The $100K Per Year Clinical Formula

By Dr. Danny Matta, Founder of PT Biz

One of the most common goals for physical therapists who go out on their own is this:

“I just want to make $100,000 a year doing what I love.”

Good news—it's more than possible. In fact, with the right setup, you can hit that number working just 15 patient visits a week in a lean, subleased clinic.

This isn’t some overhyped promise. This is just simple math.

🎯 Why $100K Matters

$100,000/year is the line in the sand for many clinicians who want more freedom and flexibility without sacrificing financial stability.

Yes, you can hit $100K working for someone else—but usually it means taking director-level roles, working in settings you didn’t train for (like SNFs or home health), or grinding multiple PRN jobs.

If your passion is outpatient ortho or sports performance, and you want to build a practice around it—this guide is for you.

💸 Breaking Down Overhead

This formula is based on a lifestyle clinic model—meaning low overhead, subleased space, and no full-time staff. Here’s a sample monthly breakdown:

💡 The Income Math

If your goal is to take home $100,000 before taxes, you need your clinic to generate revenue to cover both that income and your fixed costs.

Target income + overhead = $133,600/year in revenue

Let’s assume you charge $185 per visit, which is a conservative average for a cash-based PT clinic.

$133,600 ÷ $185 = 722 visits/year
That breaks down to:

• 60 visits/month

• 15 visits/week

That’s it. 15 solid visits per week and you’re there.

🤯 Why This Works So Well

• You control your schedule.

• You don’t need high volume.

• You don’t need a huge team or big space.

• And the more you raise your rates, the less you have to work.

For example, raise your rate to $200/visit and you can hit $100K in fewer visits—or surpass $100K quickly without changing anything else.

🚀 Real-World Examples

Plenty of PT Biz clients hit $10K–$20K/month as solo clinicians.

Some, in more affluent markets, generate $30K–$35K/month solo before hiring anyone.

The key isn’t working more—it's charging appropriately and having a solid system to bring in the right patients.

✅ Key Takeaways

• Overhead matters. Keep it low and predictable.

• Charge your value. Raising your rates increases income without adding volume.

• Master sales & marketing. These are the levers that create consistency and freedom.

🧠 Final Thought

You didn’t go to PT school to burn out in a high-volume clinic.

You can build a business that pays you well, gives you freedom, and lets you spend more time with your family—all while helping the exact patients you’re passionate about.

The $100K mark isn’t a dream. It’s step one.

👇 Ready to Build a Clinic That Pays You $100K+?

If you're ready to get started or scale faster, we can help:

👉 Visit PhysicalTherapyBiz.com
👉 Book a Free Discovery Call

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Ready to elevate your practice? Book a call at the link below with one of our expert consultants today and start your journey to delivering unparalleled physical therapy.

Podcast Transcript

Danny Matta here, founder of PT Biz, and today we're gonna talk about the $100,000 per year clinical formula. So. One of the primary goals that clinicians have when they go out on their own and start a clinic for themself is to be able to break the $100,000 per year income threshold.

Now, this is something that you can definitely make, uh, a hundred thousand dollars a year or more working in a traditional setting. Um. Oftentimes you can do this in settings that people don't really wanna work in as much. So think home health, you know, PRN, skilled nursing facilities, things of that nature.

Uh, more acute care. And I'm not saying everybody doesn't wanna work there, but a lot of people didn't go to school to do that. They wanted to work with sports orthopedic. That's probably the, uh, the biggest. Subset of our profession, and it's who we help, uh, the most as far as establishing clinics. So in order to be able to, you know, generate that kind of income in that setting, usually you have to be a clinic director of some sort.

Um, it's kinda hard to do that in a staff role. And obviously this is very dependent on your location, uh, and, you know, cost of living because it. That can go a lot further certain places than others, but that is a common goal for a lot of people to have a net take home of, you know, a hundred thousand dollars per year as if it was a salary.

So I'm gonna go through exactly what that looks like, what the typical overhead is. This would be in a sort of subleased, um, non standalone space. So think sublease space where you're renting out of another clinic, clinician's office, a gym, maybe. Something to that, uh, something to that effect and keeping your overhead really low.

So we consider these lifestyle businesses and, and honestly, everybody, for the most part starts with one of these, starts with a lifestyle business, and then they can decide to springboard that into whatever it is that they decide they wanna do. So if we look at the formula to get to a hundred thousand dollars income, basically, and I, and this is gonna be before taxes, just like, you know, your salary is.

Before taxes. If you're getting paid by your employer, like your taxes are what they are after the, uh, you know, after you, you pay. And it depends on your, your family's income and a number of other factors. But this is gonna be a hundred thousand dollars before you pay taxes Personally with a business, we have overhead though, right?

So this isn't, oh, we need to make a hundred thousand dollars in the business. We actually need to make a good bit more than that, uh, in order to be able to meet the overhead that we're gonna have for running a business in a facility, right? So. Let's talk about some of the overhead factors that you're gonna have, right?

Some of the things you're gonna have to pay for every single month. So what we're seeing across the board is sublease spaces are becoming more expensive. So whenever I got my first sublease space, it was like $400 a month, and it was actually really common for people to be in that range, um, you know, for quite a while.

It's getting more expensive now. I mean, I actually had somebody that reached out to me about a subway space that they had looked at that was like $3,000 a month, and I was kind of shocked, honestly. That's very high. Um. The average that we're seeing for a lot of people is gonna be somewhere between 750 and $2,000 a month.

A lot of it just depends on your area, uh, more than anything else. So if you're in a really, you know, affluent spot doesn't have a lot of, uh, rental space available for commercial spaces, you're gonna be on the higher end of that. If you're in a space that. Or an area that is a lot more availability. Uh, maybe it's a lot more warehouse style buildings.

You're probably gonna be able to find space for cheaper. Right? And maybe it's in a cheaper facility, like, uh, more of a strip down gym, like a CrossFit gym. Versus if you're in a really sort of be boutique, high end maybe, um, health and wellness facility, you're probably gonna pay more. But, you know, there's pros and cons to both of those.

So let's just assume that you're gonna have to have, pay $1,500 a month. And the nice thing with sublease spaces is you don't really have to account for anything else like. They're paying for utilities, all that. This is just sort of like a lump sum every single month. The next thing is your tech stack, right?

So your tech stack is your EMR. Uh, you probably have some sort of email system, like a Gmail or a Google Suite. It's not gonna cost you a ton, but it is something that gets added into that. Uh, maybe you, you have some sort of, um, programming software, maybe using some sort of AI tools. Uh, you know, may maybe you have some sort of, uh, communication tools with your, with your patient.

I'm gonna assume that you have about. $300 worth of a tech stack every single month, which you can go way above that as you, as you grow, and you get more complexity with it. But you can, you can be pretty, uh, you know, safe to say $300 a month, like that's a decent tech stack for a clinic that's a, a smaller clinic.

Uh, and put you in a really good spot to leverage your time. 'cause that's the goal, right? I wanna use tools that are gonna get me my time back. 'cause if I can make a hundred. $85 an hour seeing a patient or something like that. And I'm, and I can pay $20 to get some of that time back. Like, I'm totally doing that.

Uh, so think of it around 300 bucks. Bookkeeping. This is something that I kinda lump this into, like bookkeeping and, uh, even, you know, getting your taxes done, it should be like relatively. Inexpensive. It's just you bookkeeping you might be able to do on your own, but your CPA, whoever's gonna do your tax return, I'm just assuming around $200 a month.

You're gonna add that out. You're probably gonna pay more during tax season as they file for you. But, um, spread out throughout the year. Let's call it 200 bucks. Insurance for your business gonna be about $200 if it's just you health insurance, uh, for yourself. Again, if it's just you. Probably around $500.

It depends on what kind of insurance you're gonna get. You can do some of these like health share plans that aren't really insurance that are way cheaper. You can do traditional insurance, which is probably gonna be closer to 500. But let's just assume that, uh, let's say you have about $200 a, a month that you're putting towards continued education.

So going different courses and things of that nature, uh, and then equipment. So $200 a month that you're spending towards equipment, whatever you're using in the office or towards some purchases that maybe are a little more expensive occasionally throughout the year, we're just gonna use that as a spread out payment.

Right. So that brings us to $2,800 a month. Uh, or you could look at it annually. It's gonna be, I. $33,600 per year. And that's kinda what we need to know if we're gonna try to back into how do we net a hundred thousand dollars pre-tax. So in order to do that, that means that we need to make 100,000, uh, $133,600 because our overhead is $33,600 per year.

So in order for us to do that and have that a hundred thousand dollars left over, that means that we get to figure out. How many visits that's gonna be and back into that. So you can feel pretty confident you're gonna be able to do that. Now I'm gonna use $185 as your average per session. Uh, most people that we work with are, when we first start working with them, are actually a little bit lower than this, and they start to bump themselves up to somewhere around this range.

But once we've worked with some folks, uh, for, you know, six to 12 months, maybe even two years, like oftentimes they're well above $200 an hour. And again, this depends on your area. Uh, so it's kind of location dependent, but we're just gonna use 180 5 as a, a decent estimate of kind of where you should be.

So if you're charging $185 and you need to make $133,600 per year, that means you need to see 722 visits in the year. And that equates to. Basically 60 visits a month. And if you wanna break that up weekly, you're talking roughly 15 visits a week. And now this is the appeal to a lot of people is if you really look at the numbers on this, right?

So let's say we have 15 visits a week and we've, we've broken it down to that 15 visits a week. Equals a hundred thousand dollars income, let's call it. This is the appeal for people and why you're seeing so many people go the direction of starting these clinics, because that's 15 visits a week at a relatively, you know, mo, low to moderate average visit rate.

Let's say you bumped that up to, you know, 200. Now all of a sudden your take home is. You know, a good bit over a hundred thousand dollars per year. 'cause the overhead doesn't change. You're just changing your input. You're changing your, your uh, your, what you're charging people, you're changing how much money is coming into the business.

But the fixed costs don't change because of that. So, you know, when we look at, uh, at, at how much money people can make doing this. Getting to a hundred thousand dollars is very achievable, and you don't have to see a lot of volume for that. This is why we see people that maybe wanna have more of a lifestyle business.

They want to treat patients two, three days a week, uh, go this direction because these numbers can hold true for them. They can keep their overhead really low and just maintain a, a lifestyle business. Um, or, you know, you can grow past yourself and we see plenty of clinicians individually be able to generate $20,000 plus, uh, a month in their own clinic before they go on and, you know, maybe hire and, and bring on other people.

The most that I've ever seen is someone averaging roughly like 30, $35,000 a month. And this is in a, a very, sort of more affluent city, big city, uh, high average visit rate, you know, also higher. Costs. So their, their total amount that they had to pay per month is obviously higher than their fixed cost, but we're able to make up, it's a big difference in terms of how much they were able to keep because they did such a good job of really charging what they're worth.

So these are the keys, like you have to keep your overhead low and you have to keep your average visit rate up. And if you can do those things, a hundred thousand dollars is really just like. I mean, that is checking the box. That's the beginning of a lot of this for, for folks. And sadly, you know, I wish you didn't have to look at things like this to be able to work as a physical therapist.

Many of us do not want to, I didn't want to, I didn't wanna start a business. Um, but as I looked at places I could work. When I got outta the military, I was like, I. What option did I have? You know, I, I just couldn't do, I couldn't make what I wanted to make and have the ability to have time freedom with, you know, traveling.

'cause I was teaching at the time for the ready state and that is what's really important to me. So I couldn't find that. For some of you, maybe it's really important that you want to be able to have a better work life balance. Or maybe you just wanna really be involved in your family and your kids' lives, uh, and you wanna make sure you have a day off every single week.

To be able to focus on that. Right? And that's something you can do because you can construct your schedule the way that you want. So it's not just income, it's also income. You can get there while also maintaining flexibility in how you set up your week. So this is the appeal for a lot of folks. And if you really.

Look at the numbers and you back into the math of it. You know, you don't have to see that many people per week, per month, per year. That many sessions, I should say, because it's not like you're seeing 15 new people every single week. You know? You might only be seeing five to 10 new people a month, and then they're working with you to solve a problem, obviously.

So, you know, you don't have to see a lot of people. You don't have to take massive debt out. So, you know, I get it, right. There's a reason why we've been talking about this for a long time. There's a reason why I did it. There's a reason why literally thousands of clinicians, clinicians have already done this.

And thousands more are going to do it, you know, over the next couple years and who knows how many over the next decade. It's gonna be a a lot. Uh, so I hope this helps you get clear on kind of the math of what that looks like. If you think that that number is, uh, you know, impossible for these types of clinics.

It's very possible. It's actually, I. Honestly, I think it's like just honestly the start for a lot of people, but it's very achievable if that's all that you want to do. Uh, and it really helps, I think, to get clear on what the numbers look like and what you need to do. Because you know when, when you step back and you say, oh wow, 15 visits a week, like that's not, that's not too bad right now.

Getting those people in the sales and marketing round, these are all the hard things. These are the things we have to, you know, really step in and help people with on a day-to-day basis because you didn't learn these things in school. I didn't learn these things in school. I had to learn a lot of this stuff, the hard, slow way, and it sucked, right?

And now for us, we get a chance to help people take their great clinical skillset, add on proven sales marketing, show them systems, help them implement those things, help them build a business that's actually like not crazy and stressful and is, is, uh, systemized and it runs well and gives you an opportunity then.

Springboard into wherever you want it is that you want to do after that. So if you're looking for some help actually getting to this place and getting started, head of physical therapy biz.com. Check out what we have. We have some programs that are specifically for people just starting in, some for people that are looking to scale their business.

Uh, and we'd love to have a conversation with you about where you're at and see if you know we can help you. And if not, then we'd love to refer you to the right person who possibly can. So as always, thanks so much for watching and listening, and I'll catch you on the next one.

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