If you are a prospective or current traveler whose primary goal with travel therapy is to earn as much money as possible (likely to pay off student debt), then extending contracts when possible is a great idea. Whitney and I always try to extend contracts in places that we enjoy, and I actually extended my very first contract as a new grad twice for a total of nine months there. Extending a contract means less, or hopefully no, downtime between contracts since you don’t have to move to a new location. Most travelers choose to take at least a week off between contracts to move to their new assignment location. but that missed work means less money earned. Mitigating time off is a primary way to earn more throughout the year. Additionally, extending a contract is also easier because you’re already accustomed to the facility, staff, and patients.
Another big benefit of extending a contract is that you can almost always earn more money on the extension than you did on the original contract, either in the form of a bonus or an increase in taxable hourly pay. We usually try to get about $1-$2/hour extra when extending a contract, which ends up being $40-$80 more per week or $500-$1,000 more over the course of a 13 week contract! A dollar or two extra per hour may not sound like much, but it really adds up over time. Another option is to have the travel company reimburse travel expenses incurred while traveling back to your tax home if you plan to do that at any time during the contract. A reimbursement is almost always better than increase in taxable pay, if possible, because reimbursements aren’t taxed and therefore will mean more money in your pocket.
Understanding “Extension Bonuses”
Some travelers believe that getting an extension bonus means that the recruiter was keeping more money than they needed to be on the original contract, and now they’re somehow able to offer you more money the second go round, but that is not the case. So where does the extra money come from? Let’s investigate the answer to this question!
When you start a new contract as a travel therapist, the travel company has some upfront costs that they have to cover in order for you to start. These costs include things like: travel reimbursement for you to get to the new place, license reimbursement if applicable, background check, drug test, and TB test. All of those costs added together can end up being a significant amount of money that the company pays out in the beginning before you ever start working at the new place. These costs have to be accounted for by the company of course, so they reduce the amount that you make each week so that these costs can be recovered throughout the course of the contract. This reduction in the traveler’s pay is to be expected since all of our pay, reimbursements, and the travel company’s overhead costs, as well as their profits, come out of the “bill rate” that the facility pays the company. In other words, all the money has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is what the facility pays the travel company. Under normal circumstances where the traveler moves to a new facility after every contract with no extensions, the company has to incur these costs again before each new contract. On an extension however, these costs aren’t incurred again, which means that there is extra money that can be added to your pay!
Negotiating Extension Bonuses with Your Recruiter
Most experienced recruiters understand that by the traveler extending in a location, there will be extra money to allocate to the traveler on the extension. But I’ve worked with recruiters in the past that say that an extension bonus isn’t possible since the bill rate is the same for the extension, and the facility “isn’t offering any additional money.” Unfortunately, they were overlooking these costs that the company would be saving on the extension. After explaining how they would be saving money on the things I mentioned above for my extension, I’ve always been able to negotiate some amount of extra pay or bonus for the extension.
It’s important to discuss this with your recruiter and make sure you are on the same page. You are your own biggest advocate and need to be an informed and educated traveler.
Bottom Line
Less missed work and higher pay on an extension make it a no-brainer if you’re at a facility and location that you enjoy AND the facility needs continued help. Always be sure to ask for more money on an extension if the recruiter doesn’t automatically give it to you, and be sure to mention the costs that they would save by you extending instead of taking a new contract to back up your request.
If you have questions on this topic or would like recommendations from us on a contract, extension, or working with travel recruiters/companies, please reach out to us and we will be happy to help!
Editor’s Note: This article was originally written in 2018 and recently updated in 2023 with more up to date information and numbers. Travel therapy pay rates have increased significantly especially over the past year due to an imbalance of supply and demand in favor of travel therapists. We aren’t sure how long these higher paying travel contracts will last or if they will increase even more in the future, but we’re hoping for the best. Right now is a great time to be a travel therapist! Contact us if you’re looking for help getting started with travel therapy, or fill out our recruiter recommendations form if you’re ready to start your travel therapy job search!
Often the reason that people choose to pursue a career as a travel therapist, or even just decide to work a few travel therapy contracts, is to make more money. They’ve heard that travel therapy pay can be much higher than pay at a permanent position. For therapists coming out of school with massive student loan debt, finding a way to deal with that debt is a primary concern, and travel therapy is a great way to make more money especially when starting out as a new grad. This leads to the most common question people have when first researching the pros and cons of travel therapy:How much money do travel therapists make?
Understanding Pay Differences for Travelers
Travel therapy pay is a little different from that of permanent full time positions, and therefore it commonly leads to some confusion for those first looking into pay differences between travel and permanent positions. Travel therapists’ compensation is made up of a combination of taxable pay and untaxed money (stipends for housing, meals, and incidentals) assuming that you meet the requirements for receiving the untaxed stipends. Since part of the money is untaxed, this leads to significantly higher net pay for a travel therapist. This is best illustrated through examples of each scenario.
Permanent Job Pay
First, let’s break down what a traditional pay package would look like at a permanent physical therapist job. This scenario would be comparable for an OT or SLP job as well. For PTA and COTA, the values would be lower, but the principle is the same.
Many new grads PTs accept jobs with hourly pay in the $30-$35/hour range, but of course this can vary depending on the setting and the area of the country, as well as your negotiating skills. I’ve talked to physical therapists that have taken permanent jobs as new grads making as low as $20/hour and others that have negotiated $40/hour or more, so the true range is massive, but around $30-$35 per hour seems to be the average. We’ll take the top of that average range and find the gross yearly pay for someone working a permanent full time job making $35/hour:
$35/hour X 40 hours per week X 52 weeks per year = $72,800 annual salary
Gross pay is pretty straight forward and simple to understand, but determining how much of that gross pay you actually get to keep (i.e. net pay) is harder to understand and often overlooked when therapists talk about their hourly compensation or salary. Let’s look at how much of that money is yours after Uncle Sam takes his hefty cut. The total percentage will depend on where you live, but on average across the country, a person making a $75k salary is going to have about 25% taken out for taxes. Click here for more information on tax rates in major cities across the country. Here’s a look at the permanent physical therapist’s net pay after taxes based on the average 25% tax rate:
$72,800 X .75= $54,600 annual salaryafter taxes
$54,600/52= $1,050/week after taxes (if divided out into weekly pay in order to better compare to travel jobs )
This is an approximate take home pay per week based on a $35 per hour job working 40 hours per week. If you have offers for higher salary positions than that, feel free to use the calculations above to estimate your pay. Note that all 401k (traditional) and HSA contributions, as well as all medical, dental, life, disability costs will come out of the gross salary.
For a more specific example, we’ll use Virginia’s state tax rate. Not only is this where Whitney and I live and maintain our tax home, but it’s also near the middle of the range as far as state income taxes go, which makes it closer to the average for everyone. Pay Check City has a great tool to use for your specific scenario and is the site I’ll use to calculate the take home pay below.
$1,024/week would be the weekly take home pay for a permanent physical therapist in the above scenario who lives in Virginia, which is pretty close to the $1,050/week using the 25% rule of thumb above. For quick calculations, multiplying your salary or hourly rate by .75 is a good way to get an estimate of how much of your gross pay you actually keep, but keep in mind that for lower incomes, the percentage kept will be higher and for higher incomes the percentage kept will be lower due to the progressive nature of the tax brackets.
Travel Job Pay
Now let’s take a look at how travel therapist pay differs. A travel therapy pay package consists of a few different parts:
Hourly Rate (taxable)
Housing allowance/stipend (not taxed)
Meal and incidental allowance/stipend (not taxed)
Sometimes, additional reimbursements (for state license, relocation costs, etc)
Travel pay will generally be presented in a total gross or net weekly amount. If a gross weekly pay number is presented, then that would include the hourly taxable rate x 40 hours, then adding in the housing, meals, and incidentals stipends. If the net pay number is given, then that is usually calculated using the 25% tax rule of thumb above, which as we saw with the specific example isn’t always accurate, but it’s a good estimate of what the traveler’s tax rate might be. This would be gross hourly pay x .75 then adding in the housing, meals, and incidentals stipends. If you know that your tax rate is different, for example if you have a family/dependents, then when a recruiter presents you with a gross and/or net weekly pay number, you need to be sure to run the numbers based on your own tax rate.
Because gross vs. net pay is a big difference, always make sure to clarify with the recruiter which one they are quoting you for your weekly pay number, to ensure you’re appropriately comparing pay across different offers.
Travel Therapy Pay Examples
Here are examples of two potential travel therapy pay packages that a traveler that we mentored recently received for two skilled nursing travel positions in North Carolina to further help illustrate how travel therapist pay actually works:
Position 1:
Hourly rate: $22/hour (taxed)
Housing stipend: $730/week (not taxed)
Meals and Incidentals stipend: $320/week (not taxed)
Total take home pay (net pay using 25% rule of thumb above for the hourly wage) per week before deductions for benefits: $1,710 per week
Position 2:
Hourly rate: $25/hour (taxed)
Housing allowance: $750/week (not taxed)
Meals and Incidentals allowance: $330/week (not taxed)
Total take home pay (net pay using 25% rule of thumb above for the hourly wage) per week before deductions for benefits: $1,830 per week
In addition to this weekly amount that’s composed of the hourly taxable pay + the stipend, the traveler may also receive reimbursements as part of their pay package for things like state license, relocation to the new area (paid as mileage), uniforms, etc. These are typically going to be one-time payments, often on your first or second paycheck. These reimbursements don’t factor directly into your weekly pay, but you should certainly take them into consideration when looking at your total compensation for the whole contract.
For example, if you receive a one time reimbursement of $300 for a license and $200 for relocation, that’s an extra $500 total. If you want to, you could divide that number by the number of weeks of your contract to see how it would affect your total pay. For example $500/13=$38. This would be like making an extra $38/wk on your weekly pay package.
How are Hourly Rates and Stipend Amounts Determined?
You may be looking at the travel pay package examples above and thinking, “If the stipends aren’t taxed, then why not make them as high as possible with a lower hourly wage to maximize net pay?” That’s a great question and something that I wondered when first starting out, which led to me doing a lot of research on the topic. There are a couple of reasons why specifically aiming to increase tax free stipends as much as possible through reducing the hourly taxable pay is illegal based on IRS tax laws.
The taxable hourly rate should be a reasonable amount for the job position in order to avoid “wage recharacterization.” To read the IRS definition of wage recharacterization, check out this link, but basically it means avoiding taxes by changing compensation from a taxable hourly wage to a nontaxed stipend. There is debate about what a reasonable wage is for various therapist positions, and it’s always best to consult a tax expert if you’re in doubt, but us here at Travel Therapy Mentor (both of us being travel physical therapists) choose to keep our taxable wages at $20/hour or above to be safe and not take any risks as far as wage recharacterization is concerned for a physical therapist. This number may be different based on your profession and comfort level with the IRS law interpretation.
Maximum Stipend Amounts
The other reason it isn’t possible to have massive stipends and a very low taxable wage is due to the GSA guidelines. The GSA determines the maximum allowable stipends for housing, meals, and incidentals in different areas throughout the country, and it applies to anyone traveling for work, including travel therapists. These numbers vary drastically depending on the area of the country you’ll be working in due to variance in the cost of living in each location.
Keep in mind that these are the maximum amounts and not necessarily how much you will receive in stipends for that area. Depending on how much the facility that you’ll be working at as a traveler is able to pay for the position, you may receive significantly less than the maximum amounts. We always consult the GSA website before accepting a job offer to make sure that the stipends we will be receiving are not above the maximum amounts for that particular area.
These guidelines exist to keep people honest and not allow people to take excessive advantage of the tax code, which is a good thing even though it’s a bummer that we can’t increase our pay more by paying even less in taxes as travel therapists. This leads to the next topic: what offers can you expect to receive as far as pay is concerned as a travel therapist?
Average Pay for Travel Therapists
Just as with permanent positions, travel pay can vary significantly depending on setting and location. We’ve spoken to and mentored thousands of other travel therapists that make as low as $1,500/week take home pay and others that make as much as $3,000/week take home. That’s quite the range! And again, this will vary based on your specialty (PT, OT, SLP, PTA, COTA).
In general, the highest paying contracts are seen with home health and lowest paying are skilled nursing facilities, in our experience. Also in general, jobs on the west coast pay more than jobs on the east coast, and jobs in rural areas pay more than cities and urban areas due to rural areas often being seen as less desirable for most travelers, causing a shift in supply/demand. These observations were a surprise to us when starting out, since this is often different than the factors affecting pay in permanent positions. Taking the above into account, it’s easy to see why someone working a home health job in a rural location in California would make a lot more than someone working a skilled nursing job in Boston, MA.
Another factor that affects pay significantly is how desperate the facility is to fill the position quickly. Whitney and I once found contracts on the east coast at a wonderful outpatient facility in a great location that paid us very well because they needed the positions filled very quickly and we were ready to start right away. They were willing to pay a premium to get us there quickly!
Travel Therapy Pay Variability
With the above factors in mind, an average pay range for a traveling therapist is usually between $1,700-$2,000/week after taxes as of the beginning of 2022, based on the US as a whole and all settings being considered. Again, if you’re willing to take home health contracts or work exclusively on the west coast (CA specifically) then you can pretty easily consistently make $2,000/week or more after taxes on your travel contracts. Whitney and I personally averaged around $1,650/week after taxes over our first three years while taking contracts exclusively on the east coast and almost always in quality outpatient facilities. The range for us has been mostly between $1,500/week to $1,900/week. Keep in mind that travel contracts paid much lower back in 2015 when we started traveling as new grads.
We don’t recommend any traveling PT’s, OT’s and SLP’s, even new grads, take pay packages less than about $1,600/week after taxes in any area with the current job market (or typical recommendation used to be no less than $1500). After an initial really tough time during the beginning of the pandemic for travel therapists, the travel therapy market has been very strong throughout the second half of 2021 and into 2022 with the number of open travel contracts up significantly and paying higher than in the past. Because of the supply/demand dynamics being in favor of the traveler, there’s no reason to take low paying offers right now.
Some companies and recruiters will do their best to take advantage of new travelers, new grads especially, by offering them very low pay, knowing that they don’t really have a baseline of what pay should be yet as a traveler. This is why having a mentor in your corner as a new traveler is vital to keep from getting taken advantage of when starting out! Reach out to us with questions and for recruiter/company recommendations and we will be happy to help you!
How to Accurately Compare Pay for Travel Jobs to Permanent Positions
When comparing pay from a travel job to a permanent job, I often find that people get confused by the weekly take home amounts quoted for travel contracts. An individual that has never taken a travel contract will see $1,650/week take home, multiply that by 52 (weeks in a year) and then compare that to their permanent job gross salary and determine that travel isn’t worth it.
As we talked about earlier, that is no where near an accurate comparison. You have to either convert the gross permanent pay into a weekly take home amount (using the 25% rule of thumb above or the PayCheckCity site) as we did above, or convert the weekly take home pay of a travel therapist into an equivalent amount if it was a permanent position. The second is a more difficult calculation with no easy rule of thumb since tax rates increase significantly as pay gets higher, but luckily PayCheckCity makes it much easier using their “Gross Up” calculator. Let’s see what gross pay you’d have to make at a permanent job to equal the $1,650/week after taxes that Whitney and I averaged early on while traveling.
We would have to make a staggering gross pay of $2,390/week at a permanent job to bring home the same $1,650/week take home pay that we have while traveling! That’s the equivalent of $60/hour or a salary of well over $120,000/year at a permanent job! When expressed in these terms, it’s easy to see how much more lucrative travel therapy is over a permanent job and how I was able to save over $100,000 in 1.5 years as a new grad travel therapist.
Based on our experiences and the thousands of others travel therapists that we have talked to and mentored, it’s not unrealistic for a new grad travel therapist to make 1.5-2 times as much as they would if they took a full time permanent job right out of school. In fact, right now there are travelers making even more than double what they would make at a permanent position by being very flexible on the setting and location they go to in order to specifically take only the highest paying contracts.
The Bottom Line on Permanent vs. Travel Jobs
It is important to remember that despite the significantly higher pay, there are some trade offs to traveling, which are outlined in this pros and cons article. The big downsides to remember in terms of pay are that travel therapists don’t get paid time off for vacations like permanent therapists do, and it can be difficult to move from place to place in only a weekend, meaning that sometimes unwanted time off between contracts is inevitable. These factors eat into the pay of travelers, but even so, it is still significantly higher with all things considered.
I hope this helps clarify the differences in pay for permanent vs travel jobs. Please contact usor ask questions in the comments below if we can help you further understand pay. And if you’re looking to get started on your own travel therapy journey, fill out our recruiter recommendations form and we can get you connected with travel therapy recruiters we know and trust!
What has your experience been as far as pay for permanent jobs or travel jobs? Do the numbers in the article match what you’ve seen? Let us know in the comments!
Jared is a Doctor of Physical Therapy who has been a Travel PT since 2015. He is also a finance enthusiast and has spent thousands of hours learning about personal finance. He used his career as a Travel PT combined with strategic financial choices to achieve financial independence by the age of 30.
