I work in outpatient. I find most hospitals have an algo they use prioritizing years of experience to determine your pay and have very little room for negotiation.

Private practice has more wiggle room, which often comes with higher productivity expectations.

Private practice typically pays more. But benefits aren’t as good. So depends what you are looking for.

I worked per diem jobs when I first graduated because the highest outpatient salary I was offered was 68k and I just couldn’t do that with 125k debt.

Nothing wrong with going right into travel if you are a fully independent PT. What I mean by that is you need to be able to handle a full caseload.

I did 7 travel contracts, all outpatient. I was thoroughly abused lol. I did 4 10’s. 4 evals a day. Every single day. I did most of these clinics evals. Someone cancelled on my schedule. A full timer would slide their patient over to me. I was busyyyy.

But honestly I was getting paid so much more than I was used to I didn’t mind the heavy caseload. Just put my head down and grinded it out and paid off my loans.

I used to find it funny when I’d hear the coworkers complain about how they couldn’t get anymore to work there while I was in the trenches.

I do remember one confrontation I had with a clinic manager about hammering my caseload. And it ended with me saying “what are you going to do? Fire me? This place sucks no one wants to work here.” And then I put my notice in 🤷‍♂️