About LocumPayLab

LocumPayLab is an independent educational site about how locum tenens pay actually works after tax. It exists because the information clinicians rely on to make six-figure decisions is almost entirely produced by the people selling them the contracts.

The problem we are trying to fix

Search for locum tenens rates and you will find agency blogs, agency job boards, agency-sponsored "guides", and calculators whose real purpose is to capture your phone number. The numbers on those pages are not necessarily false. They are selected. A day rate is quoted because it is the largest number available; a state is called high-paying because the agency has vacancies there; the phrase "you can write everything off" appears because explaining self-employment tax would complicate the sale.

Meanwhile the questions clinicians actually have — what does $1,600 a day net after self-employment tax in this state, is an S-corp worth it at my income, how much do I set aside each quarter, who buys the tail — get answered in forum threads by people guessing in good faith.

What this site does

Two things, and nothing else:

• A take-home calculator that converts a 1099 contract rate into spendable cash by applying 2026 self-employment tax, federal brackets, state income tax and the business expenses you actually carry — then compares the result against an employed salary and against an S-corporation election.
• Written guides on the parts of the system that cost people money — self-employment tax, quarterly estimates, deductible expenses, malpractice tail cover, entity structure and retirement plans.

Everything is written for locum tenens specifically: physicians, physician associates, nurse practitioners and nurse anesthetists on 1099 contracts. There is a great deal of travel nursing and travel therapy content on the internet already, and the tax structure there is completely different — those roles are W-2 employees with tax-free stipends, a mechanism that does not exist in a 1099 locum arrangement. Applying that content here produces wrong answers, which is part of why this site exists.

Independence, in concrete terms

Independence is easy to claim, so here is what it means here:

• We are not a staffing agency and we are not affiliated with one.
• We take no agency referral fees. There are no agency partnerships, no sponsored placements, no "recommended agency" lists, and no affiliate links to recruiters. If that ever changes it will be disclosed on this page before it appears anywhere else.
• We do not collect your contact details. The calculator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type into it is transmitted anywhere, and there is no lead form on this site.
• We do not publish agency-sourced rate tables. Advertised rates on unfilled job postings are a systematically optimistic sample, and presenting them as market data would be misleading. Where we rank states, we hold the contract constant and vary only the tax code, and we show our arithmetic.
• The site is funded by display advertising and affiliate links in four categories — malpractice cover, entity formation, bookkeeping software and disability insurance. Those are disclosed, labelled where they appear, and never placed inside editorial text as if they were recommendations we were paid nothing to make. The affiliate disclosure sets out exactly how this works.
• Commercial relationships do not affect editorial content. No advertiser or affiliate partner has involvement in, or advance sight of, anything published here. If an ad for a staffing agency appears next to an article about agency contract clauses, that is the ad network doing its job, not an endorsement.

How we handle numbers

This is money and tax content, which means an error here can cost a reader real money. The standards we hold ourselves to:

• Primary sources. Tax figures come from the Internal Revenue Code, the IRS, the Social Security Administration, the GSA and state revenue departments, or from the Tax Foundation where it compiles those schedules. Every article lists its sources with links.
• Dated and versioned. The 2026 tax parameters that drive the calculator live in a single openly readable file with the source of each number cited inline. You can check our arithmetic, and we would rather you did.
• Computed, not asserted. Every worked example and every table on this site is produced by the same calculator you can use, with its inputs stated. Where a figure is our own calculation rather than a published statistic, it is labelled as such.
• Limits stated, not buried. The calculator does not model tax credits, itemised deductions, multi-state apportionment, state gross receipts taxes, pass-through entity taxes or paid-leave levies. We say so on the page rather than in a footnote, and we flag the specific states where an omission is likely to matter.
• No invented data. Where we do not have a defensible source, we say we do not have one. That is why you will not find a specialty-by-specialty rate table here.
• Corrections. If you find an error, tell us and we will fix it and note the change. That is the deal.

What this site is not

LocumPayLab is not a tax preparer, an accounting firm, a law firm, an insurance broker or a financial adviser, and nothing here is advice about your particular situation. Reasonable compensation for an S-corporation, tax home determinations and entity choice in particular are facts-and-circumstances questions where only your specific facts matter. The right move before your first contract — and before any decision with real money attached — is a conversation with a CPA or enrolled agent who works with independent clinicians. Please read the full disclaimer.

What is coming

The tool most locums ask for does not exist yet: a genuinely independent, anonymous rate database, where clinicians submit real contracts and can see what comparable assignments actually pay, without an agency in the middle. That is planned, and the calculator has been built so submissions and comparisons can be added without rewriting the arithmetic. It only works with enough contributors to be meaningful, so it will arrive when there is an audience to populate it.