Guides · Market data

Highest-Paying States for Travel Therapists 2026 (PT/OT/SLP)

Published 19 May 2026Updated 3 August 202611 min read

"Take the Texas contract, there's no state tax" is the most repeated piece of advice in travel therapy, and it is mostly wrong — not because the tax difference is imaginary, but because it is an order of magnitude smaller than the thing people ignore while chasing it.

To put a number on it, we ran one identical package through all fifty states and the District of Columbia using 2026 tax law. Every figure below comes from the same calculation engine that powers the TravelPayLab calculator, so you can reproduce any row yourself.

The headline finding

The gap between the best state and the worst is $95 a week — about $1,235 over a thirteen-week contract. That is real money. It is also less than a $100-a-week difference in housing stipend, which is a routine variation between two agencies recruiting for the same job in the same city.

The reason is structural: on this package only 40% of the money is taxable at all. State income tax applies to $1,280 of a $2,595 week. A state with a 5% effective rate is taking about $64 from you, not $130. Halving your state tax bill saves less than winning one modest stipend negotiation.

Full 2026 ranking, all 51 jurisdictions

TravelPayLab analysis, run 3 August 2026. State parameters from the Tax Foundation's 2026 state income tax tables (single filers), re-verified against state revenue departments and corrected for five states that changed their 2026 law after February — Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina, Utah and California. Federal figures from IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32; FICA from the SSA 2026 fact sheet. Excludes local income taxes, state payroll levies and pre-tax deductions.

Five things the table hides

North Dakota is a zero at this income, not a no-tax state

North Dakota does levy an income tax, but its 2026 schedule starts at 0% and the first bracket does not begin until $48,475 of taxable income. After the $16,100 standard deduction, this package's $61,440 of taxable wages falls below the threshold, so the bill is genuinely zero. Raise the taxable rate substantially and it stops being zero — which is a neat illustration of how sensitive these rankings are to the taxable/stipend split rather than to the state alone.

California is 18th, not 51st

California's reputation comes from its top marginal rate of 13.3%, which applies above $1 million. At the income a travel therapist's taxable wages actually reach, California's graduated schedule plus its $5,706 standard deduction and personal credit produce a bill of about $1,726 — better than half the country. What genuinely costs money in California is State Disability Insurance, withheld on every dollar of wages with no cap, which is a payroll tax rather than an income tax and is therefore not in this table. Note also that the FTB had not published its inflation-indexed 2026 thresholds when we ran this, so the figure uses the most recent published schedule and will come down slightly.

South Carolina rewrote its tax code mid-year, and it matters

H.4216 (Act 110), signed 30 March 2026, replaced South Carolina's old graduated schedule with two brackets — 1.99% under $30,000 and 5.21% above — moved the starting point to federal AGI, and introduced a $15,000 SC Income Adjusted Deduction for single filers. On this package that took the state bill from roughly $2,529 to $1,454 and moved South Carolina from the bottom third of the table into a tie for 13th. It is the largest single move in the 2026 rankings and almost nothing written before April 2026 reflects it.

Local income taxes reorder the bottom half

Ohio looks excellent at 11th on state tax alone. Most Ohio municipalities levy their own income tax of 1% to 3% on wages earned in the city, and at 2.5% the same package drops to $2,338 a week — from 11th to somewhere around 37th. Maryland is worse: every county adds roughly 2.25% to 3.20%, and at 3.2% the package falls to $2,295, below Oregon. Pennsylvania's near-universal local Earned Income Tax has the same effect. If your assignment is in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan or Missouri, add the local rate before you compare.

Oregon's last place is overstated

Oregon allows a subtraction for federal income tax paid, capped annually, which is not modelled here and which reduces real Oregon bills below the figure shown. Oregon is still the most expensive state on this package; it is not $4,546-of-tax expensive.

What actually determines a high-paying assignment

If state income tax is worth up to $95 a week, three other things are worth considerably more.

The GSA per diem ceiling for the city. Stipends are anchored to federal per diem rates, which vary from the $110-a-night standard CONUS lodging rate to several times that in the most expensive metros. A high-rate city supports a package hundreds of dollars a week larger — and the cost of living that justifies the rate is partly avoidable if you are willing to live modestly for thirteen weeks. This is the single biggest lever in the whole equation. See our guide to GSA rates.

Local demand and setting. Rural skilled nursing and home health assignments in unglamorous markets consistently pay above urban outpatient work, because that is where the shortage is. The BLS state occupational wage estimates for physical therapists, occupational therapists and speech-language pathologists are a reasonable proxy for baseline market rates, but they measure permanent staff, not crisis coverage — and crisis coverage is what travellers are paid for.

Licensure friction. States that are slow or expensive to license have thinner traveller supply and better rates. The compacts change this: the PT Compact, the OT Compact and the ASLP-IC each let eligible clinicians work in participating states via a privilege rather than a full licence, which lowers the barrier and, over time, compresses the premium in participating states.

Method and limits

State tables go stale faster than anyone expects. The most widely cited 2026 state tax compilation was current as of 11 February 2026. By August, five states in this table had changed: Arkansas cut its top rate to 3.7% in a May special session, Georgia's HB 463 cut the flat rate to 4.99% on 11 May, Utah's S.B. 60 took the flat rate to 4.45%, and South Carolina rebuilt its entire system — all four retroactive to 1 January 2026. If you are reading a state pay comparison anywhere, check when it was last verified.

One package, one filing status, one set of assumptions. Change any of them and the ordering shifts — most dramatically if you change the taxable/tax-free split, because that determines how much income each state gets to tax in the first place. The table excludes local income taxes, state disability and paid-leave payroll contributions, pre-tax deductions, credits and multi-state filing, and it uses single-filer parameters for every state. It is a comparison tool, not a tax return.

To model your own offer with your own state and filing status, use the travel therapy pay calculator — it applies the same 2026 data and includes an optional local tax field.

Sources