What’s the average pay for a speech–language pathologist?
How to find good wage data for SLP jobs, both local and national (US)
Before we started building Informed Jobs, we thought our field had decent local and national pay data available to speech–language pathologists.
(Bahahahahaha! *Cries in misinformation…*)
But it’s bad, friends. Once we started digging, reading, and analyzing the available data, we found that pay data available to SLPs is disappointingly weak and frequently misleading.
Below, we’ll explain what we DO and DON’T know (as of summer 2024) so that you can avoid misinformation pitfalls and better predict and negotiate your pay!
What are the national pay norms for SLP jobs?
Disclaimer: Don’t skim this, then use it for negotiating or even for getting a sense of what you should be earning. You’ve gotta digest it. Fully. Then use it to take next steps.
Some highlights:
a) Median hourly wage across all US-based SLPs, regardless of setting or contract type is just over $40 ( 1, 2, 3 )
NOTE: Don’t stop here. It’s tempting just to take this number and go with it, but this statistic collapses too many job types into one—including 1099 with W2, and salaried roles with pay-per-visit roles. For that reason, this is a pretty meaningless number.
b) Median annual salary for a 9–10 month school contract = $69,000 (1)
Adjust down if you’re early in your career and up if you’re more experienced. For example, if you’ve worked fewer than 3 years, the median is actually $54,909. If you’ve worked over 28 years, the median is $83,000. (1)
IMPORTANT: School-based SLPs generally just don’t need (and shouldn’t use) this pay data when choosing a job. Why? Most school salaries are public record, so you don’t need to estimate! Simply Google “salary schedule” and your city and school district, and you’ll find the exact salary you can expect for the districts in your city.
c) Median annual salary for healthcare SLPs for an ongoing contract = $82,000 (1)
Median hourly wages for Healthcare or Med SLPs are:
Part-time hourly | Full-time hourly | Per-visit |
---|---|---|
$50.00 | $45.00 | $62.16 |
IMPORTANT: While the median annual salary for healthcare SLPs is $82,000 (1), most healthcare SLPs are paid hourly or per-visit, and only 33% receive an annual salary (1). This means the annual salary number above represents the minority of med SLPs, not the majority.
Then for all these healthcare SLP numbers, adjust down if you’re early in your career and up if you have more years of experience. For example, there’s a $26,000 yearly difference between early- and late-career SLPs. (1)
Then, what are the local pay norms for SLP jobs?
Because Kansas isn’t California!
First, note that if you work remotely doing telehealth, local norms infrequently apply to you, because most companies employing SLPs currently do not adjust for local cost of living.
Then—if you work for a company that does adjust for cost of living or it’s an in-person role, consider the following sources of information:
- Consider state data: Both ASHA and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) (see this exact same data in a different format here) have per-state data you can look at. It can help some, but it’s easy to misuse this data. For example, while it makes sense that California SLPs would make far more than Kansas SLPs (and that is helpful for adjusting national norms), you’ll still see big differences between large-city SLPs and rural SLPs even within Kansas, for example—sometimes upwards of a $15/hour difference. And interestingly, it doesn’t always go in the direction you’d predict. Because while it’s most common for urban areas to pay more, sometimes rural districts and hospitals are so desperate for SLPs that they are the ones who pay more than the big city employers.
- Look at job listings in your own city: Job boards for your zip code can also give you a rough idea. Just be aware that they’re motivated to list artificially high rates because employers are trying to get you to apply and not necessarily promising an accurate rate.
- Do the math to adjust for your own city: You can also do a cost-of-living adjustment to the national data to match your own zip code or city. When used in combination with the other strategies listed above, this can really help you adjust your expectations.
- First, get your city’s cost of living index. We like this website: https://www.city-data.com/. The cost of living index uses 100 as the mean (or 100 = the national average cost of living).
- Knowing that, you’ll multiply that index by national norms. If the average salary for an SLP in your setting and contract type is $70,000 nationwide, and your cost of living index is 100, you can expect a salary of $70,000. But if your cost of living index is 110, you’d take $70,000 x 110% to get $77,000.
- Also, if you’re considering a move to a new city,you can use a cost of living calculator to help you make the best decision on what kind of pay you’ll need:
With all the links here, where is the BEST available data on SLP pay?
We’ve spent many months digging into this and found that there are only two (reasonably) reliable resources for SLP salary data:
- ASHA’s Annual Salary Survey (best currently available) and
- The Bureau of Labor Statistics: Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) data (helpful only if you ALSO understand how it’s misleading for SLPs, in particular)
Let’s take a look at each of those:
Resource #1 (Best): ASHA’s Annual Salary Surveys
Data collected:
Survey data was collected from 2,691 school-based SLPs in 2022 and 1677 healthcare SLPs in 2023. It is repeated biannually, so it’s always up to date.
What to know:
- Strengths: This is by far the most accurate data source we’ve found because ASHA correctly accounts for things most other data sources mess up. For example, most data sources will extrapolate 1099 pay-per-visit work to full-time work by simply multiplying that per-visit pay rate x 40 hours per week and including that into pay averages, which wildly inflates our “average” pay on most websites. In fact, the BLS does this, and it’s one of the reasons you need to be careful with that data.
- What is ASHA getting right, that every other data source is getting wrong? If you’re paid per-visit, you’re not actually doing 40 hour-long visits in a workweek, and you’re not going to be 100% productive. You’ll have cancellations and gaps between clients. You may have drive time. You may even have to use the restroom! (sarcasm) The Birth to Five Editor at The Informed SLP, Marie Bloem, said, “When I was in Early Intervention full-time, I had to keep a caseload of 35 in order to average 26–28 visits per week.” This means you’re paid 27 hours per week—not 40. See how that works?
- Weaknesses: Raw data are not published, meaning we can’t calculate anything other than what they’ve already calculated for their report.
Resource #2 (Okay-ish): Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey
Data collected:
People tend to mistakenly think the BLS is a survey similar to ASHA’s. But instead, this data comes from state unemployment insurance (UI) files over a three-year period.
The currently available data was sampled through May 2022 and includes data as old as 2019 averaged into it, so it’s a more out-of-date than ASHA.
However, the BLS data powers most other sources we’ve found, like this wage calculator. So because nearly everything online relies on that BLS data, and it’s pretty inaccurate for SLPs, that means most data online for SLP wages is also inaccurate, and the problem has just spread everywhere (also why you can’t ask ChatGPT or Google).
What to know:
- Strengths: They collect data from SLPs’ reports, not job listings.
- Weaknesses: The OEWS unfortunately collapses salaried, hourly, and pay-per-visit jobs, which results in all of their numbers being consistently inaccurate. Read more here on why that is critical. Also, we don’t know the sample size for this, nor is that information available upon request (we emailed the BLS to ask!). This makes it tough to judge the accuracy of their data when we don’t even know how many SLPs reported into it.
In sum, you should use the ASHA data as your primary source , and you should use the OEWS only data with caution and a full understanding of in which direction it’ll be inaccurate for your job in particular. Remember that it’s collapsing all salaried, hourly, and pay-per-visit jobs together, and consider the implications of this for your particular role.
Want to understand more about online pay data and how to correctly interpret it?
Nerd out with us in our next SLP Career Advice, Why the internet is (often) so wrong about SLP pay!
Want better salary data for our field?
We want that, too, and it’s one of our goals at Informed Jobs! Help us collect better salary data by sharing yours here.
Note: Viewing jobs and salary data will ALWAYS be free at Informed Jobs. The wage data that SLPs share freely will never be behind a paywall!
Primary Resources:
- American Speech–Language–Hearing Association. (2022–2023). Salary and Wage Data. https://www.asha.org/research/memberdata/salary-data/.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2023, May). Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2023, Speech–Language Pathologists. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes291127.htm
- Payscale. (n.d.) Average Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) Hourly Pay. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Speech-Language_Pathologist_(SLP)/Hourly_Rate