Jobs / Healthcare / 29-1123.00
Physical Therapists
Assess, plan, organize, and participate in rehabilitative programs that improve mobility, relieve pain, increase strength, and improve or correct disabling conditions resulting from disease or injury.
- US jobs
- 267,330
- Median wage
- $102,760 a year
- Job family
- Healthcare
Can agents do the work of physical therapists?
We read the evidence at the level of the job family, Healthcare:
- Task levelPartialOne benchmark, from early 2025. On Stanford's MedAgentBench, where agents do clinical tasks in a simulated electronic health record, the best recorded model completes 69.7% of tasks (Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2). It has no maintained leaderboard, so newer models are not measured. No benchmark in our collection tests work with patients.
- Project levelPartialOnly adjacent evidence. GDPval includes nurses among its 44 occupations. OpenAI reports that GPT-5.5's deliverables won or tied against professionals' work in 84.9% of comparisons across all occupations. No benchmark in our collection tests clinical work over days, such as managing a patient's care.
Benchmarks for the job family
These cover work in healthcare, not always this occupation's tasks.
- 1846 EloClaude Opus 5.5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Default Fallback) · 23 Sep 2026Unrated
Typical tasks
From O*NET 31.0. Core tasks first. Few of these tasks have a benchmark today.
- Plan, prepare, or carry out individually designed programs of physical treatment to maintain, improve, or restore physical functioning, alleviate pain, or prevent physical dysfunction in patients.
- Perform and document an initial exam, evaluating data to identify problems and determine a diagnosis prior to intervention.
- Record prognosis, treatment, response, and progress in patient's chart or enter information into computer.
- Instruct patient and family in treatment procedures to be continued at home.
- Evaluate effects of treatment at various stages and adjust treatments to achieve maximum benefit.
- Confer with the patient, medical practitioners, or appropriate others to plan, implement, or assess the intervention program.
- Administer manual exercises, massage, or traction to help relieve pain, increase patient strength, or decrease or prevent deformity or crippling.
- Obtain patients' informed consent to proposed interventions.
- Test and measure patient's strength, motor development and function, sensory perception, functional capacity, or respiratory or circulatory efficiency and record data.
- Direct, supervise, assess, and communicate with supportive personnel.
- Review physician's referral and patient's medical records to help determine diagnosis and physical therapy treatment required.
- Identify and document goals, anticipated progress, and plans for reevaluation.
Other job titles for this occupation (23)
Acute Care PT (Acute Care Physical Therapist) · Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) · Home Care Physical Therapist (Home Care PT) · Inpatient Physical Therapist (Inpatient PT) · Outpatient Physical Therapist (Outpatient PT) · Pediatric Physical Therapist (Pediatric PT) · Registered Physical Therapist (RPT) · Therapist · Acute Physical Therapist (Acute PT) · Cardiopulmonary Physical Therapist (Cardiopulmonary PT) · Geriatric Physical Therapist (Geriatric PT) · Home Health Physical Therapist (Home Health PT) · Kinesiotherapist · LPT (Licensed Physical Therapist) · Orthopedic Physical Therapist (Orthopedic PT) · Outpatient Orthopedics Physical Therapist (Outpatient Ortho PT) · Outpatient Travel Physical Therapist (Outpatient Travel PT) · Physiotherapist · Pulmonary Physical Therapist (Pulmonary PT) · School Physical Therapist · Skilled Nursing Facility Physical Therapist (SNF PT) · Sports Physical Therapist (Sports PT) · Travel Physical Therapist (Travel PT)