Salary Guides · 2026
Travel COTA Salary 2026: What Travel COTAs Make
Travel certified occupational therapy assistants (COTAs) net a minimum of $70,000 a year after taxes with Gold Coast in 2026. On October 7, 2026, the 150 travel COTA contracts on our job board listed $1,442 to $2,200 a week in gross pay. Staff COTAs earn a median of $72,300 a year before taxes (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025).
2026 Snapshot
Travel COTA Pay in 2026
Three numbers answer the question, and each one measures something different:
| What it measures | Figure and source |
|---|---|
| Take-home pay, Gold Coast travel COTAs | $70,000+ a year, net after taxes (minimum) Gold Coast, 2026 |
| Weekly gross, travel COTA contracts | $1,442 to $2,200 a week, median $1,569 150 contracts on the Gold Coast job board, October 7, 2026 |
| Staff COTA salary, nationwide | $72,300 a year median, before taxes ($34.76 an hour) BLS, May 2025 |
| Staff COTA salary, middle 80 percent | $51,490 to $89,780 a year BLS, May 2025 |
Read them side by side, not as one scale. The board figure is a weekly package before taxes, and it usually includes tax-free housing and meal stipends. The BLS figure counts taxable wages only. The Gold Coast figure is what lands in your account after taxes.
Four things move a contract within the board's range:
- State and city. California contracts on our board carry a median of $1,820 a week, the highest of any state with three or more listings. Stipends track local housing costs.
- Setting. Home health and skilled nursing pay staff COTAs the most nationally (BLS, May 2025). The setting table is below.
- Urgency. A facility that needed someone last month pays more than one filling a planned opening.
- Experience. New graduates start near the bottom of a range. A year of experience, or a specialty the facility needs, moves you up.
One honest caveat: travel pay is a live market. The board numbers are a dated snapshot, not a promise, and contracts open and close every day. Check current listings before you build a budget around any figure on this page.
Travel vs. Staff
Travel Pay vs. a Staff COTA Salary
Travel pays more in take-home terms, and most of the gap comes from how the money is taxed, not from the headline rate. A staff COTA at the national median earns about $1,390 a week before taxes ($34.76 an hour for 40 hours, BLS May 2025). The median travel contract on our board pays $1,569 a week, and part of that arrives as tax-free stipends instead of taxable wages.
The Gold Coast figure is the minimum net (after-tax) annual pay for occupational therapy assistants in 2026, true in every setting we staff. Net means after taxes, for both columns.
| Staff COTA | Travel COTA | |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly pay | About $1,390 median BLS, May 2025 | $1,569 median Gold Coast board, October 7, 2026 |
| Tax treatment | Fully taxable W-2 wages | Taxable base rate plus tax-free stipends (requires a tax home) |
| Contract length | Ongoing | 13 weeks on 148 of the 150 contracts on our board |
| Stability | One location, benefits build in one place | Renegotiated every contract, pay moves with demand |
A travel contract is not automatically a raise. A high-stipend contract in a high-rent city can net less than a staff job near family. Run the take-home math on each offer, not the headline number.
Staff work is the better fit in some seasons of a career: when you need one predictable location for family or childcare, or when giving up your home would break the tax-home rule that makes stipends worth having. Neither path is the lesser one.
If you work alongside occupational therapists weighing the same move, our travel occupational therapist salary guide runs their numbers.
Stipends & Tax Home
How Stipends and the Tax-Home Rule Work
A travel pay package splits into a taxable hourly base plus tax-free stipends for housing, meals, and incidentals. The stipends stay tax-free only while you keep a tax home: a permanent residence where you keep paying housing costs while you work away from it.
A typical weekly package looks like this:
- Base hourly rate, taxable, often set lower than a staff wage
- Housing stipend, tax-free, sized to the assignment's location
- Meals and incidentals stipend, tax-free, paid daily or weekly
- Travel reimbursement to and from the assignment
Here is one way the board's median $1,569 week can be structured, in round numbers for illustration only: a $25 an hour taxable base earns $1,000 for a 40-hour week, and the other $569 arrives as tax-free housing and meal stipends. Two contracts can post the same weekly total and split it very differently. The split decides your taxes, your overtime rate, and what a lender sees on a loan application.
Give up your permanent residence to travel full time and the IRS treats you as itinerant, which makes those stipends taxable income. We wrote the full plain-English breakdown in Travel vs. Local Therapy: Tax Home Rules Every New Grad Should Know. For your own situation, talk to a tax professional who works with travel clinicians. This guide is general information, not tax advice.
Where the Work Is
The Settings That Hire Travel COTAs
Skilled nursing hires the most travel COTAs, by a wide margin. On October 7, 2026, 146 of the 150 travel COTA contracts on our board were in skilled nursing facilities, with two school contracts and two hospital contracts making up the rest. Staff hiring spreads wider: offices of therapists and other health practitioners, where outpatient clinics sit, employ 20,640 of the 51,290 COTAs working nationally, followed by skilled nursing facilities at 9,690, general hospitals at 6,050, home health at 3,560, and schools at 2,840 (BLS, May 2025).
Staff COTA pay by setting
| Setting | Annual mean pay (staff, BLS May 2025) |
|---|---|
| Home health | $77,800 |
| Skilled nursing facilities | $77,270 |
| Colleges and universities | $75,510 |
| Continuing care and assisted living communities | $75,120 |
| Specialty hospitals, including rehab hospitals | $73,190 |
Each setting asks something different of a COTA on day one. Read what we see in skilled nursing, home health, outpatient, acute care, inpatient rehab, and pediatrics.
Where the pay is highest
| Travel contracts (median weekly, Gold Coast board, October 7, 2026) | Staff COTAs (annual mean, BLS May 2025) |
|---|---|
| California, $1,820 (33 contracts) | California, $84,690 |
| New Mexico, $1,748 (6 contracts) | Maryland, $79,890 |
| Montana, $1,680 (8 contracts) | Texas, $79,750 |
| Washington, $1,668 (4 contracts) | New Jersey, $77,640 |
| Oregon, $1,632 (6 contracts) | Nevada, $77,290 |
Board column: states with three or more travel COTA contracts on October 7, 2026.
Read both columns with rent in mind. California pays the most on paper and costs the most to live in. A mid-list state with a strong stipend and cheap housing often nets more, and a travel contract lets you re-run that comparison every 13 weeks.
Demand looks steady. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment of occupational therapy assistants and aides to grow 20 percent from 2025 to 2035, much faster than the average for all occupations, with about 8,600 openings a year (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook). Growth supports the market as a whole. It does not guarantee any single contract or city.
New Graduates
New-Grad COTAs and Travel Contracts
Some facilities take new-graduate COTAs on travel contracts, and many prefer some experience first. Your license lets you go. Whether you should go depends on the support waiting at the facility and behind you at the agency.
The first contract is the hard one: a building you have never seen, a documentation system you have never opened, productivity expectations from day one, and a supervising occupational therapist you have just met. A rough first assignment with no backup is how good clinicians decide travel is not for them.
That is why Gold Coast pairs every traveler with free one-on-one mentorship from a clinician who works in that setting. Occupational therapy assistants are mentored by licensed occupational therapists, including Dorothy Enomoto, OTR/L, MSOT, and Tiffany Simmons, OTR/L, MSOT. We are therapist-owned, we have traveled ourselves, and 98 percent of our travelers have started on time since our founding.
Dorothy Enomoto, OTR/L, MSOT, is one of the licensed occupational therapists who mentor Gold Coast COTAs. Meet all of our mentors.
If you go early, stack the odds in your favor: take your first contract in a setting where you did a fieldwork rotation, ask exactly who answers your calls after you start, and read the cancellation clause twice.
Still weighing the career itself? Start with what a COTA does day to day, then look at the occupational therapy assistant positions we staff nationwide.
Due Diligence
What to Check Before You Sign
Six items decide whether a good-looking contract is a good contract. Ask about each one before you sign:
- Guaranteed hours. What happens to your pay when the facility cancels a shift or census drops? Get the guarantee in writing.
- The stipend split. A very low taxable base inflates the weekly number but shrinks overtime pay and looks weak on a loan application. Know both numbers.
- Supervision. Who is your supervising occupational therapist, and how often are they on site? Supervision rules for occupational therapy assistants vary by state.
- Cancellation terms. Both directions: what you owe if you leave early, and what they owe if the facility ends the contract.
- Licensure timeline. Your license in the facility's state must be in hand before the start date, or the start date moves.
- Benefits. When does health insurance start, and does it carry over the gap between contracts?
We collected the rest in our list of questions to ask a travel therapy agency before you sign anything.
See Current Travel COTA Contracts
Gold Coast Healthcare Staffing places travel occupational therapy assistants nationwide, with free 1:1 mentorship on every contract. Browse the live job board or call (707) 908-9484.