Chiropractor Salary: The Truth About How Much You Could Be Earning
According to salary.com, chiropractors typically bring home an average income ranging from around $142,161 to a higher bracket of $230,623 annually, as of October 4th, 2024. This gives us a ballpark figure of about $142,161 per year, on average, that chiropractors take home.
We have now analyzed over a thousand practices and those practice owners’ take-home pay, and we have broken it down into three levels of income:
Chiropractors making less than $100K a year
Chiropractors making between $100-$200K a year
Chiropractors making between $200-$300K a year
Chiropractors Making Less Than $100K A Year
Doctors in the first category had five common traits they all shared. First, they didn't have a clear vision or an intentional roadmap of where they were trying to get to.
We found that they were just showing up to the practice and responding to the patients that were coming in, and working with the team members that they had.
But there was no clear vision of what they were trying to intend for their practice, meaning I'm here now, and I want to get there.
The second most common thing that we found with these doctors is that they didn't have a measurement tool for that vision.
Think about this for a second. Even if you have GPS on your phone, if you don't input a destination and have a step-by-step measurement towards that destination, then you'll end up driving in circles, not really getting anywhere.
It’s amazing with today's technology that when you can put in a destination that will calculate your estimated time of arrival. And that is the power of data tracking.
So those doctors that were sub-six-figure take home a year, they didn't have data tracking. There was no way to measure their progress because they didn't even have a destination to which they were trying to get to.
The third most common thing for these doctors is that they had a fear mindset. They were actually more worried about not making payroll for their team and covering their monthly overhead.
These were doctors who didn't want a lot of attention on them, so they weren't out marketing. They weren't creating content. They were fear-based. They were comparing themselves to other practices and feeling small.
And so we found a direct correlation between their feeling small and the size of their paycheck.
The fourth most common thing that we found with these doctors is that they were using their expertise, and their modality of chiropractic to become a jack of all trades. They were accepting any condition into their practice and applying chiropractic for general health.
That's not a bad thing. Chiropractic is amazing at helping patients with their health care. But being a jack of all trades means you're a master of none.
And being a jack of all trades, patients were not seeking them out for more complex conditions, which left their patient exchange at a lower level.
This leads us to the fifth most common trait, and that is these doctors were not intentionally marketing. They were reactively marketing meaning talking to some patients or paying for some advertising, but not really clear messaging on what types of conditions they wanted in their practice.
It was like, they hadn't really figured out their specialty or how they could best help their patients with their specific issues.
With no specificity in marketing, we end up with general messaging. This means that if you're promoting yourself in a broad, one-size-fits-all way, chances are, no one is listening. And unfortunately, this lack of targeted marketing directly impacts a chiropractor's earnings.
So these are the five most common traits in chiropractors who are taking home sub-six-figure annual paychecks.
By the way, I want to offer you a FREE gift, especially to help those of you who are sub-six-figure in your paychecks. And that is our data-driven New Patient System.
We have an amazing download that walks you through step-by-step how to create marketing content, and how to build your marketing calendar so that you have a consistent flow of your dream patients coming into your practice.
Just comment below in this video, “Chiros 3 Levels Of Income Without Limits”, the words data-driven new patients system, and we will make sure that you get that guide.
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Chiropractors Making Between $100K-$200K A Year
Before I talk about this second group of doctors, I have to give you a little bit of context. After studying the entire market, we broke down the roadmap of a provider evolution.
The first group of doctors we were talking about, we typically put them into a category that we call promoters because they constantly need new patients and constantly feel like they don't have enough business.
And that comes to marketing, and that's why we call them promoters. They're kind of stuck in that phase of their provider evolution.
In this next phase that we start to talk about here, we talk about operators. The first thing operators have in common is that they're gaining some clinical certainty. You're feeling a little bit better about becoming an expert in a condition that you begin attracting those patients.
They also had at least one A-player. This was a competent team member who could take over a lot of the admin so that you could play the role of the provider and not be overwhelmed by everything happening in the business.
The third most common thing is that they actually had an offer in place. This offer should be crystal clear and appealing, something that patients can see as the solution to their problem.
This way, you'll start bringing in a fresh wave of new patients, giving you the space to shift your attention from constant promotion to building solid systems in your practice. Now promotion is a system, and as they built those systems in place, there was more automation.
With more business came the need for more team members. And so they began implementing the hiring process to build their team.
And as they scaled that, they were able to scale their patient volume, increasing their paycheck to between the $100-$200K take home every year.
Chiropractors Making Between $200K-$300K A Year
At this next level of income, these doctors move from operator to what we call leader. A leader is where you're ready to build out a leadership team including your first associate doctor.
Up until this point, you have been the primary treating physician and are always stuck working in the business rather than on the business, which we know is an important connection to scaling your income.
In order to start working on the business, we need to move you from the junior associate role to a senior provider role and bring in a junior associate who can really begin to take over the basic patient population, where you focus on the more complex conditions.
Also, one of your team members is now being promoted to a fractional office manager. We don't necessarily need a full-time office manager at this point. A fractional office manager is fulfilling the admin role responsibility and filling one of your other positions.
This could involve managing the front desk, being a case manager, or handling billing responsibilities. The key is that this team member steps up to alleviate some of the pressure from you, particularly when it comes to overseeing the team, keeping an eye on your practice's metrics, helping in training, and especially building and expanding your team. This support becomes increasingly vital as you dedicate more time to growing your business.
In this leadership role, you begin to really change your marketing message. Instead of promoting you and patients coming in to see you, you're promoting a system. We call this your USP, your Unique Selling Proposition.
This is the system that you've now developed for the junior associates coming into your practice to be trained on - the system of care that you deliver within your practice that produces predictable patient outcomes.
As the junior associate is being trained on how to produce those same results as you produce, we can now promote to your community that there is a system, a brand, and an outcome that they can expect by coming into your practice.
Now as these doctors transitioned into this leadership role, they really had time to focus on what we call your profit levers. They knew their overhead. They knew their margins of where their team's payroll needed to be, where their ad spin needed to be, and where their overhead needed to be so that everything was healthy for a growing and scaling practice.
These doctors are the ones that could be predictably taking home between $200K-300K each and every year.
Bonus Income Level
Now I've got a bonus income level that I wanted to share with you because this is really the 1% of the profession that we have found making this kind of income. I wanted to share it with you so you could set your sights on this type of income - $300K plus a year.
This is not gross for their practice. This is their take-home pay. And these were doctors who had now moved from the leader role to what we call the high performer role.
The high performer role is where you brought in another associate. You've stepped out of full-time patient care, and you now have blocked time to be working on the business, with some blocked time to still be taking care of some of the patients that are really committed to you that really only want to see you.
But you now have time to work on the practice, and that means you are getting tenacious at building what we call the Four Mechanisms Of The Flywheel.
Getting a flywheel moving is really difficult in the beginning, and that's what you've been claiming up until this point. But as we begin to put in systems, and we build a team around you, we now have momentum.
And your role is to start picking up momentum in these four key areas:
Attraction - the attraction mechanism in the flywheel is controlling your marketing to generate enough new patients to fill multiple providers and schedules, create efficiency in that treatment, and optimize your production per hour within the practice.
Conversion - this is the next piece of the flywheel, and I share this all the time with our doctors that the wealth, the riches of your practices are in your conversion metrics. These are efficiency metrics, which means that more leads are converting to new patients, more new patients are converting to care plans, and more care plans are completing their care plans within the practice. That means we're working smarter, not harder.
Fulfillment - Once we create efficiencies in your conversion, we're now optimizing fulfillment, and you're doing that by working with your clinical team to make sure they're delivering high-quality care through progress exams and watching and making sure that we're delivering, we're documenting, we're doing everything that we need for the production or treatment team to produce great quality care.
Retain, Refer, Review - This is the last piece and is what brings patients back into the Attraction mechanism of the flywheel. As your practice expands, it naturally draws in more patients. This influx creates a gravitational pull, attracting individuals seeking the impressive results your practice consistently delivers.
These doctors at high performers were taking home the biggest paychecks. It’s because they figured out the business systems of the practice.
They now have a data tracking mechanism with data dashboards right in their practice. These dashboards keep a close eye on profit levers and total expenses in real time. It's like having a radar for any budget leaks.
This turns them into savvy business folks who view their practice not just as a clinic, but as a thriving business. They know that the bigger they grow, the more patients they attract, all eager to experience the transformative care their practice provides.
I hope that you can see where you're at in these four levels of income in the chiropractic profession. Set your sights on the next level and start following the steps so that you can grow and accelerate your own growth and personal development which has a direct connection to your personal income.
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We've figured all of that out for you. We've paved the path. So if you're ready to take your income seriously, click this link, and come join the Turn Your Data Into Dollars Leveraging Data + Ai challenge.
In five days, it could literally change the trajectory of your income this year. So get in the challenge. It is the place to grow your salary.
