How the pay index is computed, and how to read it as a salary

The weekly figures on this site are medians of the pay advertised on open travel contracts in its publisher's own job list, taken from a stored copy of that list and rounded to a whole dollar. They are a dated snapshot of one agency's contracts, not a survey of what employers pay over a year, so read them as weekly gross and convert them with care.

By ProTherapy Staffing, published October 26, 2026.

What does the pay index actually measure?

It measures the weekly gross that open travel contracts are advertised at: taxable wages plus any housing and meals stipends, before tax. ProTherapy Staffing, which publishes this site, posts those contracts in a public job list, and the index reads only the columns that list makes public: discipline, state, city, setting, advertised weekly pay and start date.

That makes it a snapshot of the travel market as one agency's open contracts show it, on a stated date. It is not an annual salary, not take-home pay and not what any traveler earned across a year. The list holds no facility names and no bill rates, so neither shapes a figure.

How is it different from a government wage survey?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics builds its occupational wage estimates from a survey of employers, and those estimates cover wage and salary workers across all employers. They describe what an occupation earns in a year, whether or not anyone in it travels.

The pay index asks a narrower question: what are travel contracts on this list advertised at right now? It has no survey sample to weight and no estimate for employers it cannot see. The trade-off is scope. It covers one agency's open contracts, so a state where that agency holds few contracts gets no median at all rather than a modelled one, and the figures say nothing about staff jobs.

Which contracts are counted, and which are left out?

Before any figure is computed, the list is cleaned in a fixed order.

A contract listed under several settings counts toward each setting it names. Setting counts therefore overlap and should never be summed into a total for the whole list.

If you want to know what a contract in your discipline and state would pay you across a year, ask a ProTherapy recruiter: Find my next contract.

How is a median taken, rounded and held back?

The advertised weekly pay of every contract in a slice, such as travel PT in one state, is put in order and the middle value is taken. With an even count, the pair in the middle is averaged. The result is rounded to the nearest whole dollar. No figure is weighted, projected, adjusted for experience or turned into a yearly number.

A slice needs a minimum number of contracts before it gets a median, and the state pages and the state ranking state that minimum beside their tables. Below it, a state page shows the advertised range and the count of openings; with no openings in a discipline, it shows the national median for that discipline, labelled as national. The ranking simply leaves such states out rather than rank them on a thin sample.

How current is a figure, and when does it change?

Every figure on the home page, the pay explorer, the state pages and the state ranking comes from the same stored copy of the job list, so they cannot disagree with one another. The date printed with them, after "pay data as of" or "pinned", is the date that copy was taken and saved. It comes from the stored copy itself, never from a computer file's timestamp, and pages are not rebuilt when that date cannot be established.

The copy is refreshed as a deliberate step in a release, not on a timer. The job list is read again, the release stops if too large a share of contracts arrive without a pay, every page built from the copy is rebuilt, and a checker recomputes each declared figure and stops the release if any of them disagrees. The publisher's how we verify page describes that check. Between refreshes the figures hold still, so read the date as the age of the picture.

How do you turn a weekly figure into a yearly view?

Multiply by the weeks you expect to be under contract, not by every week in the year, and keep the stipend part separate. Stipends stay untaxed only while you keep a tax home under the IRS travel expense rules, and they are commonly set against the GSA per diem rates for the locality. The annual salary guide walks through the weeks between contracts.

When you set a yearly travel figure beside a staff salary, remember that the figures were measured differently: one is a dated median of advertised weekly gross from one agency's list, the other a survey-based yearly wage across all employers. Neither is wrong. They answer different questions, and a fair comparison says which is which.

Frequently asked questions

Is the pay index an annual salary?

No. It is a weekly gross figure, the middle of the pay advertised on open travel contracts on a stated date. Multiply it by the weeks you will actually work, and keep the stipend part separate from taxable wages.

Why does the pay index differ from government wage figures?

They measure different things. The government figures come from a survey of employers and describe yearly wages for a whole occupation; the index is the middle of the weekly gross advertised on one agency's open travel contracts, taken from a stored copy of its job list.

Why does a state show openings but no median?

Because too few contracts sit behind it to support a median. The state page shows the advertised range and the count of openings instead, or the national median for the discipline, labelled as national.

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