A curated set of 5 tools for travel nurses and traveling allied-health clinicians — RT, PT, OT, rad tech, lab, surg tech — who take short agency assignments and weigh one set of offers against the next. Rank the offers on what actually lands in your bank each week, then decide the contract, negotiate it, or weigh it against a permanent role or a different city altogether.
A travel assignment doesn't get chosen badly because nobody worked hard enough. Often it comes down to the blended rate, because that's the number a recruiter reads out first and the answer is wanted quickly. The tools here move the comparison to the part that actually decides what you keep: the rent in that city, the trips home, the license fee, and how your own answer to the tax-home question changes the ranking.
The Travel-Nurse Contract & Pay-Package Comparison Workbook is the shelf's flagship for this audience: an 11-tab spreadsheet — Excel plus a one-click native Google Sheets copy, and it opens fine in LibreOffice too — that takes four assignment offers apart into taxable rate, stipends and the real cost of being there, then ranks them on net in the bank rather than the blended rate a recruiter quotes, including a switch you set yourself that reprices every stipend as ordinary wages if your answer to the tax-home question is no. Try the free Travel-Nurse Two-Offer Comparison first — no signup — before you buy the four-offer version.
Once the contract math is settled, the rest of the shelf covers the decisions around it. The Job Offer Decision Helper scores a permanent staff position against a travel contract on your own weighted criteria, not the pay alone. The Salary & Job-Offer Negotiation Toolkit builds the counter and the ask once you know what an offer should be worth. The Career-Pivot: Job vs Self-Employment Decision Helper is for the traveler weighing another assignment against going independent. And the Where to Retire Decision Helper is for the traveler who's started asking where all this moving is actually pointing.
New to the vocabulary? Start with what a travel-nurse pay package is made of, then read blended rate vs take-home pay for the gap between the number in the job posting and the one that actually lands in your bank.
None of this is tax or employment advice. The workbook helps you compare offers and see where your own facts might move the answer; whether a specific stipend is tax-free for you is a determination only you and a qualified tax professional can make.
Recommended templates
5 templates
A four-offer pay-package comparison workbook for the contract itself, plus weighted decision helpers for staying on assignment vs a permanent role, negotiating the number, going independent, and where to settle down — in Excel and Google Sheets.
Compare four travel-nursing offers on what actually lands in your bank — after that city's rent, your trips home, the license fee and your own tax situation.
Compare competing job offers with a weighted decision matrix — score pay, benefits, growth, commute & fit, and rank offers by overall fit.
Negotiate your job offer with a total-comp calculator, a prep worksheet, a counter builder, and 11 email & phone scripts — a workbook you own for Excel & Sheets.
Score staying in your job against going self-employed — with the self-employment tax, the benefits you lose and the unpaid hours worked out, not guessed.
Compare up to five places you might retire to — including staying put — with a weighted scorecard that computes each one's true annual cost and tax bill.
Where we fit
Most tools force a choice between a blank spreadsheet you build from scratch and a monthly app that's overkill. Ardent Workshop is the rung in between — structure you own.
Free, but you build and maintain every formula, tab and layout yourself.
Owned, structured, connected workbooks — a one-time price, yours to keep.
Powerful, but overkill, rented and locked-in — built for someone bigger than you.
Reading list
The five-step method for putting two travel contracts side by side, plus the same counting logic applied to a salaried offer and to the negotiation that follows.
Recruiters quote one weekly number, and two offers quoted the same way can differ by thousands over a contract. Here is the five-step method for rebuilding both offers on the same basis until one of them clearly wins.
Two good offers, one decision. Here's the total-comp math an offer letter hides, and how to score both offers instead of agonizing for a week.
A salary negotiation guide with research benchmarks, scripts for the four hardest conversations, and the line that separates a confident counter from a lost offer.
