, reporting their own salary. |
Third-party figures as of August 2026 and subject to change. BLS figure from the BLS OEWS May 2025.
The tell is that ZipRecruiter's entry-level figure sits above the BLS 25th percentile for the whole profession and close to the all-OT median of $100,330. That would mean new graduates out-earn the midpoint of everyone practising, which is not plausible. It is what happens when you measure what employers advertise rather than what clinicians accept.
Common questions
What is a good starting salary for a new grad OT?
Half of the new graduates here earn between $74,775 and $86,500. An offer inside that band is normal, above it is strong, and below it is worth a conversation. Setting and metro move it more than anything else, so check your own area before deciding.
Is $70,000 low for a new grad occupational therapist?
It is below the middle half reported here, which starts at $74,775. That does not automatically make it a bad offer, since school-based and rural positions sit lower, but it is under what most new grads report and it is fair to ask why.
Does BLS publish new grad occupational therapist salary?
No. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes OT wages by percentile but collects no experience variable, so its figures cannot be separated by career stage. A low percentile is the bottom of a range that mixes new grads with part-timers and low-cost metros.
Why federal data cannot answer this
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes occupational therapist wages by percentile: nationally, the 25th percentile is $82,510, the median $100,330 and the 75th $116,670. Those percentiles describe the spread of all OTs at once. A first-year therapist and a 25-year clinical lead sit in the same distribution, so a low percentile is not a new-grad figure, it is the bottom of a range that mixes career stage with geography, setting and hours.
BLS collects no experience variable at all, which means no amount of analysis recovers this cut from it. The only way to produce it is to ask clinicians how long they have been practising and what they are paid.
How these numbers were produced
- Source. 99 occupational therapists in their first year of practice who reported their own pay to the Rehab Wealth Project salary tool.
- Window. Reports from the last three years. Older reports age out rather than being carried forward.
- One clinician, one figure. Each person counts once per job. Re-reporting the same job updates that figure instead of adding a second.
- New grad means year zero. Not the first two years. Someone two years in has usually taken a raise or changed jobs, and a first-offer negotiation should not be anchored on their number.
- Precision. A median is stated only where its 95% confidence interval is inside ±$5,000, computed from the sample's own spread. The new-grad figure carries an interval of ±$2,146 on 99 reports.
What this data cannot tell you
These are different people at different career stages today, not one person followed over time. A new graduate should not read the top-band figure as a forecast of their own pay in twenty years. It describes what experienced OTs earn now.
The sample is also self-selected. Everyone here found a salary tool and chose to report, which is not a random draw from the profession. It skews toward clinicians who were curious enough about their pay to look it up. Where a figure sits close to the federal data, that is corroboration; where it does not, both numbers are worth weighing.
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See also: therapist pay by state · the salary comparison tool