About
A pay benchmark you can audit
PayBeacon exists because travel-healthcare pay is famously opaque — every number you find is a recruiter's quote or an anonymous forum post. We wanted a benchmark that anyone could check.
So we built one from the public record. We take the government's own wage surveys (BLS), the contract-labor rates hospitals report to the government (CMS), and the rate caps states publish, and we turn them into a transparent, pre-tax gross-wage benchmark. Every input is public, every assumption is labeled, and every page links the raw data.
Reproducible by design
PayBeacon is an independent, automation-first public-data benchmark. A deterministic pipeline recomputes 1,542 benchmarks from configured government-source vintages. Source rollovers and material model changes are reviewed before publication; no generative model writes or changes the numbers.
Where the numbers come from
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — OEWS: occupation and metro wage medians, percentiles and employment. Public domain.
- CMS — HCRIS hospital cost reports: facility contract-labor hours and dollars, from which we derive the contract premium. U.S. Government Work; our derived figures are not attributable to CMS.
- State agencies: published maximum agency/temporary-staffing rates, used as legal ceilings.
The full model, assumptions and limitations live on the methodology page.
Important
Every figure on PayBeacon is a modeled gross-wage benchmark before taxes, not a package, paycheck, job offer, quote, or guarantee. It excludes stipends and premium-pay components; always confirm actual terms with an agency or facility.
Contact
Questions, corrections, or data partnerships? Email hello@travelpaybeacon.com. If you spot a number that looks off, tell us — it's all reproducible, so we can trace it.
PayBeacon — the contract-pay benchmark you can audit.