Skilled Nursing Therapy Demand by State: Nursing Home Beds per Therapist

A director of rehab hiring for a skilled nursing facility is competing for the same PTs, OTs and SLPs as every hospital, clinic and home health agency in the state. The table below puts the two sides of that competition next to each other for every state and DC: the Medicare-certified nursing homes and beds on one side, the therapists with an active practice address in the state on the other, and the ratio between them. Nationally there are 1,567,113 certified beds and 604,278 PTs, OTs and SLPs, or 2.6 beds per therapist.

States are ranked from the most beds per therapist to the fewest. A high ratio means each therapist in the state is spread across more skilled nursing capacity, which is the market an administrator feels as slow requisitions and agency spend; a low ratio means a deeper pool relative to the beds. The therapist count covers every setting, not only nursing homes, so the ratio describes the pool a facility recruits from, not its own staffing. Where BLS publishes it, the last column adds total private employment in nursing care facilities, all occupations, as a measure of the size of the skilled nursing employer base.

For an administrator, the ratio is a starting point for the pay and search conversation: a facility in a state near the top of the table is hiring from a thinner pool per bed than one near the bottom, and the offer, the schedule and the productivity expectation have to reflect that. Click any state for its full therapist count by discipline, pay, employer and licensure-compact picture.