Travel PTAs and travel COTAs are paid out of the same band, and it is a narrower band than most assistants expect. The current median for each discipline, and the number of contracts behind it, are published on our Travel Therapy Pay Index, which is rebuilt from live contract data. We point you there rather than restating a number here, because a pay figure typed into an article is stale the week after it is written. If a recruiter quotes you a weekly number as the "typical" PTA rate, check it against the Index before you believe it is the middle of the market — quoting the top of the range as though it were the middle is the most common way assistant pay gets misrepresented.
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
The Pay Index carries the live table — the median for each discipline and the contract count behind it — with PTA and COTA listed alongside PT and OT. Read it there. Two things about the assistant numbers are worth calling out, because they hold steady even as the figures move.
PTAs and COTAs are priced almost identically. The two assistant medians track each other closely enough that, in the travel market, the two 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. Assistant packages cluster more closely around their median than therapist packages do, and the practical consequence is that 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.
What "package" means here. Every figure is the total weekly gross package — taxable hourly wages plus non-taxable stipends for housing and meals. It is the figure a contract advertises, and the one to compare between offers. It is not a statement about what any individual clears, which depends on withholding, benefit elections and circumstances we cannot see.
Setting Moves the Number More Than Anything Else
Setting is where the assistant number actually moves. The Pay Index breaks the median out by setting as well as by discipline, with the contract count printed next to every row and any row too thin to publish left out rather than shown.
The first thing to notice is not the rate — it is the volume. The overwhelming majority of travel PTA contracts are in skilled nursing, by a margin the setting breakdown makes obvious the moment you open it. That is the travel PTA market. Outpatient and inpatient PTA travel jobs exist, and they tend to pay somewhat better, but there are very few of them open 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.
Outside skilled nursing the assistant numbers rest on a small number of contracts, which is why the Index prints the count beside every row and omits anything below the publishing threshold. Treat a thin row as directionally useful, not precise: a single unusually good contract moves a small-sample median noticeably. That is exactly why the count sits next to every figure rather than buried in a methodology note.
Why the PT/PTA Gap Is What It Is
There is a substantial gap between the median PT package and the median PTA package — the Pay Index shows both, so you can read its current size rather than take ours for it. What matters more than the exact figure is that the 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- Start date flexibility. A Monday start when the current traveler leaves Friday is worth real money. A start four weeks out is not.
- 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.
- 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 an hourly wage "plus stipends" without saying what the stipends are. An hourly figure 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 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. The same weekly package at 40 guaranteed hours is a very different job from one 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.
Methodology. Every figure on the Pay Index is computed from ProTherapy contracts after de-duplication, and the page states the contract count behind each row and the month it was built. "Package" means the total weekly gross package — taxable wages plus non-taxable stipends. Cells computed from too few contracts are suppressed rather than published, because a median built on one or two contracts is not a number anyone should plan around. These are our own placements, not an industry-wide survey, and they skew toward the settings and regions where we place most heavily.
The Short Version
Travel PTA and COTA pay occupy the same, fairly narrow band — look it up on the Pay Index rather than trusting a number in an article. The great majority of travel assistant contracts are in skilled nursing. The gap to PT pay 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.
See Real PTA and COTA Rates
Every assignment we post shows the pay. No commitment required.
Questions? Call us: (484) 324-8320