Respiratory Therapist Salary in South Carolina 2026,
$77,740 Median | BLS Data by City

A median $77,740 a year, or $37.38 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $67,410 and $82,400 and a full range of $63,700 to $90,670. That is 5.5% below the $82,280 national median — a narrow gap, and the state's 75th percentile of $82,400 effectively matches the national median.

Columbia at $79,780, but only just. Charleston-North Charleston at $79,410, Florence at $78,550 and Greenville-Anderson-Greer at $78,390 are all within about fourteen hundred dollars, and only Myrtle Beach at $76,440 falls clearly behind. This is one of the flattest metro tables anywhere in this batch — the city you work in is close to irrelevant to your pay here.

Through the Board of Medical Examiners at the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, which handles respiratory care licensure in this state rather than a standalone respiratory board. You need a CoARC-accredited programme and NBRC credentialing — CRT at entry, RRT as the advanced credential — plus the board's application and continuing education for renewal.

The licence recognises both credentials, but South Carolina hospitals hire at the registered level in practice, and the RRT is what opens critical care, neonatal and transport work. Those assignments are what sit at the $82,400 seventy-fifth percentile and above. A therapist entering the state holding only the CRT should treat completing the RRT as the first priority — it is worth more than any relocation available in this state.

Because a small number of large systems set the market statewide. Prisma Health, MUSC and the Upstate and Pee Dee systems operate across multiple regions and run broadly similar wage scales, and with only about 1,960 respiratory therapists in the state there is not enough independent local demand to pull any one metro away. The practical effect is that a therapist in Florence at $78,550 is paid within about twelve hundred dollars of one in Columbia at $79,780, which means career decisions here should be about the unit and the credential, not the postcode.

It removes the lever most healthcare workers reach for first. In Tennessee or Missouri a respiratory therapist can gain ten thousand dollars by moving cities; in South Carolina the entire published spread is about three thousand three hundred dollars, and moving costs would eat it. What is left is credential and assignment. Completing the RRT, then adding ACCS for adult critical care or NPS for neonatal and paediatric, and joining an ECMO or transport team, is the whole of the progression — and those steps carry you from the $67,410 twenty-fifth percentile to the $82,400 seventy-fifth and beyond. Shift pattern is the other genuine variable, and it is negotiated rather than relocated to.

Differentials, as always in a twenty-four-hour hospital service. Night, weekend, holiday and on-call premiums are a material part of what South Carolina respiratory therapists actually take home and are not in this base annual median. The figure also blends acute hospital work with sleep laboratory, home care and durable medical equipment roles, which pay differently and carry different hours. And with only about 1,960 therapists statewide, the percentile estimates rest on a smaller sample than they do in a large state — read them as a reliable shape rather than a precise ladder.

Credential and unit, in that order, because geography is a dead end here. Complete the RRT if you hold the CRT. Move to adult critical care or the neonatal intensive care unit, and add ACCS or NPS certification. Get onto an ECMO or transport team at MUSC or a Prisma Health hospital — those are the roles at the $90,670 ninetieth percentile. Charge therapist and clinical educator posts are the other route. And negotiate the shift differential explicitly, because in an occupation with a flat wage table it is the largest variable component available.