Tag: Physical therapy

Factors to Consider when Comparing Pay Rates to Other Travel Therapists

Factors to consider when comparing pay rates to other travel therapists
~ Travel Therapy Mentor ~ 3 Comments

Written by: Jared Casazza, PT, DPT

Background

One of the biggest fears for travel therapists, especially those new to traveling, is getting taken advantage of by recruiters. There is good reason for this fear since there are plenty of recruiters out there that are willing to low-ball those that don’t know what is reasonable in terms of pay and benefits. This is actually one of the main reasons that we created this website and began mentoring those new to travel therapy. Whitney and I  have had such an awesome experience while traveling, and we want to do our best to ensure that other travelers have a positive experience as well.

Since travelers are often so worried about their pay being inadequate, there is often open discussion regarding weekly take home pay between travel therapists. In general, I think this is a great thing and that everyone (not just travel therapists but therapists in general) should be more open to discussing their pay in order to have more transparency in this area.

Alas, as a travel therapist, there are some pitfalls to these discussions and comparisons that should be considered. If another travel therapist is working in the same state and at a similar facility but making significantly more than you, are you being taken advantage of? Sometimes, but not always. Let’s look at some of the factors that can affect discrepancies in pay. (If you’re completely new to travel pay then check out this comprehensive article on how it works for some background information)

Differences Between Travel Companies

Each travel company does things differently in terms of pay. Sometimes these differences are minor and sometimes they are major. The biggest difference affecting pay is your hourly taxable pay rate. For example, getting a pay offer from two different companies offering different taxable hourly pay rates is going to make the total take home pay each week much different even if the bill rate is the exact same. Some companies have a policy of not allowing taxable pay to go below a certain level (this can be as high as the $25-$30/hour range) whereas other companies will allow a much lower hourly rate (we’ve seen as low as $15/hour for PT, OT, and SLP). If your taxable rate is higher, that means your total weekly take home pay will be lower. The reason for that is not only do you have to pay extra money in taxes on that higher hourly rate, but the travel company has to pay a higher amount toward FICA taxes on your behalf as well. The difference between a $15/hour taxable rate and a $25/hour taxable rate can be $100-$200/week or more on your take home pay! If comparing your weekly take home pay to a fellow traveler, make sure to always consider your taxable pay rate compared to theirs.

Cost of Living

A huge factor to consider is the cost of living and desirability of the location in the area that you’re working in. In general, areas with higher costs of living (big cities) are able to offer higher stipend amounts for housing, meals, and incidentals. These stipends usually aren’t able to be fully maxed out in those areas though because the bill rate won’t support the full amount. Keep in mind that in general, rural areas are willing to pay more due to a lower demand in the area. As you can probably imagine, most travelers (and permanent therapists) want to go to the desirable areas in the country, which means that the demand for therapists there is lower and the facilities can offer lower bill rates and still know that someone will still take the position. If you’ve looked into a  contract in Hawaii then you’ll know what I mean. Hawaii is an extremely desirable location for travelers, and despite the high cost of living there, pay rates are very low due to the high demand. If you’re taking a job in Hawaii, it’s for the experience of the island life, not the pay.

Be careful comparing your weekly take home pay in lower cost of living states to others taking assignments in higher cost of living states (such as the west coast). Even though someone on the west coast might be making significantly more per week, you have to remember that their living expenses might be significantly higher there as well!

Up-Front Reimbursements

Some companies may offer up-front reimbursements as part of their pay packages, while others don’t and instead add that money into the weekly pay. This isn’t necessarily a good or a bad thing either way, but it can affect weekly take home pay significantly and cause a discrepancy in pay between you and a fellow travel therapist, which is something to be cognizant of.

For example, let’s imagine both you and a fellow traveler recently accepted 13 week travel contracts in California after getting licensed there last month. You’ll both be traveling there from your home state of Tennessee. Your company offers you $500 in reimbursement for your CA license, as well as $400 to travel from Tennessee to California, and another $400 to travel back to Tennessee when your contract is completed. The other therapist’s company does not offer any reimbursements. Their take home pay is quoted to be $1,900/week after taxes, whereas your take home pay will only be $1,800/week. If you met this traveler while in California and discussed your pay, you may very well think that your company is taking advantage of you by paying you $100/week less, but in reality when you factor in the reimbursements, your pay is the exact same!

Be careful comparing weekly pay without considering reimbursements. Some companies and recruiters will purposely not offer reimbursements in order to be able to offer a high weekly pay rate since that’s what most travelers are concerned with. This is just moving the same money around, don’t be fooled!

Travel Company Size

As I talked about in the post I wrote on bill rates, travel companies take a different percentage of the bill rate depending on their overhead. Bigger companies are going to have higher overhead due to more people on payroll, bigger marketing budgets, more buildings, etc. Small companies usually have lower overhead and can get by with taking a lower percentage of the bill rate, although this isn’t always the case as we’ve found over the years. If bigger companies have higher overhead, isn’t it always better to work with a smaller company? Not necessarily. Bigger companies often have more jobs as well as exclusive contracts. They also tend to have better benefits and lower costs for the benefits due to having more employees working for them.

Combining Multiple Factors

When these factors are added together, differences in weekly pay can huge. If you compare weekly pay amounts between a big company that pays a high taxable rate and offers a lot of up-front reimbursements with a job on the east coast to a small company that pays a very low taxable rate with no reimbursements with a job on the west coast, you can see differences of $500/week or more in some cases!

Conclusion

Be careful when comparing weekly pay rates to other travel therapists without also considering all the factors influencing weekly pay rate. Don’t automatically feel bad about your pay the next time you see another travel therapist bragging about their high weekly pay rates when working with small companies on the west coast, when you’re working with a big company with more jobs and better benefits on the east coast.

If you’re in need of a company/recruiter that you can trust, send us a message with some info about yourself and your reason for traveling and we can set you up with a few that match well with you and that we trust!

Do Travel Therapists Work Overtime and Is It Worth It?

Do travel therapists work overtime and is it worth it?
~ Travel Therapy Mentor ~ Leave a comment

Written by: Jared Casazza, PT, DPT

“Travel Therapists Don’t Work Overtime”

When Whitney and I started traveling, we were told by most recruiters and other travel therapists that overtime in the travel therapy world is rare. We heard that facilities don’t want to pay extra to have a traveler working overtime, and they won’t allow them to get overtime. In general, that does seem to be the case for the majority of travelers, but it has definitely not been the case for me. In fact, in almost all of my contracts I’ve worked some overtime and in a couple of them I worked A LOT of overtime. I’m not exactly sure why this has been the case for me, but it is probably the combination of two factors:

  1. I was very eager to work all that I possibly could in order to save as much as possible for my first few years as a traveler. I went out of my way to offer to see extra patients or stay late at each of my contracts if needed. I also always asked about the potential for overtime in my phone interview with the facility, and in some cases their answer would sway my decision of which facility to choose if there was more than one that I liked.
  2. We worked primarily in small rural areas where they didn’t have PRN help. If it got busy, they were fine with me working extra hours in order to make sure all of the patients were seen. Whereas most clinics in more populated areas have PRN therapists they can call for help when things get busy, many rural facilities do not, so that means overtime for the regular staff, even if that happens to be a traveler.

It’s true that most facilities do everything possible to avoid having travelers work overtime. The big reason for that, of course, is money. Bill rates for travelers can be huge, and often the facility is obligated to pay 1.5x the bill rate for any hours worked over 40. That could mean that a facility is paying $100/hour or more for each hour of overtime that we work in some cases! Meanwhile, 1.5x the hourly rate for a permanent employee is likely in the $50-$60/hour range, which is much more palatable for them. Even though this is the case, I’ve found that often the permanent staff isn’t willing to work overtime, so with no PRN help and me being eager to work all the hours I can, they just approve it. Or, in some cases, I’ve been the only PT on staff, with no permanent PTs or PRN PTs. So in that case, if patients need to be seen outside of 40 hours of work, then I’m the only option and thus get asked to work overtime.

My Experience

In my first two years as a new grad travel therapist, I worked a total of over 400 hours of overtime! That’s an average of about 4 hours per week, but that wasn’t distributed evenly. Most weeks I worked only 40 hours (even less in some cases), but then other weeks I worked as many as 65 hours when a facility was really desperate to have patients seen. That meant some really long weeks sometimes, but I was very happy with the extra money!

Facilities/managers will often approve a couple of hours of overtime per week for a traveler, but there are rare cases where they will approve as much overtime as is needed. When those times came around, I took advantage!

Is Working Overtime Worth it as a Travel Therapist?

Whether or not it’s worth it to work overtime as a travel therapist depends on a couple of factors:

  1. How much you’re earning for each hour of overtime that you work based on your contract.
  2. How eager you are to make extra money.

A mistake that I made early on as a travel therapist was not negotiating a higher overtime rate, or even realizing that it was negotiable. As I mentioned above, the travel company can often make $100/hour or more when a traveler works overtime, because the facility pays out 1.5x the full bill rate, but that doesn’t mean that the extra money goes to the traveler automatically. In fact, in most cases the traveler will make only 1.5x their taxable pay rate, which often means overtime pay in the $30-$35/hour range. This means the amount they’re making for overtime hours is actually less than the amount they make during normal hours. How does that work exactly? Because during normal hours, we get paid our hourly taxable pay + our stipend pay. Whereas, if we’re only making 1.5x the hourly taxable rate with no additional stipends for the overtime hours, the overtime pay is actually less than the normal pay. In this case, the extra money is made mostly by the travel company, not the traveler, because the facility is still paying the travel company 1.5x the full bill rate.

This happened to me in the beginning, but I quickly wised up and you should too if you’re planning to work overtime. I recommend that you negotiate at least 2x (ideally 3x or more) your normal taxable pay for working overtime hours. Keep in mind that stipends can’t be increased when working overtime, because there is a max amount of stipends you’re legally allowed to earn each week regardless of working over 40 hours, but a multiple of the hourly rate should be possible. Another option that some companies do instead of writing in a certain hourly rate for the overtime hours is they’ll arrange for you to receive an additional bonus at the end of the contract for any overtime hours worked, which equals out to the extra money you should be receiving on an hourly basis for each hour worked. This has been the case with one company we’ve worked with. However, if a company tells me overtime rates are not negotiable period, then that’s a deal breaker for me in terms of working with that travel company.

Many travel therapists have no desire to work overtime. Since we already make a lot more money than at permanent positions in most cases, these travelers don’t see the need to work extra hours. This is especially the case in desirable areas where working longer hours takes away from time that could be spent exploring! This is completely understandable, and if you value your free time more than you value the extra money that you’d make while working overtime, then feel free to decline the hours. A facility can’t require that you work hours that aren’t in your contract, so you’re in the drivers seat in this situation.

Conclusion

If you look for opportunities to work overtime as a travel therapist, you can usually get some extra hours depending on the facility and location. Whether or not the extra hours are worth it depends on you and your priorities.

If there is at all any potential for you to work overtime based on what you hear during the phone interview, make sure to negotiate a higher rate for those hours than the standard 1.5x hourly taxable rate. Don’t get taken advantage of by the travel company earning a lot of extra money for your overtime hours like I did when starting out! If the travel company/recruiter that you’re working with isn’t willing to work with you to find a fair amount for your overtime work, then there are plenty of other fish in the sea!

If you’d like some recommendations for recruiters/companies that we’ve had success working with, then reach out to us here and tell us about your main priorities as a travel therapist, and we’ll match you with a good fit. If you have any other questions about travel therapy or overtime pay, contact us!