Travel therapy pay in Texas, 2026

Texas levies no individual income tax, and a travel therapy contract nets more here than anywhere else — $31,556 over 13 weeks. The honest size of that advantage is $468 against California and $737 against New York. Worth having. Not worth planning a career around, and this page explains why the gap is so much smaller than it is for other healthcare contractors.

Figures below are produced by the same pay calculator you can run yourself, with the inputs stated. Tax data last reviewed 3 August 2026.

The number, on a standard package

PT, $32/hr taxable wage, 40 hours, $1,000 weekly housing stipend, $315 weekly M&IE, 13-week contract, single filer, qualifying tax home maintained:

The blended rate is $64.88 an hour and it pays $59.72. Across 48 weeks a year that is $116,513 of take-home — equivalent to a permanent Texas salary of $153,983 before tax.

Note what that equivalent salary figure does not say. The same contract in California is equivalent to a $168,122 permanent salary, because a permanent Californian job would be taxed on all of it. The travel structure is worth more in a high-tax state, which partly offsets the higher tax on the wage portion.

Why "no state income tax" is worth less here than you have been told

Because state income tax only touches the $1,280 of taxable wages, not the $2,595 package. Roughly half of travel therapy pay is untaxed stipend, so a state tax rate — any state tax rate — is applied to a base that is already halved.

Recruiters who lead with the no-income-tax angle are not lying. They are quoting a real advantage at roughly ten times its actual weight.

The Texas address problem

Texas comes up constantly in travel therapy tax discussions for a second reason: people are told to establish a Texas tax home to escape state tax entirely. This is where it goes wrong.

A qualifying tax home is not an address. It requires a genuine, regular place of abode that you maintain and return to, with duplicated living expenses while you are on assignment. A mailbox service, a relative's spare room you never use, or a driver's licence do not create one.

If the tax home fails, every stipend becomes taxable wages — even in Texas, where there is no state tax to save:

$5,105 on one contract — nearly seven times the entire state-choice advantage. A Texas tax home that does not stand up is worse than a genuine tax home in California. What a qualifying tax home actually requires →

Texas against the states travellers compare it to

Ninety cents an hour separates the best state from the worst of these three. A contract that pays $2 an hour more somewhere else has already erased the difference — which is the practical takeaway: negotiate the rate, not the map.

Also worth reading before a Texas contract

• Licences and compact privileges — whether this state participates in your discipline's compact changes both the cost and how long it takes to start.
• Tax home explained — the $5,105 question, and the reason Texas addresses get scrutinised.
• How to read a pay package — where the taxable and untaxed split is actually decided.
• GSA per diem rates — the ceiling on how much of your package can legitimately be untaxed.