How Much Is a Housing Stipend for Travel Nurses and Therapists?
The question usually arrives as "what's the average housing stipend?" — and the honest answer is that the average is the wrong thing to want. Not because the number is secret, but because a national average across counties whose federal lodging rates range from $110 a night to more than three times that describes nobody's contract.
None of this is specific to therapy. A travel nurse's stipend is benchmarked against the same federal lodging and meals rates, depends on the same tax home, and trades off against the taxable hourly rate in exactly the same way. The worked figures below use a therapy package; the method is the one to use on a nursing offer too. Where the two professions do differ is the size and shape of the package: see travel PT vs travel nurse pay.
What you actually want is a way to judge the number in front of you. That is three questions, and the third one is the one nobody asks.
Why we will not publish an average
You will find plenty of sites quoting one. They are almost always built from advertised rates on job boards, and that is a systematically optimistic sample: postings that are still open are disproportionately the ones nobody took, and the headline figure is usually the top of a range for the best-paying market in the set.
An average built that way tells you what agencies advertise, not what travellers are paid. We do not publish agency-sourced rate data anywhere on this site, and this is the page where it would be most tempting.
There is a defensible benchmark, and it is public: the federal per diem table. Use that instead.
The three things that set your number
1. The federal ceiling for that county
Stipends are structured around the GSA per diem rate for the locality where you work. For FY2026 the standard rate is $110 a night for lodging — roughly $770 a week — and several hundred higher-cost counties carry more, some of them seasonally.
This is why the same job title pays wildly different stipends in different cities, and why a big stipend is often a statement about local rents rather than about how good the contract is. Where the numbers come from, how to look up your assignment county and what happens above the rate are covered in GSA per diem rates — that is the reference page for the ceiling itself.
2. The bill rate and the agency's margin
The facility pays the agency an hourly bill rate. Out of it come your wages, your stipends, the employer's payroll taxes, any insurance and the agency's margin. Everything you are offered is carved from that one number, which is why the total package is far less negotiable than the split inside it. There is more on this in how to read a pay package.
3. The split you are quietly agreeing to
This is the one that gets skipped. Your stipend is not an independent number — it is one side of a division. The same total package can be quoted as a high taxable rate with a modest stipend, or a low taxable rate with a large one, and the two are not equally good for you.
What the split is worth
The same $2,595 a week, split four ways. PT, 40 hours, 48 weeks worked, Texas, single filer, tax home maintained — all figures from this site's calculator.
| Taxable rate | Weekly wages | Housing stipend | Untaxed share | Annual take-home |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $32/hr | $1,280 | $1,000 | 51% | $114,667 |
| $28/hr | $1,120 | $1,160 | 57% | $116,176 |
| $24/hr | $960 | $1,320 | 63% | $117,685 |
| $20/hr | $800 | $1,480 | 69% | $119,194 |
Identical gross package in every row. The spread from top to bottom is $4,527 a year, purely from where the line is drawn. That is why recruiters can offer to "restructure" a package and make it sound like a concession that costs them nothing — because it does cost them nothing.
Why you cannot just take the bottom row
Because the bottom row is not legal, and the cost of it landing on you is far more than $4,527.
A reimbursement is only outside wages if it is genuinely reimbursing an expense. An arrangement that shrinks the wage in order to inflate the untaxed portion is wage recharacterisation, addressed directly in Revenue Ruling 2012-25. Where it applies, the whole amount becomes taxable — and it is your return that gets adjusted, not the agency's.
Our calculator carries a floor for each discipline for this reason. Enter $28 an hour for a PT and it warns that the taxable base is on the low side; enter $24 and it says the rate looks too low for the discipline. Those flags are not about the money you take home. They are about whether the structure survives scrutiny.
What a cut taxable rate also costs you
Beyond the audit exposure, four things track the taxable wage and not the package: your overtime, which is computed on the base rate; the income a mortgage lender will underwrite; the earnings a disability policy replaces; and your Social Security credit. In the bottom row above, recorded wages are $38,400 against a $124,560 package. That gap is invisible until the year you need one of those four things.
A ninety-second test on the number you were quoted
- Look up the county. Get the FY2026 lodging and M&IE rates for the assignment location, not the state.
- Convert to weekly. Lodging × 7, M&IE × 7. The standard-rate combined figure is about $1,246 a week; a higher-cost county will be more.
- Compare. Your combined housing and M&IE stipend materially above that number, in a standard-rate market, has stepped outside the safe harbour and deserves a question. Materially below it means the agency is keeping margin you might be able to argue for.
- Then check the taxable rate on its own. Ignore the blended figure. Is the hourly rate one you would accept as a plain wage for the work, in that setting, with your licence? If not, the package is not as good as its total suggests.
Why two agencies quote different stipends for the same job
Usually not because one of them found extra money. Common reasons, roughly in order of how often they turn out to be the explanation:
- Different split, same total. One has moved money from the taxable rate. Compare take-home, not stipend.
- Different bill rate with the facility, or a different margin taken from it.
- One is quoting a weekly figure that assumes 40 hours and the other assumes 36, or one includes travel reimbursement in the headline and the other does not.
- One is using the county rate and the other the metro rate for an assignment on a boundary.
- One is including the M&IE stipend in the "housing" number when quoting quickly.
Asking for the four components separately, in writing, resolves nearly all of it in one message.
What is actually negotiable
The total is constrained by the bill rate, so the honest list is shorter than the forums suggest:
- The split, upward from a low taxable rate — always in the safe direction. Asking to move money into the taxable rate is a request no compliant agency will refuse, and it is the one nobody makes.
- Travel reimbursement, which is untaxed and often quoted below what the trip costs.
- Guaranteed hours, which are worth more than a stipend bump in a low-census season.
- The first and last week, where partial-week stipend treatment is frequently unclear until you ask.
If a recruiter offers to raise your stipend and says nothing about where it is coming from, that is the moment to ask what the taxable rate becomes.
What this page does not tell you
Whether the stipend is enough to live on in that city. That is a rent question, not a tax question, and it varies more than the federal table does — a stipend at the county ceiling can still be short in a market where short-term furnished lets carry a premium. Price the actual accommodation before you accept, and read company housing vs housing stipend for the cases where letting the agency house you is the better call.
And none of it applies at all unless you maintain a tax home — the condition the whole structure rests on, set out in what a housing stipend is and in detail in tax home, explained.
Sources
- U.S. General Services Administration, FY2026 per diem rates — standard CONUS $110 lodging / $68 M&IE and non-standard area rates.
- Internal Revenue Service, Revenue Ruling 2012-25 — wage recharacterisation and failure of the accountable plan rules.
- 26 CFR § 1.62-2 — accountable plan requirements.
- Internal Revenue Service, Rev. Proc. 2019-48 — per diem substantiation safe harbour.
- Take-home figures in the split table computed with this site's travel pay calculator on 2026 federal and state parameters; inputs stated above the table.
Test your own split
Put your quoted taxable rate and stipends into the pay calculator. It shows take-home rather than blended rate, and flags a taxable base that looks too low for your discipline.