As with any job you might interested in if you are looking at getting started in the medical field as a patient care technician you might be wondering the following:
How much does a patient care technician make?
In other words, what is the typical patient care technician salary?
Fortunately for us there are folks who keep track of that type of information and we can use some of that to give us a look inside the patient care technician / patient care assistant profession.
Knowing a little about the job can go a long way to helping you decide if it is a career option you want to pursue. Perhaps you intend to work as a patient care tech for long term or perhaps you see it as a stepping stone to more advanced positions in the medical arena.
Regardless of your intentions for getting started as a PCT knowing what level of compensation you will receive is a good thing since we all need to support ourselves and our families in some way.
So How Much Does a Patient Care Technician Make?
The average patient care technician salary is $11.54 per hour according to data provided by the BLS.
Depending on where you live and work as well as what type of establishment you work for you could start as low as $8.55 or make as much as $16.62 per hour.
Naturally there are a lot of different factors that go into the wage numbers for any position and patient care technician jobs are no different.
Depending on your credentials such as previous experience, courses of study you have completed and certifications you may be able to command a higher wage level than you would with the most basic qualifications.
Keep in mind that even if you can’t start out earning as much as you would like to in a patient care technician position that you might want to look at it as a sort of paid educational experience.
Typically real world work experience is worth a lot on a resume -especially compared to someone with virtually no experience- so if you have your eyes on moving up into other lines of work in the medical field it is very valuable to have past experience to point to and give you a foot in the door so to speak.
Increasing Your Patient Care Technician Salary
If you are already working as a patient care technician or in another position and feel like you could be compensated better for the value you bring to your organization there are things you can do.
As we mentioned above the patient care technician salary data shows a fairly wide range in pay scale from ~$8.50 all the way to nearly double at ~$16.50 per hour. What if you wanted to move up from the lower end of the scale to the better compensated end?
Author Ramit Sethi talks a lot about making “big wins” in your career to reach your financial goals rather than skimping on little things that you like such as coffee, eating our or buying books.
One of the biggest wins you can make is to negotiate your way to a higher salary whether at your current job or when looking for a new position.
Here’s a video on Salary Negotiation 101 with Ramit to help you get started in learning how to negotiate your way to a more rewarding patient care technician salary level.
If your successful in employing some of these negotiation techniques perhaps the answer for the question, “how much does a patient care technician make?” can be different (i.e. more) for you going forward than it was in the past.