Blended Rate Calculator

It’s your total weekly pay — wages plus per diem — divided by the hours you actually work. Traveling trades offers mix the two, so comparing hourly rates alone is misleading: per diem isn’t taxed (when it qualifies), so a dollar of per diem is worth more than a dollar of wages. The blended rate puts every offer on one scale.

Yes. Hours past 40 in a week are paid at 1.5×, which is how the law treats non-exempt craft work, and the calculator applies it by default — a 50-hour week at $35/hr is $1,925, not $1,750. Turn the overtime box off if a particular job pays straight time. Per diem is separate: it’s usually paid per day, seven days a week, whether or not you work.

Take-home is what actually hits your bank after taxes. Because qualifying per diem isn’t taxed, a dollar of per diem lands in your pocket whole, while a dollar of wages is trimmed first — so the calculator estimates your weekly take-home at the tax rate you set, and shows the gross-up: how much extra taxable pay it would take to match your tax-free per diem.

Two travelers working the same job site can each collect wages and per diem. Turn on the household option to add your partner’s offer and see your combined blended rate, combined take-home, and how much of the household check is tax-free — the real number a traveling couple lives on.

Generally no — but only when it qualifies. Three things have to be true: you have a real tax home you’re travelling away from, the assignment is temporary (expected to last a year or less), and the rate is within the federal GSA ceiling for that work location. Miss any one and some or all of it becomes taxable wages. Anything paid above the GSA ceiling for the location is generally taxable even when the rest qualifies. This is general information, not tax advice — your preparer decides your situation.

It depends on the location, because the federal GSA ceiling does. That ceiling is the practical benchmark: it’s the most an employer can pay you per day tax-free for that city, and many traveling jobs are written right at or near it. Rates commonly run somewhere between about $100 and $180 a day depending on the market, with high-cost metros higher. Check the ceiling for the actual job location rather than assuming a national number.

Sixty — six days at ten hours. That’s twenty hours of overtime in a week, which is why schedule matters as much as rate on a traveling job: at $35/hr a 6x10 grosses about $2,450 in wages before per diem, against $1,400 for a straight forty. Enter your real hours per week above and the calculator does that math, including the 1.5× on everything past forty.

That’s a different question, and this calculator can’t answer it — it does the math on the offer in front of you, not the market around it. The Pay Negotiator, included with any Paid profile, draws on RoadWage — our proprietary pay-and-demand system — to give you the going rate for your trade in your state, what each grade pays (helper through journeyman to foreman), whether work there is busy or slow, the per diem actually being offered, and talking points built from those numbers.