Is there a physical therapist shortage?

There were 260,298 physical therapists on the national provider registry in July 2026, and the count rose in every month from April to July. If your PT posting has sat unanswered for months, the market is not empty. It is full of people a posting does not reach, and this page shows where they are and how to reach them.

The short version

Every physical therapist who bills for care holds a National Provider Identifier, so the NPI registry is the closest thing to a census of the profession, and it is public and monthly. From April to July 2026 it grew every month, and in July 829 of 260,298 therapists filed a new practice address. Those filings are the closest public sign of how few therapists are on the move at any time. Kandidate starts from the whole registry: it counts the physical therapists within reach of your site, filters them to the licence state and setting the role needs, and writes to them from your own domain, whether or not they are looking.

Problem one: the posting that gets no applicants

A PT role sits open for a quarter while the registry adds 3,450 people. Between April and July 2026 it went from 256,848 to 260,298 physical therapists, and no month in that window lost people. New entries ran between 623 and 1,445 a month, about a thousand on average, with June and July roughly double the spring months, which is consistent with the DPT graduation and licensing cycle.

New entrants are the group most likely to be looking for a first job, and if a role can wait a few weeks, early summer is when more of them arrive. It is a small edge, not a plan: even in the strongest month the new entrants are half a percent of the profession.

What Kandidate does about it. Sourcing starts from the registry count for the role and the radius, not from the applicants. For an open PT role you see how many physical therapists on the registry sit within a commutable drive of the site and how many joined in the last year; that list, filtered to the licence state and the setting, is who the outreach goes to.

Problem two: three in a thousand

In July 2026, 829 physical therapists filed a new practice address, 0.3% of the registry. A filing is not a job change and a job change does not always produce a filing, so the number is the visible part of movement, not the whole of it. It is still the best public measure there is, and it says the visible market is small. Those few are the people a job board can show you, and the same people every other clinic in the metro is posting for.

What Kandidate does about it. Outreach goes to the physical therapists a posting does not reach: named people on the registry within reach of the site, contacted from the hiring clinic's own domain with the setting, the caseload and the site in the first line, so the therapist can verify the role before deciding whether to answer. It is slower per person than a posting, and it is a second route to the part of the market a posting never touches.

Problem three: "our state is empty"

Supply is not evenly spread. Five states, California, New York, Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania, hold a third of the physical therapists in the country, and a clinic in Vermont or Wyoming hires from a statewide pool roughly a thirtieth the size of California's. Even the smallest state pool is several hundred people; California's is 25,505. A statewide count does not tell you how many of them are within a drive of your site, or how many fit the role, which is the question that decides whether the requisition is hard.

California added 102 physical therapists to the registry in July 2026, and 17 more filed a practice address that moved into the state, against 15 that moved out. A California clinic that cannot fill a PT role is short of reach, not of licensed therapists.

What Kandidate does about it. A market probe counts the physical therapists on the registry within a commutable radius of one site, for one role. When that local pool is small, the search widens to the multistate and relocation candidates first; when it is large, the outreach starts at once. The state pages for California and Texas carry the current count and the market pay estimate.

Send us one open PT role

Send us one open physical therapist role and the site address. Within 48 hours you get the physical therapists on the registry within a commutable radius, matched to the role's licence state and setting, up to 50, each with a direct channel to reach them. A free sourcing sample, three roles a week, no contract, and how the managed service starts.