Travel PTA Pay in 2026: What Assistants Actually Earn

The median travel PTA package is $1,460 per week, based on 182 physical therapist assistant contracts in our Q3 2026 data. The 10th percentile is $1,260 and the 90th is $1,680. Travel COTAs land in the same place — a $1,460 median across 95 contracts. If a recruiter quotes you $1,900 as a "typical" PTA rate, they are quoting the top 2 percent of the market as if it were the middle.

Assistants are the most poorly served group in travel therapy pay discussions. Nearly every salary guide, calculator, and "highest paying states" article is written about PTs and OTs, and PTA and COTA numbers get treated as a footnote — or worse, estimated by taking a percentage of the PT number. We publish the assistant numbers separately because they behave differently, and because a PTA deciding whether to take an assignment deserves the same quality of information a PT gets.

Everything below comes from our own placement data, not a survey. Details on the methodology are at the end, and the full tables live on our Travel Therapy Pay Index.

The Headline Numbers

Two things stand out immediately.

PTAs and COTAs are priced almost identically. Same median, same 10th percentile, with the COTA 90th percentile running a bit higher. In the travel market, the two assistant credentials are close to interchangeable from a rate standpoint — the discipline matters far less than the setting and the state.

The assistant band is tighter than the therapist band. For PTAs, the spread from 10th to 90th percentile is $420. For PTs it is $640. That has a practical consequence: there is less room to negotiate your way into an outlier package as an assistant. The upside comes from choosing the right market, not from out-negotiating the next candidate on the same contract.

Setting Moves the Number More Than Anything Else

Here is the PTA median broken out by setting:

The first thing to notice is not the rate — it is the volume. 162 of 182 travel PTA contracts, roughly 89 percent, are in skilled nursing. That is the travel PTA market. Outpatient and inpatient PTA travel jobs exist, and they pay a couple hundred dollars a week more, but there are very few of them at any given time.

If you are a PTA who does not want to work in a SNF, that is a completely legitimate preference — but it is important to know going in that you are competing for a small number of contracts, and you should expect longer gaps between assignments. Plan your finances around a longer search rather than assuming outpatient work will appear on demand.

We are showing the outpatient and inpatient numbers with their sample sizes attached because 9 and 6 contracts are thin. Treat them as directionally useful, not precise. A single unusually good contract moves a 6-contract median noticeably, which is exactly why we publish the count next to every figure.

Why the PT/PTA Gap Is What It Is

The median PT package is $2,280 and the median PTA package is $1,460 — a gap of $820 a week, about 36 percent. That gap is remarkably stable across settings and states, and it is worth understanding rather than resenting, because understanding it tells you where your leverage actually is.

The gap is a scope-of-practice gap, not a skill gap. A PT can evaluate a patient, write the plan of care, and discharge. A PTA cannot. When a facility loses a PT, evaluations stop and admissions back up — a regulatory and revenue problem that has no workaround. When a facility is short a PTA, treatment minutes get harder to hit, which is a productivity problem. Both are real, but only one of them stops the building from taking new patients. Bill rates follow that difference, and pay packages follow bill rates.

The practical read: as an assistant, your leverage is highest at facilities that are short on both. A building with a stable PT and a PTA vacancy has an ordinary need. A building with travel PTs already on site and a PTA hole is one where the evaluations are happening but nobody can carry the treatment load — and those are the contracts where assistant rates run toward the 90th percentile.

What Actually Raises an Assistant's Package

In rough order of how much they move the number:

1. Geography. The largest single lever. State medians for assistants vary by several hundred dollars a week, and the pattern does not always match the PT pattern — a state can be strong for PTAs and average for PTs. Check the state you are considering on the Pay Index rather than assuming.
2. Willingness to take a rural or hard-to-fill location. Facilities that have been trying to fill a role for two months pay differently than facilities filling a planned leave. This is the single most reliable way for an assistant to reach the top of the range.
3. Start date flexibility. A Monday start when the current traveler leaves Friday is worth real money. A start four weeks out is not.
4. Clean licensure. Not a rate increase so much as an access requirement — if you already hold the license or a compact privilege, you are eligible for contracts that others cannot take, which is where the better rates sit. See our licensure guide for the discipline-by-discipline picture.
5. Extension willingness. Facilities discount the risk of a traveler who signals they will extend. It is not always reflected in the first contract, but it shows up at renewal.

Notice what is not on that list: years of experience. In travel therapy, experience beyond the minimum a facility requires rarely changes the rate. A PTA with 15 years and a PTA with 3 years take the same contract at the same number far more often than not. Experience buys you access to pickier settings and better assignments, not a higher line on the same one.

Reading a PTA Offer Without Getting Fooled

Two patterns come up constantly in assistant offers specifically, and both are worth naming.

The blended-rate quote. A recruiter quotes "$24 an hour plus stipends" without saying what the stipends are. Twenty-four dollars an hour is meaningless on its own. Ask for the weekly gross at the guaranteed hours, and ask what happens to the stipend if you are called off. The whole-number weekly figure is the only one you can compare across offers.

The hours mismatch. Assistant contracts in skilled nursing are frequently written at 40 guaranteed hours, but productivity expectations sometimes assume you will pick up more. If the package looks strong, confirm the guaranteed hours and confirm the overtime rate before you sign. A $1,700 package at 40 hours is a very different job from a $1,700 package where 45 is the norm.

Our guide to reading a travel therapy pay package covers the full anatomy of an offer line by line, and applies equally to assistants and therapists.

The Short Version

Median travel PTA and COTA pay in 2026 is $1,460 a week, with most contracts between $1,260 and $1,680. Nearly nine in ten travel assistant contracts are in skilled nursing. The gap to PT pay is about 36 percent and it is structural, not negotiable. Your real levers are which state you work in, how hard the role is to fill, and how fast you can start.

If you want to see the numbers for a specific state before you commit to a market, the Pay Index has per-state assistant medians wherever we have enough contracts to publish one honestly. And if you want to know what a specific open assignment actually pays, the number is on the posting — we publish rates on every job we list.