When new grads call us, the first question is almost always a version of the same worry: can you even do travel therapy without experience, and what would it actually pay? The honest answer surprises most of them. Your first year as a travel PT can pay remarkably close to what a therapist with a decade on the road earns — and the reason has nothing to do with your resume.
A new-grad travel PT typically earns about $1,800 to $3,000+ per week gross — often around $2,100 on an average assignment — with skilled nursing running roughly $1,900 to $2,400. Because pay tracks the facility's bill rate rather than years of experience, your first-year number can look a lot like a veteran's.
Why Bill Rate — Not Experience — Sets Your Pay
The single most important thing to understand about travel pay is that it does not work like a permanent salary. A staff job pays you for tenure: years of experience, raises, seniority. A travel contract pays you out of the facility's bill rate — the flat hourly amount the facility has agreed to pay for a licensed therapist in that role, right now, to cover an immediate need.
That bill rate is set by the facility's need and the local market, not by your years in the field. A new grad and a PT with ten years of experience filling the same 13-week contract are often paid very similarly, because the facility is paying for the coverage, not the resume. This is the part that catches new grads off guard — and it is exactly why travel can be so financially compelling early in a career.
Not how it works. Travel pay is built on the contract's bill rate, which is tied to the facility's need and market — not to your experience level. Two therapists on the same contract, one fresh out of school and one a decade in, are frequently paid within a few dollars of each other. Your job as a new grad is to pick contracts with strong bill rates, not to "wait until you have experience" to earn well.
What New Grads Actually Earn by Setting
Across our assignments, weekly pay packages generally run from $2,000 to $3,500 per week gross, with the average new assignment landing around $2,100 per week. For new grads specifically, most packages fall in the $1,800 to $3,000+ per week range. The variation comes from setting, specialty, and how badly a given market needs coverage — not from your experience level.
By setting, the pattern we see for first-year travelers looks like this:
- Skilled nursing (SNF): roughly $1,900 to $2,400 per week. SNF has the highest volume of new-grad-friendly openings, which is why it is where a lot of first-year travelers start.
- Outpatient, acute care, home health, and school-based: these land across the broader $1,800 to $3,000+ range, depending on demand and location. High-demand and rural markets tend to sit toward the top.
Quick reality check: the average new assignment across our board runs about $2,100 per week gross, and new grads sit squarely inside that range. Experience shapes which contracts you feel comfortable taking over time, but it is not what sets the weekly number on any single contract.
Those are ranges, not promises — the number for a specific contract depends on the facility and the market. If you want an estimate for your discipline, setting, and target state, our pay calculator will get you closer than any general range can.
Taxable Wage vs. Stipends: Where Your Take-Home Comes From
That weekly package number is not one lump of taxable salary. Every travel pay package has two parts:
- A taxable hourly wage — treated like a normal paycheck, with federal, state, Social Security, and Medicare taxes withheld before you see it.
- Non-taxable stipends — reimbursements for the housing, meals, and incidentals you take on by working away from home. These arrive untaxed, which is what makes the take-home on a travel package so strong.
The catch: the stipend portion is only tax-free if you maintain a legitimate tax home, which means satisfying at least two of the IRS's three factors. If you do not have a qualifying tax home, those stipends become taxable and the math changes significantly. We walk through exactly how that works in our travel therapy tax guide.
Here is what the split does to real take-home: a roughly $2,100 gross package nets somewhere around $2,040 to $2,080 per week in take-home, because most of the package arrives untaxed. That is the number that actually lands in your account — and it is why comparing travel to a permanent salary on gross alone is misleading. For a fuller breakdown of how these packages are built and compared, see our guide to travel therapy pay packages.
Travel vs. a Permanent First Job: The Real Comparison
A permanent new-grad PT job typically pays about $65,000 to $75,000 per year. Spread across the year, that is roughly $1,250 to $1,450 per week — and it is fully taxable, so take-home is lower still.
Compare that to a travel package netting around $2,040 to $2,080 per week in take-home. The weekly gap is substantial, and it compounds week after week. Three stacked 13-week contracts can put your first year into six figures gross — an outcome that is essentially unavailable in a permanent first-year role. The difference is not that travelers are paid more for being new; it is that the pay is structured around bill rate and untaxed stipends rather than a fixed starting salary.
That does not make travel automatically the right call for every new grad. Permanent jobs offer structured mentorship, a slower ramp, and staying put. But purely on the money, first-year travel is in a different tier, and the reason traces straight back to the bill-rate structure and the untaxed stipend portion. If you are weighing whether travel makes sense straight out of school, our new grad travel therapy guide covers the non-money considerations honestly.
How to Estimate Your Own Number
General ranges are useful for orientation, but your number depends on specifics. Here is how to get to it:
- Pick your setting and target markets. Bill rates vary by both. SNF openings are the most plentiful for new grads; high-demand or rural markets tend to pay toward the top of the range.
- Confirm your tax-home situation. This determines whether the stipend portion is tax-free — the single biggest lever on your take-home. If you are not sure, read the tax guide before you assume the full package is yours to keep.
- Run real numbers. Plug your discipline, setting, and target state into our pay calculator to get a package estimate grounded in current rates rather than a broad range.
- Look at what is posted right now. The fastest reality check is seeing live packages for your discipline and setting — the buttons below will take you straight to open assignments and a pay estimate.
The takeaway for new grads: your lack of experience is not the ceiling on your travel pay you might assume it is. Because pay follows the bill rate, first-year travelers routinely earn within striking distance of seasoned ones. Understand the taxable-versus-stipend split, keep a legitimate tax home, and estimate with real numbers instead of guesses — and you will know what your first year can actually pay.