Salary Ranges for Non-Clinical Healthcare Administration Roles

A Posting Deadline That a Generic Salary Survey Can't Help With

The practice manager at a 60-employee physical therapy group in Colorado has two job postings due by end of week: "Front Office Manager" and "Insurance Verification Specialist." Colorado's Equal Pay for Equal Work Act applies to every employer with at least one employee in the state — there's no size threshold to check, no grace period to lean on. She pulls up a generic salary calculator and types in the job titles. What comes back is either a national average for "office manager" that could mean anything from a law firm to a warehouse, or nothing at all for "insurance verification specialist," because that title doesn't exist in most off-the-shelf compensation tools. Clinical roles — physical therapists, nurses, medical assistants — are easy to find wage data for. The back office that keeps the clinic running is a blind spot in most salary surveys built for healthcare.

This is a common gap for non-clinical healthcare administration: practice managers, medical office administrators, billing and coding staff, patient services representatives, and records staff who keep a clinic, group practice, or care facility operating, but whose job titles don't map cleanly to the provider-focused salary surveys healthcare organizations usually reach for. This article walks through how to find defensible government wage data for these roles, map ambiguous job titles to the right occupation code, and turn that data into a posting-ready range.

Why Non-Clinical Roles Get Left Out of Healthcare Pay Data

Most healthcare-specific salary surveys are built around clinical staffing — they're designed to answer "what should we pay a physical therapist" or "what's the going rate for a medical assistant," because that's where the acute hiring pressure and the licensure complexity sit. Administrative and back-office roles get treated as an afterthought, if they're covered at all.

But the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program doesn't have that blind spot, because it isn't built around any single industry. OEWS covers approximately 830 detailed occupations, drawn from a rolling sample of roughly 1.1 million establishments across a three-year collection cycle, and it classifies those occupations using 22 of the 23 major groups in the 2018 Standard Occupational Classification system (only the military-specific major group is excluded). Office and administrative support roles, healthcare support roles, and management occupations are all represented — which means the job titles sitting in a clinic's back office are generally codable, even when a healthcare-specific survey has nothing for them.

The data is published annually with a May reference date, and it covers the nation, every state, D.C., U.S. territories, and roughly 530 metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. It isn't a census — the combined national response rate across OEWS's six semiannual collection panels runs 65.7% by establishment count and 65.9% by weighted employment, covering an estimated 55% of total national employment — but it's a large, government-run, methodologically documented sample, which is a meaningfully different foundation than a crowd-sourced listing or a vendor's proprietary panel.

Building Salary Ranges for Healthcare Administration Roles from BLS OEWS Data

Building salary ranges for healthcare administration roles starts with the same step as building any other range: finding the right occupation code before looking at a single wage number. This is where most of the real work happens, and where most of the mistakes get made, because a title like "Office Manager" or "Patient Coordinator" could plausibly map to several different SOC codes depending on what the person actually does day to day.

A few SOC codes recur constantly in non-clinical healthcare administration: Medical and Health Services Managers (SOC 11-9111) typically fits a practice manager or administrator with budget and staffing authority; Medical Secretaries and Administrative Assistants (SOC 43-6013) usually fits front-desk and scheduling-heavy roles; Medical Records Specialists (SOC 29-2072) fits coding and health-information roles; and Billing and Posting Clerks (SOC 43-3021) fits dedicated billing staff. At the time of writing, the specific published wage figures for those four codes weren't available to verify against a current BLS vintage for this piece — so rather than print a number that might be stale or mismatched, the honest move is to point you to bls.gov's OEWS occupation search and have you pull the current figure for your own metro area or state directly. It takes a few minutes, and it's the only way to be sure you're looking at a number from the current data vintage rather than one that's quietly a year or two old.

One title in this cluster does have verified wage data available: Patient Services Representatives, Medical Receptionists, and similar front-desk, phone-heavy roles are frequently coded as Customer Service Representatives (SOC 43-4051), a broad occupation that spans every industry, not just healthcare. BLS OEWS (May 2023) put the median annual wage for that occupation at $39,680, with a 10th percentile of $29,560, a 25th percentile of $34,780, a 75th percentile of $48,480, and a 90th percentile of $61,250. If your front-desk or patient-coordinator role matches the Customer Service Representative definition more than a more senior administrative or clinical-adjacent definition, this is a legitimate, citable starting point.

Mapping Common Practice-Management Titles to the Right SOC Code

Getting the mapping right matters more in healthcare administration than in most other back-office functions, because titles are inconsistent across practices. A "Practice Manager" at a five-provider dental office might be doing the work of a Medical and Health Services Manager; at a larger multi-location group, the same title might sit closer to an operations or office-manager classification instead. The fix isn't to guess — it's to write down, in plain language, the actual duties of the role (budget authority, direct reports, scope of decision-making, licensure requirements if any) and compare that against the official SOC definitions before assigning a code. This is slower than typing a job title into a search box, but it's the difference between a range that would hold up under a documentation request and one that's a guess dressed up as data.

This is also where a seeded occupation typeahead does real work: rather than starting from a blank search, SalaryRange's app pulls from the same BLS OEWS tables described above to suggest likely SOC matches as you type a job title, so you're choosing between real candidate codes instead of starting from nothing. It doesn't replace the judgment call on which code fits your role best — it just removes the blank-page problem.

From Median Wage to a Posting-Ready Band: A Worked Example

Once you have a wage anchor, turning it into a range is a matter of applying a spread. Using the Customer Service Representative figures above as a real anchor: if you set your band using the published percentiles directly, a reasonable entry-to-experienced range for a patient services role might run from the 25th percentile ($34,780) to the 75th percentile ($48,480), with the median ($39,680) sitting as your reference point rather than the exact middle of the band — which is normal, since percentile-based bands aren't always symmetric around the median.

Alternatively, you can apply a percentage spread around the median instead of using raw percentiles — for example, a ±15% spread around a $39,680 median would put the band roughly between $33,728 and $45,632. This is a worked example of the method, not a published figure, and the right spread width depends on the job family: narrower for highly structured, high-turnover roles, wider for roles with more variation in tenure and scope. How much to widen or narrow that spread by job family is its own decision, covered in more depth separately.

Pay Transparency Thresholds Practices Often Miss

Non-clinical healthcare administration roles often sit at small practices — the kind of 10-, 25-, or 60-person employer that can fall just inside or just outside a state's size threshold for pay transparency requirements, which makes checking the specific number worth the extra few minutes. Colorado's Equal Pay for Equal Work Act applies to any employer with at least one Colorado employee, with fines running $500 to $10,000 per violation and each job opening counted as a separate violation. California's posting requirement applies at 15 or more employees, with penalties of $100 to $10,000 per violation (the first violation is waivable if all current postings are corrected). Washington State's law applies at 15 or more employees, and a 2025 amendment added a five-business-day cure period before penalties of up to $1,000 plus statutory damages apply. Maryland's Wage Range Transparency Act has no size threshold at all, and starts enforcement with a compliance order before escalating to per-person penalties on repeat violations.

None of these figures should be treated as legal advice, and thresholds and effective dates continue to shift — several states, including Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia, Maine, and Delaware, have requirements that took effect or will take effect between 2025 and 2027. Confirm the current threshold and penalty structure for your specific state directly with that state's labor agency before finalizing a posting.

Turning the Range Into an Audit-Ready Document

Once a range is built on a defensible wage source and an intentional spread, the last step is documenting it in a way that survives scrutiny — a board question, a legal-counsel request, or a state agency inquiry. If you're building your first range from scratch, a structured walkthrough of the process is worth reading alongside this one, and if job leveling across a small, flat organization is the part that feels unfamiliar, that's worth a separate look too, since healthcare back-office structures often don't match the clean leveling ladders built for larger corporate functions.

For teams that want to work through this methodically with a spreadsheet rather than inside an app, the Salary Range Builder Workbook walks through the same SOC-code-to-band process described above, with space to document your reasoning for each role — useful if you're building ranges for a handful of practice-management and billing roles before deciding whether to bring the process into a tool that generates a disclosure-ready PDF automatically. For a broader set of HR operations resources beyond salary ranges specifically, there's a fuller hub worth bookmarking as well.