Respiratory Therapist Salary in Wisconsin 2026,
$84,210 Median | BLS Data by City

The published figure is $84,210 a year, or $40.48 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025 for SOC 29-1126, with a band from $70,520 at the 10th percentile to $100,320 at the 90th. That is 2.3% above the national median of $82,280, and the middle half of Wisconsin therapists earn between $78,800 and $96,510 — a comparatively narrow spread.

Yes. The Department of Safety and Professional Services licenses respiratory care practitioners through the Respiratory Care Practitioners Examining Council, requiring graduation from an accredited programme and the National Board for Respiratory Care examination. The NBRC's Registered Respiratory Therapist credential sits above the entry level and is what most Wisconsin hospitals treat as the working standard.

Milwaukee-Waukesha, at $89,040, then Racine-Mount Pleasant $86,460, Appleton $84,300, Green Bay $82,300 and Janesville-Beloit $81,600. Unusually for Wisconsin, the largest metro does lead here — respiratory therapy is a tertiary-hospital occupation, and the intensive care and neonatal volume that pays best is concentrated in the biggest centres.

The national projection is 12.1% growth through 2034, and Wisconsin's share pro-rates to roughly 120 openings a year. On a base of only 1,940 practitioners statewide — a location quotient of 0.74, well below the national rate — that annual requirement is a real pressure, and it falls hardest on intensive care and neonatal staffing at the state's tertiary centres.

Adult and neonatal intensive care, transport teams and specialty-credentialled roles, which account for most of the distance from the $84,210 median to the $96,510 seventy-fifth percentile. Above that, the $100,320 ninetieth percentile is lead therapist, clinical educator and department supervisory work in the state's larger health systems.

Because almost all of this workforce is employed by a small number of large hospital systems that pay on published grade scales. With 1,940 practitioners statewide, Wisconsin's respiratory care labour market is small enough that the major systems know each other's ranges and benchmark closely, which removes the dispersion that individual negotiation produces in other clinical professions. The result is a $78,800-to-$96,510 interquartile range around an $84,210 median — narrow enough that the meaningful variation for an individual therapist is shift pattern and specialty credential rather than employer.

That Wisconsin employs respiratory therapists at about three-quarters the national rate relative to its workforce. That is not a demand statement so much as a staffing-model one: hospital systems differ in how much respiratory work they assign to therapists versus to nursing staff and protocol-driven care, and Wisconsin's systems run relatively lean respiratory departments. The consequence for an individual is that vacancies are concentrated and hard to fill, particularly in intensive care and neonatal units, which is where the state's premium over the national median actually sits.

It is straight-time. Respiratory therapy is a twenty-four-hour hospital service, and night, weekend, holiday and on-call differentials are a substantial part of what a Wisconsin therapist actually earns — none of it captured in a BLS wage estimate. A therapist working a permanent night rotation in a Milwaukee or Madison tertiary centre will gross materially above the published band without being unusual. The figure also averages general floor coverage with intensive care and neonatal practice, which are different jobs with different credentials behind them.