Athletic Trainer Master’s Degree: Do You Really Need One?

Accreditation is what makes you exam-eligible, so a decision taken at the accreditor moves the entry level for the entire field at once. CAATE did not raise a standard inside undergraduate programs. It stopped accrediting them for professional entry, which pushed the qualifying degree up a level for everyone who had not yet enrolled.

This is where a lot of the advice online is still wrong, and O*NET is part of the reason. O*NET reports 54% of athletic trainers saying a master’s degree is required and 37% saying a bachelor’s. That 37% is not a second door. It counts athletic trainers already working, most of whom entered under the old route and are still in the job. A survey of people inside an occupation describes how they got in, not how you can.

The other trap is the degree title. Undergraduate majors called athletic training still exist, and some of them are strong programs. They are no longer accredited for professional entry, so finishing one does not make you exam-eligible. Titles are unreliable here for a second reason too: every program ranked on this site carries the same federal classification code, and the schools split that one code across several degree names, which we worked through in kinesiology vs exercise science. Read the accreditation, not the name.

Verify on CAATE’s directory, then, and not on an admissions page, which has every incentive to present the institution’s regional accreditation as though it were the programmatic one the BOC checks.

Your kinesiology bachelor’s is preparation, not qualification, the same relationship a pre-med biology degree has to medical school. That changes what you optimize for when you pick one. You are no longer choosing the program that trains you to be an athletic trainer. You are choosing the program that gets you admitted to one that does.

Prerequisite lists differ by graduate program and they overlap heavily. Anatomy, physiology, biomechanics and statistics appear on nearly all of them, and psychology and nutrition on most. Kinesiology and exercise science degrees cover most of that by default, which is why they are the common feeder into a master’s in athletic training. Pull the actual prerequisite list off each graduate program you are targeting and check it course by course against the catalog of the bachelor’s you are considering. Do that before you enroll, not in your junior year.

Pay particular attention to the laboratory courses. Anatomy with a lab and anatomy without one are not interchangeable on a graduate application, and this is where an online bachelor’s can quietly cost you a year. Only 6% of the 343 bachelor’s programs ranked here are flagged as available fully online, against 25% at the master’s level, and the reason is the same labs-and-practicum requirement graduate admissions committees are checking for. Online kinesiology programs has the split level by level.

Two things matter as much as the transcript. Bank observation hours while you are an undergraduate, because graduate programs want evidence you have watched the job being done, and the athletic training room at your own institution is the obvious place to start. And protect your science GPA, because the courses that carry the prerequisites are the same courses that pull a GPA down.

Then there is the bill, which is six years long now instead of four. Both degrees are exposed to residency pricing at a public university: across the 296 public programs here that publish both rates, the median out-of-state premium is $10,344 a year, and every private program that reports both charges one rate to everyone. Kinesiology degree cost runs that arithmetic, and it compounds over six years in a way it does not over four.

Two steps follow graduation and they get conflated constantly. The BOC exam is national and it certifies you. A state license is issued by a state board and it permits you to work in that state. You need both, and the second one usually depends on the first.

Eligibility for the exam comes from the degree, which is the whole reason the accreditation status of your program matters more than anything else about it. The exam is $375 in the US or Canada and $495 elsewhere (including a $120 international surcharge). A separate non-refundable application fee applies: $75 for NATA members, $100 for non-members. Budget for the application separately, because it is charged separately and it is non-refundable.

Then it keeps going. After an initial staggered schedule (50 CEUs for those certified in year one, 25 for year two, each due within about three years), the ongoing requirement is 50 CEUs every two years. Price that in before you plan around the salary. The ATC credential page carries every fee and the date it was checked against the BOC’s own page.

Licensure is where the athletic trainer requirements stop being national. This is the route to a license. Most states require the ATC credential to practice, which makes it the one credential on this list that is not merely an employer preference. Check your own state board directly, and check it again if the graduate program you are targeting is in a different state.

One narrow alternative to a CAATE-accredited program exists and it is not a shortcut for anyone who trained here. Someone already credentialed by an International Arrangement organization, which the BOC lists as ARTI, BASRaT or CATA, can qualify for the exam through a credentials evaluation instead.

The median athletic trainer salary is $62,520 a year (BLS, May 2025), with the bottom tenth under $48,180 and the top tenth above $88,760. BLS counts 30,500 athletic trainers employed nationally and publishes a median for 50 states. The highest of those is California, at $78,490.

Weigh that against six years of tuition rather than four. That is the arithmetic the transition forces: the same median that looked reasonable behind a bachelor’s now sits behind an athletic trainer master’s degree, and nobody raised the salary to compensate. Our state-by-state salary breakdown shows where the number moves most.

Two comparisons put the figure in context. Athletic training is a much bigger occupation than exercise physiology, at 30,500 jobs against 8,560, and it pays a higher median, $62,520 against $59,460, for two more years of school. The comparison that stings is physical therapy, another graduate-entry route, where the median is $102,760. Athletic training sits about 39% below that.

If that arithmetic does not work for you, look hard at what the bachelor’s reaches without a second degree. Exercise physiology is clinical work you can enter with the bachelor’s. So is recreational therapy, where 92% of O*NET respondents name a bachelor’s as the entry education, though the CTRS credential wants therapeutic recreation coursework specifically rather than a general kinesiology transcript. Neither role is athletic training, and both cost two fewer years of tuition. The bachelor’s program rankings cover the degrees that feed all three routes, so you can shortlist once and decide later.

Every figure in this guide is computed at build time from the same federal IPEDS data behind the program rankings, so it moves when the data moves rather than being typed in once. Wage figures come from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release. Certification rules come from the issuing body’s own page, with the date each was checked on the certification pages.