Respiratory Therapist Salary in Chicago, IL 2026,
$87,060 Median | BLS + Market Data

Chicago respiratory therapists earn a BLS median of $87,060/yr, or $41.86 an hour, across the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin metro, with a published band from $74,560 to $100,100. That is 5.8% above the US median for the occupation. BLS counts 3,620 respiratory therapists in the metro.

Modestly — the metro runs 3.5% above the Illinois statewide figure. That is a smaller gap than downstate-versus-Chicago comparisons in most occupations, because respiratory therapy pay in Illinois is set by hospital grids that do not vary as sharply by geography as, say, professional-services pay does. Among peer metros Chicago sits below Philadelphia at $88,790 and above Denver at $85,870, Dallas at $84,080 and Austin at $82,760.

The large academic and tertiary systems — the downtown and Near West Side academic medical centres and the region's children's hospital — pay at the top of this band, but the reason is the assignment rather than the brand. Those are the employers running ECMO programmes, transplant services and level-one neonatal intensive care, and it is the specialty credentialing and 24-hour rostering attached to those services that carry the premium. A therapist on a general medical-surgical floor at an academic centre and one at a suburban community hospital are usually within a few percent of each other.

Yes. The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation licenses respiratory care practitioners, and the licence is issued statewide — Chicago does not license the occupation and there is no city credential to add. The normal route is an accredited associate or bachelor's respiratory care programme followed by the National Board for Respiratory Care examinations, with employers in this metro overwhelmingly hiring at the registered (RRT) rather than the certified (CRT) level.

More comfortable than the same figure would be in a coastal metro. Housing across the Chicago region is materially cheaper than in the West Coast and Northeast markets that publish similar respiratory therapy medians, the flat 4.95% state tax is predictable, and there is no city wage tax. The trade-off is that the top of this band is low — the 90th percentile is only about 15% above the median — so a therapist planning a long career here should think about where the differentials and specialty credentials are rather than expecting the base grid to keep climbing.

In most metros the distance between the median and the 90th percentile in a hospital occupation reflects a mix of employer types paying quite differently. In Chicago respiratory therapy that mix barely exists: essentially all of the work is in hospitals, the hospitals pay from published grids, and several of the largest systems in the region are organised, which pulls schedules toward one another rather than apart. The result is a band where the practical ceiling is reached by senior staff therapists carrying differentials, not by a separate high-paying employer tier. Anyone modelling a career here should treat the 90th percentile as a realistic destination rather than an outlier.

Chicago has one of the densest concentrations of large hospitals in the country, yet the metro's location quotient for respiratory therapy is 0.89 — below the national average concentration. The explanation is that a location quotient measures the occupation's share of local employment, and Chicago's total employment base is enormous and heavily weighted toward professional services, logistics and finance. Health care is large in absolute terms and unremarkable as a share. For a therapist the practical reading is that the metro has plenty of posts but no unusual local surplus of them, which is consistent with a wage sitting only modestly above the national figure.

The step from CRT to RRT is effectively a hiring requirement in this metro rather than a raise — most acute-care employers here will not interview at the certified level for a staff post. The credentials that move pay are the adult and neonatal-paediatric critical care specialties and the employer-specific ECMO qualifications, because they attach a therapist to a service line that must be covered around the clock. That is why the levels on this page describe assignment as much as certification: in Chicago respiratory therapy, what you are rostered onto is a better predictor of where you sit in this band than how many letters follow your name.