Choose Your Employment Status

The choice of physiotherapy practice often consists in choosing an employment status, as an employee or self-employed. In the profession of physiotherapist there is both a wide variety of employment statuses & possible pathways and the overall consistency of the profession. The different employment statuses are not antagonistic and allow the physiotherapist to move from one status to another, or even work in both at the same time (half-time self-employed and half-time employee).

Physiotherapists are very committed to the values ​​of freedom attached to their profession, in particular the ability to guide their practice. The idea that "anything is possible" is shared by all professionals and is one of the main attractions of the profession. This principle ensures that everyone is never locked into an inappropriate employment or practice environment.

Likewise, the feeling of autonomy is reinforced in the exercise of the profession, and it is generally up to the practitioner to determine the treatment protocol (with the exception of certain centers or in services of the most advanced hospital rehabilitation), and to choose the most appropriate acts for each patient, in accordance with the physiotherapeutic diagnostic assessment that he himself established.

However, self-employed and employed physiotherapists are very often described in opposition to each other : isolated work for self-employed versus team work for employees, autonomy of the self-employed in his practice and his organization versus submission of the employee to the organization decided by the establishment, privileged relationship with the patient for the self-employed physiotherapist versus circulation between the services for the employees…

At glance, the self-employed physiotherapist seems to earn a better living than the employed one, however this is only in case he can clearly generate higher volumes of work. The reality is that the hourly income of self-employed practitioners is strongly impacted by unpaid administrative tasks (phone calls and appointments organization, mail processing, management of purchases, invoicing, debt collection, tax and social declarations, accounting, controls, etc.).

On the other hand, the comparison between the income of a self-employed physiotherapist and that of an employed physiotherapist is not easy to carry out, since many complex parameters have to be taken into account. They include the shift of risk and responsibility to the employer, while the self-employed physiotherapist is on the front line in case of difficulty. The employed physiotherapist benefits from the social protection of the general social security system and from the numerous advantages which it provides, whereas the self-employed is forced to resort to private insurance often expensive and restrictive. In the event of total or partial unemployment, as we have seen recently with the COVID-19 crisis, employees have their income maintained while the revenue of the self-employed physiotherapists is strongly impacted.

In order to allow an informed choice of the exercise status, FisioFrance has established a detailed comparison of employed versus self-employed status.