Solo PT clinics hold $300K–$1M in operating cash earning 0.05% APY. At 1.75%, that same balance earns $5,000–$17,500 a year — with no operational changes.
A solo PT clinic holding $300K to $1M in operating reserve at 0.05% APY earns a few hundred dollars annually. The same balance at 1.75% earns $5K to $17K. No new patients. No new fees. Just modern rates.
You opened your PT clinic to do PT. Not to be a treasury analyst. So your operating account sits at the same regional bank where you opened your first business checking, earning minimal returns, well below what practices are seeing on APY in 2026 (opens in a new tab). The reconciliation is fine. The cash flow is fine. But every dollar of operating reserve is quietly underperforming, and on a substantial balance, that adds up faster than most solo practices realize.
The numbers are straightforward.
A solo PT clinic typically holds $300K to $1M in operating cash to cover payroll, lease, and the gap between insurance billing and reimbursement. At a typical big-bank business checking rate of 0.05% APY, that earns $150 to $500 a year. At 1.75% APY, that same balance earns $5,250 to $17,500 a year. The gap represents thousands of dollars of recovered yield.
No new patients. No new fee schedule. No restructure. The cash sits where it sat. It just earns at modern rates instead of minimal returns. For a clinic doing $1M in collections, that represents roughly 0.5% to 1.7% of top-line revenue, captured without changing anything operational.
Account opening takes just minutes. No branch visit, no in-person notarization, no relationship banker call. ACH transfers cost $0 in both directions, so paying vendors and collecting from payers does not eat into the yield. Wires are a flat $15 for rare vendors requiring them.
FDIC coverage on a medical practice's cash (opens in a new tab) runs up to $10M per entity through sweep networks, which matters if you have a large reserve, a buy-in coming up, or a property purchase you are saving for.
You do not have to close your existing bank. Most solo PT owners run parallel for a quarter, watch the yield show up on the new account, then close the old one when they are confident.
If you keep less than $50K in operating cash, the yield difference is small enough that the switch is not urgent. If your reserve is $200K or more, especially if you also write checks to vendors or wire occasionally, the math closes itself in the first month. If you are growing into a multi-clinician group with associate doctors or a second location, this is the right moment to look at banking built for physical therapy practices (opens in a new tab), starting with what to look for in banking for physical therapy clinics (opens in a new tab), and set up a structure that scales.