Free tool · for travel nurses weighing two assignment offers
Travel-Nurse Two-Offer Comparison
A recruiter quotes you a blended rate — the whole weekly package divided by your guaranteed hours. It is a real number and a poor one to decide on, because it is quoted before the city, the state and your own tax situation have had their turn. This free worksheet puts two offers side by side and reduces each to what actually lands in your bank: taxable wage, both stipends, the rent you enter for that city, and one combined tax rate. It opens on a worked example already filled in — two invented offers where the one with the higher blended rate is not the one that pays more — so you can watch the mechanism run before you type anything.
Take it with you — free, no signup
Direct download. No email, no account — just the files.
What it does
- Two offers side by side, each broken into the parts a recruiter reads out: taxable hourly rate, guaranteed hours, weekly housing stipend and weekly meals-and-incidentals stipend.
- Computes the blended hourly rate the job ad leads with, then keeps going: one combined tax rate you set, applied to the taxable wage only, with the stipends treated as tax-free.
- Subtracts the weekly cost of actually being there — the rent you enter for that city, plus everything else — for net in the bank per week and across the contract.
- Names which of the two pays more, and by how much, in a formula that recomputes the moment you change a number.
- Opens pre-filled with a complete worked example, so nothing starts blank.
- Opens in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice — no macros, no signup, and the figures you type stay in your own file.
Related reading
Own it, don't rent it
Sitting on more than two offers?
This free sheet compares two offers on one combined tax rate. The full workbook compares four, itemizes what the contract costs you to take across eighteen lines, separates federal, state and FICA, and walks the twelve tax-home questions that sit behind whether stipends can be treated as tax-free — answer them one way and every stipend on every offer is repriced as ordinary wages at once. It adds an eighteen-clause contract red-flag score, three downside repricings, and an outcome log for what each assignment actually paid: an 11-tab workbook you keep (Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice) plus five guides.
A one-time purchase you keep and reopen for the next assignment, and the one after that — the structured workbook between a blank spreadsheet and a web calculator that forgets you when you close the tab.
Arithmetic on numbers you enter — not tax, legal or employment advice. It treats the stipends as tax-free, which is an assumption you are making rather than a finding it produces, and it cannot tell you whether you qualify to receive a stipend tax-free. The example offers are invented; any resemblance to a real facility or agency is coincidental. Free to use; please don't resell or redistribute.