A recruiter reads you a blended rate. It is a real number, and it is the wrong one to decide on — because it is quoted before the city, the state and your own tax situation have had their turn.
This workbook takes four assignment offers apart into the pieces a recruiter actually reads out, puts them back together as what lands in your bank each week, and ranks them. Not one package at a time, the way a free pay calculator does it. Four, side by side, on every tab.
It is built for travel nurses and traveling allied-health clinicians — RT, PT, OT, rad tech, lab, surg tech — anyone who has to answer this question again every time a contract ends.
Why a blended rate cannot answer this
A blended rate is the whole weekly package divided by your guaranteed hours. It cannot know three things that decide what you keep:
- What that city costs to live in for thirteen weeks. A housing stipend is only worth what is left after the rent it was meant to cover.
- What your own tax situation does to the parts of the package that are not automatically tax-free.
- Whether the guaranteed hours are really guaranteed, or just the number printed at the top of the contract.
Two offers can quote within a dollar of each other and land thousands apart. In the fictional worked example this ships with, the offer with the highest blended rate — and the biggest headline package of the four — finishes third once all three of those are accounted for.
What it computes
Offer Inputs takes each package apart: taxable hourly rate, guaranteed hours, overtime and on-call, both weekly stipends, the bonuses, the reimbursements, the unpaid orientation hours, the weekly agency deduction, and the assignment state’s tax rate.
Assignment Costs is the tab no pay calculator has. Eighteen lines for what taking that contract in that city actually costs you — the rent you will really pay, utilities, parking, getting around, trips home, the state license fee, certifications, the deposit you will not see again. The cost of keeping your permanent home is deliberately not on this tab; you pay that whether or not you take an assignment, and it belongs to the tax-home question instead.
Weekly Net is the engine. Gross package, less pre-tax deductions, less FICA and estimated federal and state tax on whatever is actually taxable, less what it costs you to be there. Then the number — net in the bank per week — and across the whole contract, per hour worked, and as a share of everything you were quoted.
The tab most people skip
Whether a stipend is tax-free at all usually turns on your tax home — broadly, on whether you genuinely maintain a permanent home and are duplicating your living costs while you are away. Where exactly that line falls in your case is a question for your own tax professional. Every free pay calculator simply assumes the answer is yes, because it has no way to ask.
Tax-Home Check asks. Twelve weighted questions, each with a note on what it is really looking at — and three of them count against you when the answer is yes, rather than for you. The result feeds one switch into the money tabs: set the stipends to taxable and they stop being tax-free money on all four offers in the same instant. In the worked example, that reverses the top two.
It cannot tell you whether you qualify, and it does not try. What it can do is show you, in your own numbers, what the answer is worth — and which offer you would be most exposed on.
What each offer is worth when it goes wrong
Contracts get cut, contracts get canceled, and some weeks you turn a shift down. Downside Scenarios reprices all four under each, and takes the worst as the floor. The rent does not fall when your hours do — and an offer whose guaranteed hours are only verbal loses that protection automatically, because the clause tab feeds that one line straight into the model.
Clause Red Flags rates eighteen pieces of contract language per offer, weighted by how much money each can cost you. Nothing there adds a dollar to any total. It is there so a thin margin does not quietly beat an offer you can actually rely on.
Own it, don’t rent it
Every free pay calculator forgets you the moment you close the tab. This one is still on your drive in thirteen weeks — and by then the Outcome Log has what your last assignments actually paid against what they promised, which is the only measured number in the file and the one no calculator can give you.
It works in Excel, in LibreOffice, and in Google Sheets as a ready-made native copy you open with one click. No import, nothing to repair on the way in.
Try the free version first
There is a free two-offer comparison sheet you can download right now — no email, no signup. It takes two offers, both stipends, the rent you will really pay, and one combined tax rate, and tells you which of the two actually pays more. It is the same method, running on two columns instead of four, and it is enough to show you why the higher blended rate is not always the better offer.
What the full workbook adds is everything the free sheet deliberately leaves out: two more offers, the eighteen assignment-cost lines, federal and state tax separated from FICA, the tax-home question, the per-diem check, the clause score, the three downside scenarios, and the outcome log.
What this workbook is not
This workbook does arithmetic on numbers you enter. It is not tax advice, employment advice, or a legal review of your contract, and no part of it can tell you whether you qualify to receive a stipend tax-free — only your own tax professional can, working from your own facts. Every tax figure is an estimate built from one effective rate you supply; it does not model brackets, credits, multi-state apportionment or your filing status. What it is good for is comparing offers under identical assumptions. Every figure in the four sample offers is invented, and the facilities and agencies in them do not exist.
