The United States is hurtling toward a healthcare staffing crisis that, by most credible estimates, will leave millions of positions unfilled before the end of the decade. A 2024 Mercer analysis projects a nationwide shortage of more than 100,000 healthcare workers by 2028. The Health Resources and Services Administration forecasts significant allied health shortfalls by 2038 in occupations ranging from medical assistants to respiratory therapists. The American Hospital Association's 2026 Workforce Scan describes a system "under pressure, poised for reinvention," with rising demand from an aging population colliding with an exhausted workforce still carrying the aftershocks of the pandemic.

For students and career-changers watching these numbers, the implication is straightforward: healthcare desperately needs more workers, and many of the fastest-growing roles in the field do not require a bachelor's degree, let alone a medical school education. Some can be entered in under a year. Others take two. A handful pay six figures. All of them are growing faster than the national average for employment, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics pegs at just 3 percent over the 2024–2034 decade.

This guide compares six of the most accessible healthcare careers that sit below the four-year degree line: medical assistant, phlebotomist, dental hygienist, pharmacy technician, surgical technologist, and radiation therapist. The aim is not simply to list salaries and program lengths—plenty of career sites do that—but to help you think clearly about the trade-offs between them. How much does an extra year of schooling actually buy you in lifetime earnings? Which credentials stack into higher roles? Where is the demand heading, and why? The data here is drawn primarily from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook and Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, both updated with May 2024 wage figures and 2024–2034 employment projections.

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The Landscape: Why Sub-Bachelor Healthcare Roles Are Booming

By 2030, every Baby Boomer in America will be 65 or older, a demographic milestone that will push one in five Americans into the age bracket most likely to need intensive and ongoing medical care. The Census Bureau estimates the 65-and-older population will swell from roughly 56 million in 2023 to 82 million by 2050. That is a 47 percent increase in the patient population most likely to require prescription management, surgical procedures, blood work, dental care, and cancer treatment—precisely the services delivered by the six occupations profiled here.

Simultaneously, the people currently providing that care are aging out themselves. The American Medical Association estimates that 44 percent of the physician workforce is either already at retirement age or will reach it within five years. One in four nurses is expected to leave or retire by 2027, according to the 2022 National Nursing Workforce Survey. These departures ripple downward: when physicians and nurses leave, the support staff who worked alongside them often follow, or find their workloads unsustainable.

The result is a labor market in which healthcare employers are not only competing fiercely for physicians and nurses but also scrambling to fill the roles that keep clinics, operating rooms, pharmacies, and dental offices functioning. Hospitals report staffing as their top operational concern. Rural communities face the sharpest shortages, with the AHA warning that without flexible staffing and local workforce development, access inequities will continue to widen. For anyone evaluating career options in 2026, the signal is clear: there are few corners of the American economy where labor demand is as structurally strong as it is in healthcare.

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Six Careers, Side by Side

Before diving into the details of each role, it helps to see the full picture at a glance. The table below summarizes the key data points from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for each of the six occupations covered in this guide. All salary figures reflect May 2024 data; all growth projections cover the 2024–2034 period.

Occupation Median Salary Low 10% High 10% Growth (2024–34) Annual Openings Typical Education
Medical Assistant $44,200 $35,020 $57,830 12% 112,300 Postsecondary certificate
Phlebotomist $43,660 $34,860 $57,750 6% 18,400 Postsecondary certificate
Dental Hygienist $94,260 $66,470 $120,060 7% 15,300 Associate's degree
Pharmacy Technician $43,460 $35,100 $59,450 6% 49,000 HS diploma + training
Surgical Technologist $62,830 $42,000 $87,000 5% 8,700 Associate's degree
Radiation Therapist $101,990 $77,860 $141,550 2% 900 Associate's degree

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2024–2034 projections; May 2024 wage data.

A few patterns are immediately visible. The three roles requiring only a certificate or high school diploma—medical assistant, phlebotomist, and pharmacy technician—cluster in a tight salary band between $43,000 and $44,200. The two associate's-degree roles in clinical settings—dental hygienist and surgical technologist—leap dramatically higher, to $94,260 and $62,830 respectively. And radiation therapy, which also requires an associate's degree (though most programs take closer to three years), tops the chart at nearly $102,000. The relationship between training length and pay is not perfectly linear, but the broad message is unmistakable: an additional year or two of education generally buys a significant and lasting salary premium.

Growth rates tell a somewhat different story. Medical assisting leads the pack at 12 percent projected growth, with more than 112,000 annual openings—by far the largest volume of any occupation on this list. That sheer scale matters. Even if a role has a lower median salary, an abundance of openings means more geographic flexibility, more employer competition for workers, and more leverage for employees to negotiate wages and conditions. Pharmacy technician and phlebotomist roles each project 6 percent growth with tens of thousands of annual openings, while radiation therapy's 2 percent growth and just 900 openings per year make it the smallest and slowest-growing field here, despite its impressive salary.

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What the Money Actually Means

Raw salary figures are useful, but they can be misleading without context. A pharmacy technician earning $43,460 after a few months of on-the-job training is in a fundamentally different economic position than a dental hygienist earning $94,260 after completing a three-year associate's degree program that may cost between $20,000 and $50,000. To think clearly about the value of each path, you need to consider the total investment—time, tuition, and foregone earnings—against the lifetime return.

Start with the fastest entries. Phlebotomy certificate programs can be completed in as little as four to eight months, often for $1,000 to $3,000 in tuition. Medical assistant certificate programs at vocational schools typically run eight to twelve months and cost between $3,000 and $10,000. Pharmacy technicians can enter the field with only a high school diploma and on-the-job training, though postsecondary certificate programs of varying length are increasingly common and preferred by employers. For someone eager to start earning in healthcare quickly, these three pathways offer the lowest barriers to entry in terms of both time and money.

The associate's-degree roles require a longer commitment but deliver substantially higher compensation. Dental hygiene programs typically take about three years, including prerequisites, and most graduates must pass both a written national board exam and a state or regional clinical exam to earn licensure. Surgical technology programs generally run about two years. Radiation therapy programs also take roughly two years of concentrated study beyond prerequisites, though many students spend closer to three years total from start to finish. The cost of these associate's programs at community colleges ranges from roughly $10,000 to $30,000 total, depending on the institution and state. At a private school, costs can run significantly higher.

Consider a simple back-of-the-envelope comparison. A phlebotomist who starts earning $43,660 six months after beginning training accumulates roughly $436,600 in gross income over their first ten working years. A dental hygienist who spends three years in school before beginning to earn $94,260 accumulates roughly $659,820 over the same ten-year window from the start of their training (seven working years at median salary). Even after subtracting tuition costs and three years of lost income, the hygienist comes out well ahead—and the gap only widens over a full career. This does not mean phlebotomy is a bad choice; it is an excellent one for someone who needs to start earning immediately and can use it as a stepping stone. But it does mean the decision about how much schooling to pursue has very real long-term financial consequences.

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How Credentials Stack: Building a Career Ladder

One of the most underappreciated features of sub-bachelor healthcare careers is that many of them are not dead ends. They are entry points into a larger ecosystem of credentials that can be combined, upgraded, and leveraged into higher-paying roles over time. The concept of "credential stacking"—earning certifications sequentially, with each building on the last—is particularly well suited to healthcare because the field is structured around specialized competencies that employers recognize and reward.

Phlebotomy is perhaps the clearest example of a stackable entry credential. A phlebotomy certificate provides the foundational knowledge of venipuncture, specimen handling, and patient interaction that transfers directly into medical assisting, medical laboratory technician work, and eventually nursing. Many medical assistant programs include phlebotomy training as part of their curriculum, and employers in hospitals and large clinics increasingly prefer or require MAs who hold both a medical assisting certification and a separate phlebotomy credential. Some training providers now offer bundled programs—medical assisting plus phlebotomy plus EKG technician certification—that allow students to graduate with three marketable credentials in about eight to nine months.

Medical assisting itself functions as a broad-based healthcare platform. Certified medical assistants who want to advance can pursue nursing, health information management, healthcare administration, or specialized clinical roles. The clinical exposure, patient communication skills, and familiarity with electronic health records that MAs develop on the job are directly relevant to nursing school applications and to roles in quality improvement or practice management.

Pharmacy technicians who earn their Certified Pharmacy Technician credential through the Pharmacy Technician Certification Board can advance into specialized compounding, hospital pharmacy, or supervisory positions. Some pursue a PharmD, though that requires a full doctoral program. More commonly, experienced pharmacy techs move into roles in medication therapy management, insurance authorization, or pharmacy informatics—fields where their practical knowledge of medication dispensing and insurance systems gives them an advantage over candidates entering from a purely academic track.

Surgical technologists can advance to become surgical assistants, which the BLS groups in the same occupational category but which carry additional responsibilities—and higher pay—in the operating room. Some surgical techs go on to physician assistant programs or nursing programs that value their extensive surgical experience. Dental hygienists, already among the highest-paid associate's-degree holders in any field, can pursue bachelor's and master's degrees in dental hygiene that open pathways into education, public health, and research. A few states now allow dental hygienists with additional training to function as dental therapists, performing certain restorative procedures that were previously limited to dentists.

The key insight here is that choosing an entry-level healthcare role is not the same as choosing a permanent career ceiling. The credential you start with determines your initial salary and work environment, but it does not have to define your trajectory. Thinking of these roles as the first rung on a ladder, rather than the ladder itself, changes the calculus considerably.

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Where the Demand Is—and Where It's Heading

Not all healthcare demand is created equal, and understanding where specific roles are concentrated matters as much as understanding overall growth rates. Medical assistants, the most numerous occupation on this list with roughly 811,000 jobs in 2024, work overwhelmingly in physicians' offices—about 56 percent of them, according to BLS data. That makes MAs highly sensitive to trends in outpatient care, and the news there is favorable: outpatient settings are expanding as procedures that once required hospital stays move to ambulatory clinics and same-day surgery centers.

Surgical technologists, by contrast, are concentrated in hospitals, which employ about 71 percent of them. Their growth is tied directly to the volume of surgical procedures, which is expected to increase as the population ages and as advances in minimally invasive techniques make surgery viable for a broader range of patients. The expansion of ambulatory surgery centers is creating new demand for surgical techs outside the traditional hospital setting, and this shift may offer better hours and more predictable schedules than hospital operating rooms, which often require nights, weekends, and on-call availability.

Pharmacy technicians are the most distributed of these roles. About 52 percent work in retail pharmacies and drugstores, 16 percent in hospitals, and 9 percent in grocery-store pharmacies. The retail pharmacy segment is under pressure from automation and consolidation, but hospital and specialty pharmacy settings are growing, and they tend to pay more—median wages in ambulatory healthcare services and hospitals hover around $49,300 to $49,900, well above the overall occupational median of $43,460.

Dental hygienists enjoy one of the most favorable demand pictures of any healthcare occupation. Nearly all of them work in dental offices, and the field is buoyed by long-term trends in preventive care, the aging population retaining more natural teeth than previous generations, and expanding state laws that allow hygienists to work at the top of their training. Several states now allow hygienists to practice in community settings—schools, nursing homes, public health clinics—with reduced or no direct dentist supervision, a development that has the potential to significantly increase demand in underserved areas.

Radiation therapy stands apart. With only about 18,000 practitioners nationwide and projected growth of just 2 percent, it is a small, stable, and well-compensated field rather than a rapidly expanding one. Openings are primarily driven by retirements rather than new positions. The role requires a high level of technical precision and patient interaction, and the relatively limited supply of qualified workers helps support the field's high wages. For students willing to invest in the training, radiation therapy offers an unusual combination: an associate's-level education requirement with earnings that rival many bachelor's-degree professions.

Geography matters, too. Healthcare wages and demand vary enormously by state and metro area. Dental hygienists in California earn a median of over $100,000; in some Southern states, the figure is closer to $70,000. Medical assistants in the San Francisco Bay Area can earn above $60,000, while those in rural parts of the Midwest may earn closer to $35,000. Cost of living explains some of this variation, but not all of it—local supply-and-demand dynamics, state licensing requirements, and the presence of major health systems all play a role. Anyone choosing among these careers should research wages and openings in the specific areas where they plan to work.

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What to Watch: Choosing and Planning

If there is a single takeaway from this data, it is that the "best" career on this list depends entirely on the constraints and priorities of the person choosing it. For someone who needs income now—a single parent returning to the workforce, a recent high school graduate supporting a family—phlebotomy or pharmacy technology offers the fastest path from enrollment to paycheck. The training is short, the costs are low, and the demand is broad enough to find work in almost any part of the country.

For someone who can invest two to three years in education and is willing to take on modest student debt, dental hygiene is almost certainly the highest-return option in this group. A median salary of $94,260 with only an associate's degree puts hygienists well above the national median for all workers ($49,500 in 2024) and within striking distance of many occupations that require a bachelor's or even a master's degree. The work-life balance is often favorable, too: many hygienists work part-time or for multiple practices, giving them flexibility that is rare in healthcare.

Surgical technology and radiation therapy appeal to different temperaments. Operating-room work is physically demanding, fast-paced, and involves direct participation in procedures that are often high-stakes. Radiation therapy is technically precise and emotionally complex—you are treating cancer patients daily—but offers a more predictable schedule and higher pay. Both require a comfort level with clinical environments that not everyone shares, and prospective students should pursue clinical observation or shadowing before committing.

Regardless of which role you choose, a few principles apply broadly. First, certification matters. While some of these roles can technically be entered without formal credentials, employers consistently prefer and often require nationally recognized certifications—CMA or RMA for medical assistants, CPT for phlebotomists, PTCB or ExCPT for pharmacy technicians, CST for surgical technologists. Certified workers earn more, get hired faster, and have better access to advancement. Second, think in terms of trajectories, not just starting salaries. A phlebotomy certificate is worth $43,660 a year on its own, but it is worth far more as the foundation for a medical assisting credential, which is worth even more as a springboard into nursing or health information management. Each credential you add opens new doors and increases your earning power.

The structural forces driving healthcare demand are not going away. The population is aging. Chronic disease is rising. The existing workforce is burning out and retiring. Technology is making more procedures possible in more settings, but it is not replacing the human beings who perform blood draws, clean teeth, count surgical instruments, or position patients for radiation treatment. If anything, the growing complexity of the healthcare system is creating new roles and expanding existing ones. For anyone willing to invest in the right training, the returns—financial, professional, and personal—are as strong as they have been in a generation.

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