About TravelPayLab

TravelPayLab is an independent educational site about how travel therapy and allied health pay actually works. It exists because the information travellers rely on to make five-figure decisions is almost entirely produced by the people selling them the contracts.

The problem we are trying to fix

Search for "travel PT pay" and you will find agency blogs, agency job boards, agency-sponsored "guides," and calculators whose real purpose is to capture your phone number. The numbers on those pages are not necessarily false. They are selected. A blended rate is quoted because it is the largest number available; a state is called high-paying because the agency has vacancies there; a tax-free stipend is described as free money because explaining wage recharacterisation would complicate the sale.

Meanwhile the questions travellers actually have — what does this offer net after tax in this state, is a $22 taxable rate a problem, what happens to my stipends if I extend past a year — get answered in comment threads by people guessing in good faith.

What this site does

Two things, and nothing else:

• A pay calculator that splits a package into taxable wages and tax-free stipends, applies real 2026 federal, FICA and state tax rates, shows the contract and annual totals, converts the result into an equivalent permanent salary, and flags patterns associated with wage recharacterisation.
• Written guides on the parts of the system that cost people money — tax homes, GSA per diem rates, contract clauses, housing decisions and the whole-year arithmetic.

Everything is written for therapy and allied health specifically: physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech-language pathology, respiratory therapy, imaging and laboratory. There is a great deal of travel nursing content on the internet already, and while the tax rules are identical, the market, the settings, the reimbursement drivers and the pay structures are not.

Independence, in concrete terms

Independence is easy to claim, so here is what it means here:

• We are not a staffing agency and we are not affiliated with one.
• We do not take referral fees. There are no agency partnerships, no sponsored placements, no "recommended agency" lists, and no affiliate links to recruiters.
• We do not collect your contact details. The calculator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type into it is transmitted anywhere, and there is no lead form on this site.
• We do not publish agency-sourced rate tables. Advertised rates on unfilled job postings are a systematically optimistic sample, and presenting them as market data would be misleading.
• The site is funded by display advertising. Advertisers have no involvement in, or advance sight of, anything published here. If an ad for a staffing agency appears next to an article criticising staffing agency practices, that is the ad network doing its job, not an endorsement.

How we handle numbers

This is money and tax content, which means an error here can cost a reader real money. The standards we hold ourselves to:

• Primary sources. Tax figures come from the IRS, the Social Security Administration, the GSA and state revenue departments, or from the Tax Foundation where it compiles those schedules. Wage data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Every article lists its sources with links.
• Dated and versioned. The 2026 tax parameters that drive the calculator live in a single openly readable file with the source of each number cited inline. You can check our arithmetic.
• Limits stated, not buried. The calculator does not model pre-tax deductions, credits, itemised deductions, multi-state filing, state disability and paid-leave payroll levies, or local income taxes beyond an optional manual field. We say so on the page rather than in a footnote.
• No invented data. Where we do not have a defensible source, we say we do not have one. Where a figure is our own calculation rather than a published statistic, it is labelled as such.
• Corrections. If you find an error, tell us and we will fix it and note the change. That is the deal.

What this site is not

TravelPayLab is not a tax preparer, an accounting firm, a law firm or a financial adviser, and nothing here is advice about your particular situation. Tax home determinations in particular are facts-and-circumstances questions where only your specific facts matter. The right move before your first contract — and before any decision with real money attached — is a conversation with a tax professional who specialises in travel healthcare. Please read the full disclaimer.

What is coming

The tool most travellers ask for does not exist yet: a genuinely independent, anonymous pay database, where clinicians submit real packages and can see what comparable contracts actually pay, without an agency in the middle. That is planned, and the calculator has been built so that submissions and comparisons can be added without rewriting the arithmetic. It only works with enough contributors to be meaningful, so it will arrive when there is an audience to populate it.