homearrow_rightSLP Career Advicearrow_rightWhy is the internet is (often) so wrong about SLP pay?

Why is the internet is (often) so wrong about SLP pay?

Or, how weak data and online misinformation impact SLPs’ ability to be paid fairly and negotiate well

First, we’re writing this with the assumption that you understand:


If you’ve got that, then we’re ready to chat about myths, missteps, and SLP pay!


MYTH #1: “I can ask other SLPs on Reddit or in a Facebook group about pay…”


PROS: SLPs helping SLPs for free is the best.


CONS: People often don’t know what they don’t know, so you get a mix of inaccurate and accurate information.


When you ask about SLP pay online, you cannot get even remotely accurate answers without (bare minimum):

  • Location
  • 1099 vs. W2
  • How you’re paid (salary, hourly, direct time only, pay per visit, etc.)
  • Setting
  • Other specifics to you and the job (such as how many years you have in the field and what benefits they’re offering you—or really, all the things we ask about in our Pay Calculator)

Without these details, you’re going to get:

  • Tips from people who don’t live in your state and therefore don’t understand local pay norms. Kansas isn’t California, friend…
  • Tips from people who aren’t doing the math to account for the tax implications of 1099 vs W2, benefits, whether the job pays for indirect or unbillable time, etc. If they aren’t doing this essential math, you can easily miscalculate your pay by up to 40%.
  • Tips from people who wish SLP pay norms were $70/hour. Trust us– we wish this, too!!! But these people will tell you not to take a job with pay that’s actually average or even above average for SLPs in your area. And some of these jobs have perks that’d make it well worth average pay— like great health insurance, solid PTO policies, and/or a flexible work-from-home set-up.

With all that said, we DO NOT want to discourage you from talking to other SLPs about pay! In fact, SLPs disclosing pay and helping each other is critical for individual well-being and the health of our field. However, we do want to caution you about trusting everything you read online. Get Informed, and ask the right questions!


MYTH #2: “I can look at pay averages from places like ASHA’s salary data and the Bureau of Labor Statistics data (BLS) to find a good job with above-average pay.”


PROS: You definitely need to look at this data! We want you to find those higher-paying jobs and push the pay norms in our field up.


CONS: The averages can be very misleading if you don’t understand how they’re calculated.


Here’s the biggest problem with most pay data online—SLP jobs are not all the same. As SLPs:

  • Half of us are on 9-month contracts (school-based SLPs).
  • Each year, it seems like more and more of us are being put on 1099 contracts instead of W2 contracts.
  • Many of us are ONLY paid for direct time, billable time, or paid per visit.
  • We work in a variety of settings with different pay norms, including schools, hospitals, private practice, and industry.

Job listing websites and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) collapse all this data together to find SLP pay “norms.” ONLY ASHA correctly these factors out, but their data set is so small that it doesn’t include relevant regional differences. To emphasize the issues:

  • You CANNOT assume all SLPs work full-time, 12 months per year, and are paid for a full 40 hour workweek, where all hours are paid the same. BLS data does this.
  • You CANNOT combine 9-month and 12-month contracts in a data set and then assume they’re all 12-month contracts. BLS data does this.
    • Example: If you have a 12-month contract, but 9-month contracts are in the data set, it will push your pay norms down. It makes sense for a school-based SLP to make $70K per year. That means they’re making $45 per hour. But $45 per hour on a standard full-time 12-month contract would be $93,600.
  • You CANNOT combine salaried wages with pay-per-visit wages and average them to get hourly rates. It will cause wage reports to be artificially high or low, depending on if the survey asked for an annual versus hourly rate. BLS data does this.
    • Example: Salaried people usually work (and are paid) 40 hours per week. Pay-per-visit (PPV) and direct-time-only folks also usually work 40 hours per week but are often paid for more like 30 hours per week.
  • You CANNOT combine school and healthcare settings in your data and call it all “SLP wages” because their pay norms are different. BLS data does this.
  • You CANNOT combine the data from SLPs in administrative roles and the data from SLPs in clinical roles and assume they’re the same job. BLS data does this.
  • You CANNOT use nationwide data to predict local wages. You also CANNOT split the nation into four quadrants and assume that’s local enough. You also CANNOT report wages by state only and assume that city and rural areas will be paid the same. BLS and ASHA do this.

How do you know if a data set you’re looking at is falling into these traps? A simple hint is if the hourly averages multiplied by 2080 = the annual averages, you can trash that data set for SLPs. Our jobs don’t work like that.


Explanation: Hold your hats for some fun math! So most jobs are paid an annual salaried rate, and you can assume that most people who work full-time work 2080 hours per year. This is a simple standard calculation used in HR and labor markets when they have to collapse lots and lots of contracts into one. So if you see an annual salary average of $93,600 per year, next to an hourly average of $45, the number to get from one to the other is 2080 (multiply or divide by). See that? And it should send off major warning alarms that you can’t use that data set.


Because while for some fields (maybe Engineers, idk?) this shakes out ok, it DOES NOT for SLPs. What this means is the data set doesn’t account for jobs that aren’t paid 2080 hours per year, which is well over half of all SLP jobs. Think about it like this—are school-based SLPs working 40 hour weeks year-round (2080 hours)? No. When you’re paid per-visit are you paid for 40 hours per week, year-round? Also no. Also, if the data set allows BOTH hourly rates AND annual salaries to feed into the same data set, then calculates one from the other, it’ll always be wrong for SLPs.


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!


MYTH #3: “I can use job boards, Google SLP pay, or ask ChatGPT and get a decent answer.”


PROS: It’s fast. Love AI.


CONS: Websites that aren’t pulling ASHA data (and basically none of them are), are instead pulling data from BLS + job sites like Indeed or ZipRecruiter. These sites together create wildly inaccurate norms.


As we spent more and more time Googling SLP pay to research Informed Jobs, we realized that most salary data you see online is from job listings, NOT actual SLP pay data (from either ASHA or BLS). Here’s why that happens and how it’s a problem:

  • Job listing data is easy to get, because it’s online and easy to extract from the internet. Employers post rates online daily in order to hire. But SLPs don’t post their real pay rates online unless asked to.
  • Journalists use this job listing data to report what SLPs make. However, they don’t usually realize we aren’t all on 12-month full-time salaried contracts (see Myth #2, above), and that our field is split between W2 and 1099 work. They also don’t realize most job posts are ads (see next point).
  • Job listing sites artificially inflate pay rates for marketing purposes. The goal of most job website is to make employers (their customer) happy, and the goal of most employers is to get their jobs filled. One way job sites do this is by prompting employers to prompt employers to adjust their advertised pay ranges upward in order to be “competitive”.
    • Example: An employer may be ready to hire at around $50/hour. They get on the job website to post this, and it encourages a range. So they think, “Sure, I guess I’ll put a range then”. So they list $45–55. The website then prompts the employer to increase the upper end of this range in order to get more job views. So the employer does. They think, “It’s telling me to… and I guess I’d pay $65 on the upper end in the right circumstance, so sure”. So the listed rate is $45–$65 even though the employer very much intends to pay $50 or below. Then, people looking at this data assume it’s an accurate reflection of what SLPs are being paid, and worse yet, an accurate way to extrapolate an average of what SLPs are paid.

In sum, the pay ranges listed on job boards aren’t averages, but people pulling this data who have no experience with how the data was created in the first place treat them as such.


Want to see an example of the silly stuff these job websites spit out?


This is a screenshot taken from Glassdoor’s website, showing average pay for SLPs in the U.S. Screenshot taken on August 12th, 2024:


Glassdoor SLPs salaries

For the grad students or non-SLPs looking at this screenshot, and wondering if it’s real– it’s about $45,000 too high, on both ends.


How did this happen?! By a) pulling data from job posts instead of real SLPs, and b) collapsing hourly and pay-per-visit roles into a dataset and assuming they’re all full-time 12-month salaried jobs. Yikes.


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!


Want a jobs board that gets it right for SLPs, so that you can make more informed decisions?


Unlike the most commonly-used jobs boards, our goal with Informed Jobs is to create a place where SLPs can get the (accurate) information they need in order to find a good job, and employers get connected quickly to great-fit candidates for their jobs.


We put transparency, accuracy, and consumer (SLP) protection above all else. And unlike other jobs boards, we will have minimum standards for posting and exclude employers who don’t meet basic transparency and accuracy requirements.


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Visit our sister site, The Informed SLP.