SAFE
The core of the job is manual spinal and joint manipulation performed with hands on a live patient whose tissue response changes minute to minute — nothing in current robotics comes close. AI can absorb the paperwork tier: intake histories, SOAP notes, insurance coding, X-ray pre-reads, and generic home-exercise handouts. What remains is a licensed clinician who palpates, adjusts, decides when a case is a red flag needing MD referral, and owns that call.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
Median pay $70,340 → $79,200 -9.9% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+9.5%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 39,630 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Hard to automate, and growing
The work resists current AI and the BLS projects +9.5% more of these jobs by 2034. Note that safe does not mean well paid — several of the fastest-growing resistant occupations are among the lowest paid on the register.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~2,800 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
ChiropractorChiropractic PhysicianChiropractic Doctor (DC)Chiropractic Neurologist
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: judgment & accountability .
Tasks largely resist digitisation The billable act — locating a restricted segment by palpation, setting a line of drive, and delivering a high-velocity low-amplitude thrust with the patient's tone and guarding shifting between passes — is the visit, and it sits at 15 rather than 18 because the surrounding tier (history intake, Medicare-compliant SOAP documentation, CPT 98940-98942 coding, ROF scripts, recall scheduling) is a real fraction of your week and is already being handled by software.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments An 18 reflects that you are bodily loaded into the work — drop-table, Gonstead, Activator, side-posture lumbar rolls, cervical setups on necks with variable range — on patients whose size, pain tolerance, and osteoporotic risk are never standardized, in a room where an unexpected flinch mid-thrust is your problem to absorb.
Licensed human required and personally liable Every state licenses DCs through a board with its own scope statute and NBCE Part I-IV plus physiotherapy requirements, you carry your own malpractice policy, and cervical manipulation with stroke and VBA-dissection allegations is litigated against you by name — that's a 17, held short of 20 only because scope excludes prescribing and most surgical exposure.
Meaningful discretion 13 sits at the top of real discretion: you decide when neck pain with headache and nystagmus is a contraindication, when radiating leg pain means MRI and an ortho referral rather than a fourth adjustment, and when to stop care — high-stakes calls, but made against established red-flag screening frameworks rather than in true diagnostic wilderness.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (15/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (17/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (16/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (13/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 46 of this occupation's 79 points (58%).
Embodiment (18/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 89/100, still SAFE.
Task-mix shift: once AI reliably handles intake summarization, SOAP notes, CPT/ICD coding and imaging pre-reads (already shipping in chiropractic EHRs like ChiroTouch/Jane), the residual day is palpation, adjustment, and referral judgment — the automatable tier is the tier that leaves
Chiropractic is already largely cash-pay or partially self-pay, and patients choose a specific practitioner's hands; a further shift toward membership/cash models (as insurance manipulation coverage stays capped) hardens the paid-for-a-human component
State board or malpractice-insurer rules making the DC personally responsible for documented red-flag screening (vertebral artery dissection, cauda equina, undiagnosed malignancy) before any cervical manipulation — NCMIC (the dominant chiropractic malpractice carrier) already conditions coverage on informed-consent and screening documentation; tightening this to a mandatory signed differential-diagnosis step per new patient shifts the role's weight onto the referral/no-adjust call
Expansion of state scope-of-practice statutes that reserve spinal manipulative therapy to licensed DCs, DOs, or PTs with certification — plus board rules barring unlicensed 'adjustment' devices or technician-delivered manipulation under remote supervision. Watch state chiropractic board actions against non-licensee manipulation and any Medicare rule tying manipulation reimbursement to the treating licensee's own hands
The limit. Already near the top of the register; the score is carried by embodiment and licensure, so realistic movement is a few points of consolidation, not a category change. The genuine downside risk is not automation of the adjustment but payer pressure and PT/DO scope competition shrinking the occupation's size.
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 1,470 | $72,440 -9% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 1,110 | $97,580 +23% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 1,060 | $52,000 -34% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 870 | $79,450 +0% |
| Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ | 830 | $102,110 +29% |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI | 810 | $98,630 +25% |
| Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO | 750 | $84,100 +6% |
| Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL | 740 | $78,000 -2% |
| Sheboygan, WI | 30 | $120,440 +52% |
| Anchorage, AK | 50 | $118,080 +49% |
| Green Bay, WI | 70 | $115,380 +46% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 79. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.