Quick answer:Online respiratory therapy programs put the coursework on your laptop and the clinicals in a hospital. CoARC accredits the programs, an associate degree is the entry credential, and the National Board for Respiratory Care issues the CRT and RRT. Programs, the careers this degree opens, and what they pay are covered below.
How Much of an Online Respiratory Therapy Program Is Actually Online?
The honest answer is roughly half, and the half that is online is the half you can do at 11pm after a shift.
Respiratory therapy education splits into three parts, and only the first one moves cleanly to a screen:
Didactic coursework. Cardiopulmonary anatomy and physiology, pharmacology, acid-base balance, arterial blood gas interpretation, mechanical ventilation theory, patient assessment. This runs asynchronously in most hybrid programs and is what a school means when it advertises an online respiratory therapy program.
Laboratory practice. Ventilator circuits, airway adjuncts, intubation assistance, aerosol delivery devices, blood gas sampling technique. Scheduled on campus, in person, on set days.
Supervised clinical rotations. Real patients on real ventilators in a real intensive care unit, with a preceptor signing your competencies. CoARC accreditation is built on documented clinical experience, and there is no version of this that happens remotely.
So the useful question is not whether a program is online but how far you will drive and how the clinical blocks are scheduled. Rotations follow hospital hours, which frequently means weekday daytime. If you currently run a night ambulance shift or a fixed hospital rotation, the clinical calendar is the thing that will force a scheduling conversation with your employer, not the lectures.
Degree advancement tracks are the genuinely online exception. Those are built for people who already hold a credential and want to add a bachelor’s degree on top, so the clinical requirement is already satisfied by employment.
Before you pay a deposit anywhere, confirm CoARC accreditation for the specific program and ask how the in-person clinical blocks are scheduled against your work week. With that filter set, compare online respiratory therapy programs enrolling now:
Colleges Offering This Degree
Every school listed is verified in federal IPEDS data both to award this degree and to offer programs that can be completed entirely by distance education at this level. Whether this exact degree is delivered fully online varies by school, so confirm the format before you apply.
How we rank schools – graduation rate, graduate earnings, cost and retention.
Advertising plays no part.
This page lists 10 schools, closest group first, then ordered by
BOC Score with the highest at the top.
10 of them carry a score.
LOCAL RANK
Location / proximity to this page
Defines the local group
Graduation rate how often students finish
30%
Median earnings, 10 years after entry whether it paid off
25%
Average net price what students actually pay after aid; lower ranks higher
20%
Retention rate how many come back for year two
15%
Fully online availability whether you can study while working
10%
Scores come from IPEDS (2024) and the U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard.
Earnings are for all graduates of a school, not one program, so treat them as a signal
about the institution rather than about this subject.
Sponsored listings are paid placements and are labelled as such; they are separate from
this ranking and never change it. Read the full methodology.
How Does Accreditation, the NBRC and State Licensure Fit Together?
Three separate gates, in this order. Confirm all three before you pay a deposit anywhere.
CoARC accreditation. The Commission on Accreditation for Respiratory Care accredits respiratory therapy programs. This is the gate that matters most, because eligibility for the national board examinations flows from graduating an accredited program. Separately, the institution itself should hold institutional accreditation from a recognized accreditor such as HLC, SACSCOC, MSCHE, NECHE, NWCCU, WSCUC, ACCSC, ABHES, COE or DEAC, or a career-school accreditor such as ACCSC, ABHES or COE, which is what makes credit transferable if you later add a bachelor’s.
NBRC credentialing. The National Board for Respiratory Care issues the CRT as the entry credential and the RRT as the advanced one. Most hospitals, and effectively all critical care departments, now expect the RRT. Plan your study calendar around reaching the RRT rather than stopping at the CRT.
State licensure. The license itself comes from your state, not from CoARC and not from the NBRC. States generally build their requirements on top of accredited-program graduation and national credentialing, but the specific application steps, renewal cycle and continuing education rules vary by state and must be confirmed with your own state board. If you enroll in an out-of-state online program, get written confirmation that your board accepts it. That is the single most expensive mistake in online allied-health education.
If a program publishes completion, credentialing or placement statistics, read them as program history rather than a forecast - individual outcomes may vary.
Before you shortlist schools, it also helps to be precise about the job this credential points at.
What Do Respiratory Therapists Actually Do?
This is a critical care role, and it is narrower and deeper than most people expect from outside the hospital.
Domain
Day-to-day work
Ventilator management
Setting modes and parameters, weaning trials, troubleshooting alarms, extubation support
Surfactant delivery, high-frequency ventilation, NICU and PICU coverage
Chronic and post-acute
COPD management, long-term acute care, home ventilator and oxygen education
You are the person a hospital calls when someone cannot breathe. That is the appeal and the cost of the job in one sentence. Hospitals staff respiratory therapy around the clock, so nights, weekends, holidays and on-call rotations are normal features of the schedule rather than occasional impositions. Many departments run twelve-hour shifts, which some people find gives them more usable days off than a five-day week.
What Transfers From EMT or Patient Care Tech Experience?
More than you would guess, and specifically the things that are hardest to teach in a classroom.
If you already work as an EMT, you arrive with airway familiarity that most classmates do not have. You have bagged patients, managed positioning, watched capnography and made decisions with incomplete information at 3am. Respiratory therapy formalizes that instinct into ventilator physiology, but the underlying calm is already yours. Paramedic and EMT backgrounds also tend to shorten the adjustment to codes and rapid response calls, which is where new therapists usually struggle.
If you work as a patient care technician, what transfers is the assessment habit - reading vital sign trends, noticing when a patient looks worse before the monitor says so, and moving people safely. You also already know hospital workflow, charting culture, and how to talk to families, which are quiet competencies that shorten your clinical rotations.
What does not transfer is the science load. Respiratory therapy programs are front-loaded with chemistry, physics of gas exchange and cardiopulmonary pathophysiology. Prior field experience does not exempt you from those courses, and prerequisite anatomy and physiology work is normally required before you are admitted at all. Where you may recover time is general education credit: see college credit for work experience and degree completion programs for how prior coursework and training get re-evaluated before enrollment.
Where Does a Respiratory Therapy Career Lead?
The associate degree can get you licensed. What you do afterward determines whether the job plateaus or keeps moving.
NICU and PICU coverage, high-frequency ventilation
RRT plus specialty credentialing through the NBRC
Pulmonary function laboratory
Diagnostic testing, interpretation support
RRT plus laboratory-specific credentialing
Sleep and diagnostics
Sleep study administration and scoring
RRT plus sleep-specific credentialing
Clinical education
Precepting students, running department in-services
RRT plus a bachelor’s degree in most systems
Department management
Staffing, budget, compliance, quality
Bachelor’s degree, often a business or administration track
What the top decile of the occupation earns, and what typically drives it, is documented in the pay section below.
A bachelor’s degree is where the management and education tracks open. That can be a bachelor’s in respiratory care or an applied route - see bachelor of applied science for how those degrees are built for working adults, and associate vs bachelor degree for the general tradeoff. If your hospital offers an education benefit, look at employer tuition assistance before you commit to a payment plan; cost varies widely by institution type, and community and technical college associate routes are generally the lower-cost entry.
What These Careers Pay
Employment is projected to change by 12.1% from 2024 to 2034 (BLS Employment Projections, 2024-34), with a median wage of $82,280 (BLS OEWS, May 2025).
Online Respiratory Therapy Programs at a Glance
Item
Detail
Source
Respiratory therapist median wage
$82,280
BLS OEWS, May 2025
Respiratory therapist employment
139,790
BLS OEWS, May 2025
Projected change (2024-34)
12.1%, about 8,800 openings per year
BLS Employment Projections, 2024-34
Entry degree
Associate degree, bachelor’s options available
Program structure
Program accreditation
CoARC
CoARC
Credentialing body
NBRC - CRT entry, RRT advanced
NBRC
Fully online option
No - clinical rotations are in person
Program structure
What Does the Pay Comparison Look Like Against EMT and Nursing?
Three occupations, three SOC codes, three different bets.
Wage and employment figures are BLS OEWS, May 2025; change and openings are BLS Employment Projections, 2024-34.
Read the table carefully, because each column tells a different story. On raw pay, nursing leads. On growth rate, respiratory therapy leads by a wide margin at 12.1% against 4.9% for nursing and 5.1% for EMTs. On sheer volume of openings, nursing dwarfs everything because the workforce is 3,379,720 people and replacement hiring alone produces about 189,100 openings a year.
The move that changes your income most is the one out of EMT work. Going from a median of $44,470 to $82,280 is close to a doubling, and it is achieved with an associate degree rather than a bachelor’s.
Percentiles show the shape of the career rather than a single point:
Occupation
10th percentile
25th percentile
Median
75th percentile
90th percentile
Emergency medical technician
$34,130
$37,960
$44,470
$50,100
$62,500
Respiratory therapist
$63,660
$74,520
$82,280
$98,730
$118,050
Registered nurse
$68,940
$80,330
$97,550
$112,350
$137,470
Figures: BLS OEWS, May 2025.
The respiratory therapy 10th percentile of $63,660 sits above the EMT 90th percentile of $62,500. That single comparison is the clearest argument on this page: the floor of the new job is above the ceiling of the old one.
Respiratory Therapy or Nursing - Which Should You Pick?
If you are weighing both, decide on the shape of the work rather than the wage gap.
Respiratory therapist
Registered nurse
Median annual wage
$82,280
$97,550
Employment
139,790
3,379,720
Projected change 2024-34
12.1%
4.9%
Entry degree
Associate
Associate or bachelor’s
National exam
NBRC board examinations
NCLEX-RN
Program accreditor
CoARC
CCNE or ACEN
Scope
Cardiopulmonary specialist across the whole hospital
Whole-patient care within an assigned unit
Patient load
Assigned by therapy need across units
Assigned by unit staffing ratios
Nursing pays more at the median and offers far more lateral movement, from bedside to case management to advanced practice - our online nursing programs guide and BSN vs ADN comparison cover that ladder in detail. Respiratory therapy is the specialist route: fewer employers, narrower scope, deep expertise, and a faster projected growth rate. People who like the technical, equipment-facing, physiology-heavy side of critical care generally prefer it. People who want breadth of career options generally choose nursing.
Where Do Respiratory Therapists Earn the Most?
State medians vary with cost of living, hospital density and union presence.
State
Median annual wage
Employment
District of Columbia
$111,950
430
New York
$107,810
7,010
California
$104,820
18,650
Massachusetts
$102,170
2,220
Washington
$101,130
1,860
Figures: BLS OEWS, May 2025.
The largest employment bases are not identical to the best-paying states. California leads on both, employing 18,650 respiratory therapists. Texas employs 12,130 at a median of $79,540, Florida employs 8,820 at $81,160, New York employs 7,010 at $107,810, and Ohio employs 6,640 at $79,920 (BLS OEWS, May 2025). Ohio is worth a note for anyone already living there: its location quotient of 1.33 is the highest in that group, meaning respiratory therapy is more concentrated in the state economy than the national average.
For comparison, registered nurse pay by state runs higher across the board, with California at a median of $140,270, Washington at $124,200 and Texas at $95,970 (BLS OEWS, May 2025).
The top decile figure of $118,050 (BLS OEWS, May 2025) generally reflects some combination of specialty credentialing, shift differential, seniority and a high-wage metropolitan market rather than base pay in an entry role.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you do a respiratory therapy program online?
Partly. The didactic half - cardiopulmonary anatomy, pharmacology, mechanical ventilation theory, blood gas interpretation - is routinely delivered online. Laboratory practice and supervised clinical rotations are in person at hospitals, and CoARC accreditation depends on them. Treat any program advertised as fully online with suspicion unless it is a degree advancement track for someone already credentialed.
How much do respiratory therapists make?
The national median annual wage for respiratory therapists is $82,280, or $39.56 per hour (BLS OEWS, May 2025). The bottom 10 percent earn $63,660 or less and the top 10 percent earn $118,050 or more. Employment stands at 139,790 respiratory therapists nationwide across hospitals, long-term acute care, sleep labs and home care.
How long does respiratory therapy school take?
The entry credential is an associate degree, normally about two years of full-time study after prerequisites, and bachelor's options exist for people who want management, education or advanced practice tracks later. Part-time and evening formats stretch the timeline. Clinical rotation blocks are scheduled by the hospital, not by you, which is the main constraint for anyone working full time.
What is the difference between the CRT and the RRT?
Both come from the National Board for Respiratory Care. The CRT is the entry-level credential earned by passing the first board examination. The RRT is the advanced credential earned by passing the additional clinical simulation component. Most hospital critical care positions now expect the RRT, so plan on it as the real destination rather than an optional extra.
Is respiratory therapy a good move from EMT?
It transfers unusually well. Airway management, rapid patient assessment and working calmly during a code are the core of both roles. The pay difference is substantial: emergency medical technicians earn a median $44,470 against $82,280 for respiratory therapists (BLS OEWS, May 2025). The tradeoff is two years of school and a shift from field autonomy to hospital protocol.
Do respiratory therapists need a license?
Licensure is issued by the state, not by the school or the credentialing board. In practice, states build their requirements around graduation from a CoARC-accredited program and a National Board for Respiratory Care credential. Requirements, application steps and renewal rules vary by state and must be confirmed directly with your own state board before you enroll.
Is respiratory therapy better than nursing?
They are different jobs, not ranked ones. Registered nurses earn a median $97,550 against $82,280 for respiratory therapists (BLS OEWS, May 2025), but respiratory therapy is projected to change by 12.1 percent from 2024 to 2034 versus 4.9 percent for nursing (BLS Employment Projections, 2024-34). Respiratory therapy is narrower, deeply cardiopulmonary, and less driven by broad patient-load staffing.
What does a respiratory therapist actually do all shift?
Manage ventilators and adjust settings, run and interpret arterial blood gases, deliver aerosolized medication, maintain artificial airways, respond to codes and rapid response calls, perform pulmonary function testing, and support neonatal and pediatric patients. It is a critical care role in a hospital that never closes, so night, weekend and holiday rotations are standard.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 - Respiratory Therapists (SOC 29-1126), Emergency Medical Technicians (SOC 29-2042), Registered Nurses (SOC 29-1141)
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Projections, 2024-34 - Respiratory Therapists, Emergency Medical Technicians, Registered Nurses
Commission on Accreditation for Respiratory Care (CoARC) - respiratory therapy program accreditation
National Board for Respiratory Care (NBRC) - CRT and RRT credentials
About this guide: Researched and written by the TradeCareerPath Editorial Team. Our editorial team researches and sources every trade school and career guide using federal labor and education data, including BLS OEWS and Employment Projections, DOL apprenticeship records, IPEDS, College Scorecard, and state licensing boards. We follow the editorial standards documented at /editorial-policy/.
