Hiring for your audiology or hearing aid practice: how to find, pay, train and keep audiologists, HIS and clinic staff

The roles a hearing practice hires for fall into three groups: the licensed providers who deliver care, the clinic support staff who keep the schedule and records moving, and the business layer above them.

The provider bench is audiologists and hearing instrument specialists.

The support bench is audiology assistants and front-desk patient care coordinators.

Above them sit practice management and billing.

The two provider roles carry different state credentials, and that difference should shape your first hiring decision.

BLS notes all states require audiologists to be licensed, and lists typical entry education for the occupation as a doctoral or professional degree.

A hearing instrument specialist works under the state's hearing aid dispensing rules — what the state calls the credential varies.

BLS's hearing aid specialist occupation (SOC 29-2092) counts licensed staff and trainees together, so its numbers cover both ends of the experience ladder.

Growth projections are one input.

BLS Employment Projections for 2025–35 put audiologist employment on an 11.0% growth path — from 14,200 to 15,700 jobs — with about 600 openings a year.

Hearing aid specialists are projected to grow 19.4% over the same window, from 11,200 to 13,400 jobs, with about 900 openings a year.

Those projection counts include self-employed workers; the wage figures later on this page do not.

Which seat to hire first depends on where the work is backing up.

Diagnostic and medically oriented hearing care points to an audiologist.

Hearing aid fittings, programming and follow-up point to a specialist or, under your state's supervision rules, a trainee.

Phones, scheduling and benefit checks point to the front desk.

The hearing care industry statistics pull the BLS employment and wage numbers for these roles into one place.

Screen on the credential before anything else.

Federal EEO guidance counts questions about education, work history and required certifications and licenses as ordinary qualifications questions, so asking for a state audiology or hearing aid dispenser credential number before an offer is permissible under EEOC guidance.

What the ADA holds until after a job offer is anything about a disability or medical history.

Before the offer, you may ask whether and how the applicant can perform the job's functions.

Job ads carry their own rule.

Ads may not show a preference for, or discourage, applicants because of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information, under the laws the EEOC enforces.

The EEOC's own example of a problematic ad is one seeking “recent college graduates,” and an ad that says only new graduates need apply raises the same concern.

After a conditional offer and before the start date, the ADA allows a medical exam or inquiry only when every entering employee in the same job category must go through it (29 CFR 1630.14(b)).

Verify the credential itself with the board that issued it.

The credential's name and type vary by state — license, registration or certificate.

An audiology license is a different credential from a hearing aid dispensing one, and whether an audiologist needs the dispensing credential too is its own state question.

Check both for a role that dispenses.

If you bill Medicare or state health care programs, search new hires in the HHS-OIG List of Excluded Individuals/Entities.

No Medicare or state health care program payment can be made for items or services an excluded person furnishes.

A positive match points to OIG's Special Advisory Bulletin on the effect of exclusion, and to its self-disclosure protocol if the person is already employed.

OIG's instruction to check the list monthly is addressed to state Medicaid agencies, not private practices; state Medicaid programs can add screening requirements of their own, so check yours.

Working interviews need care: the FLSA defines “employ” to include “to suffer or permit to work,” which is the federal basis for treating productive working-interview time as compensable hours.

No DOL regulation names working interviews specifically, so pay the hours a candidate works productively as hours worked and confirm the treatment with the Wage and Hour Division.

Coverage thresholds matter for a small practice.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the ADA's employment title cover employers with 15 or more employees for each working day in 20 or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding year.

The Age Discrimination in Employment Act covers employers with 20 or more on the same calendar-week test.

State fair-employment laws often reach smaller employers, so a one-provider practice should not assume it is exempt from everything.

It is also worth reading live postings before you write yours: the audiologist jobs page and the hearing instrument specialist jobs page are where candidates see these two provider roles on this board.

What an audiology assistant may do is a state question, not a national one: ASHA says support-personnel licensure varies from state to state, and Texas, for example, licenses an assistant in audiology.

The rules on duties and supervision differ by state, so confirm the assistant's allowed scope with your board before you write the posting.

ASHA's credential for the role is the C-AA.

It is a voluntary national certification — not a state license, and not the credential that lets someone work as an assistant; state law decides whether an assistant needs a license or registration.

Treat it as a qualification to prefer in a posting, not the gate itself.

The front-desk seat owns the schedule and the patient's first impression: appointments and recalls, insurance and benefit questions at check-in, and patients moving between stations without waiting on an empty desk.

Write the posting around the work your front office actually does today, not a generic receptionist description.

Pay for these seats has no exact BLS occupation, so the figures below are labeled proxies.

For audiology assistants, the closest available group is healthcare support workers, all other (SOC 31-9099).

Its May 2025 median is $56,470 in offices of physical, occupational and speech therapists and audiologists — the industry row closest to private audiology practices — and $48,430 across all industries.

The proxy for patient care coordinators is medical secretaries and administrative assistants (SOC 43-6013): $41,420 in that same industry row and $45,930 across all industries.

For practice managers, the medical and health services managers grouping (SOC 11-9111) shows $100,290 in the industry row and $123,860 across all industries — a proxy that overstates small-practice manager pay.

Anchor pay to labeled data before you adjust for your market.

For audiologists (SOC 29-1181), BLS's OEWS survey for May 2025 puts the national median at $95,780; the survey counts wage-and-salary workers and excludes self-employed owners.

In the industry row closest to private audiology practice — offices of physical, occupational and speech therapists and audiologists — the median is $81,730.

Physicians' offices, the row that includes ENT groups, show $92,620; general medical and surgical hospitals show $103,700.

State medians range from $75,200 in Louisiana to $133,110 in Nevada among the 50 areas with published data.

For hearing aid specialists (SOC 29-2092), the national median is $65,160.

The industry rows compare retail and clinic settings: $77,310 in general merchandise retailers, a grouping that includes warehouse clubs, against $65,530 in health and personal care retailers and $59,990 in audiology and therapy offices.

State medians run from $35,110 in West Virginia to $82,990 in New York.

BLS publishes medians for 44 areas, so states outside those areas have no row to compare against.

The full state tables live on the audiologist salary and hearing instrument specialist salary pages.

For the rest of the bench, hearing aid repair technicians map only weakly to BLS's medical equipment repairers (SOC 49-9062), a May 2025 national median of $61,660 — a proxy, not the role's own wage.

Contract terms need as much attention as the numbers.

California requires a contract involving commission pay for work in California to be in writing, to state how commissions are computed and paid, and to be signed and receipted (Labor Code 2751).

Under federal wage law, wages must be paid free and clear: deductions cannot cut into the minimum wage or overtime owed for a workweek (29 CFR 531.35).

That is the issue commission recoveries on returned hearing aids raise.

State wage laws can be stricter, so confirm yours.

The federal white-collar salary threshold is $684 per week as of 2026.

The FLSA's exemption for licensed practitioners of medicine (29 CFR 541.304) names MDs, DOs, podiatrists, dentists and optometrists as the physicians it covers; audiologists are not named.

Exemption from overtime is therefore not automatic by job title — confirm classification with the DOL or a health-care attorney.

Our research found no published commission-split benchmark, so weight base pay against production from your own books.

Post where hearing care candidates already look: the specialty boards that carry hearing care listings, your own careers page, and your state audiology association's classifieds if it runs them.

Externships are one way in: the American Academy of Audiology's HEARCareers site lists jobs and externships year-round, its listings include paid fourth-year externships, and students can post their information for employers — so ask AuD programs how they take employer requests.

Two rules shape the posting itself.

Pay disclosure comes first.

Washington requires employers with 15 or more employees to disclose in each posting the wage scale or salary range — or the fixed wage — plus a general description of all benefits and other compensation, and postings placed through third parties count (RCW 49.58.110).

New York requires employers with four or more employees to include compensation or a range in any advertised job performed at least in part in New York or reporting to a New York supervisor or site.

Commission-only roles may instead state that pay is commission-based (Labor Law 194-b).

Pay-disclosure rules in other states and cities were not verified in our research, so check your own state before you post.

Then candidate incentives.

Audiologists are not among the eligible disciplines for the NHSC Loan Repayment Program, which lists primary-care physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, certified nurse midwives, dentists, dental hygienists and behavioral-health providers.

A rural practice therefore cannot pitch NHSC loan repayment to an audiologist candidate through that program.

State-level repayment programs are separate and were not covered in our research.

Budget for the boards themselves by asking: the public pricing pages for the association job boards our research tried were unavailable, so no posting prices are established here.

You can post the opening on this board too — the Post a Job link below takes you straight to the form.

Onboarding has a federal floor.

Examine each new hire's Form I-9 identity and work-authorization documents within three business days of the hire (8 CFR 274a.2), and retain the form for three years after the hire date or one year after employment ends, whichever is later.

E-Verify, the free online system that checks I-9 information against DHS and Social Security Administration records, is not federally required for every private employer; state laws and federal contracts can mandate it, so check which side your practice falls on.

Training routes differ by role.

BLS lists moderate-term on-the-job training as typical entry preparation for hearing aid specialists, and state licensing applies regardless: trainee supervision rules, sponsor experience requirements, permit length and fees are all state-specific, so confirm them with your board before a trainee works with patients.

Retention is where the published research runs thin: our research found no survey data on why audiologists leave practices.

Start from your own exit conversations and turnover count instead.

The levers you control are the ones benchmarked above — pay against labeled data, a supervision load that fits your state's rules, schedule predictability, and support for license renewal and continuing education.

Once the team is in place, the practice runs on measurement.

Our research found no published industry benchmarks for hearing aid close rate, binaural rate, revenue per provider or overhead, so build each metric from your own books: define it, fix its inputs and its period, and trend your numbers against themselves month over month.

Billing carries current-year rules of its own.

Medicare lets patients see an audiologist without a physician order once every 12 months for certain diagnostic tests the audiologist personally furnishes — non-acute hearing conditions, and not disequilibrium or imbalance tests.

The direct-access claim carries modifier AB, and CMS publishes which audiology codes allow it.

The CPT code set changed on January 1, 2026: the six hearing aid service codes 92590–92595 were replaced by 12 new codes, 92628–92642, and the old codes are absent from the 2026 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule RVU file.

ASHA advises checking with each payer before using the new codes, because some payers may not switch immediately or may keep using HCPCS V-codes for hearing aid services.

Third-party administrator networks enroll practices on their own terms.

UnitedHealthcare Hearing's provider page, for example, tells hearing care providers to contact it by email to learn how to join, and lists a provider portal, provider tiers and a Medicare Advantage Regulatory Appendix for current providers.

Reimbursement amounts were not published on the pages our research read, so ask the network directly.

Joining or declining a network is the practice's own business decision.

Compliance stacks on top of hiring.

Under HIPAA, a covered practice may let a vendor create, receive, maintain or transmit protected health information on its behalf only after obtaining satisfactory assurance that the vendor will safeguard it — a business associate agreement (45 CFR 164.502(e)).

OSHA, FDA and state hearing aid sales rules add requirements of their own, and software, equipment and marketing choices each carry training and documentation consequences.

Confirm the current requirements with the agency that administers each one before you rely on any setup.

Ownership is the stage of the practice lifecycle that surrounds all of this hiring: the people starting, buying and growing hearing practices are the ones hiring audiologists and specialists.

BLS counted 2.2% of audiologists as self-employed in 2025 on the projections basis — the basis that includes the self-employed workers the wage survey leaves out.

The two entry routes raise different financing questions.

Starting from scratch means equipment, a location and working capital before revenue.

Buying an existing practice means valuing someone else's books.

On the financing side, the SBA's 7(a) loan program tops out at $5 million; borrowers must be for-profit operating U.S. small businesses that are creditworthy and unable to get the credit on reasonable terms elsewhere, and applications run through a participating lender.

Franchises, dealer networks and buying groups publish their own terms.

Our research did not verify fees, investment ranges or earnings for any of them, so read the company's current documents and date everything they tell you.

Who may own a hearing practice was outside our research, so ask your board whether your state restricts ownership before you sign.

When you eventually sell, the same absence applies: our research found no published valuation multiples for audiology practices, so value the practice from its own financials with your CPA and a health-care attorney.

Employer information, not licensing, legal, medical, clinical, billing or coding advice. Rules change and are state-specific; confirm requirements with the board or agency named, and with a health-care attorney, your CPA or the payer for contract, classification and billing questions.