What does “Informed Pay” on these job posts mean?

Informed Pay is Informed Jobs’ unique and proprietary metric of hourly value that allows you to directly compare pay across jobs within our database. It looks like this, on each of our job posts:

It’s benchmarked from W2 roles, and accounts for a job’s estimated paid hours, along with the average value of benefits listed (for W2), or the incremental self-employment tax (7%) and average cost of 1099-specific expenses (for 1099).

This metric is helpful to speech–language–pathologists in particular, because we are often comparing jobs that cannot be compared without a) data from the employer and b) running calculations based on this data. This is most relevant in the comparison of 1099 vs W2 roles and salaried vs pay per visit roles– both which SLPs are considering almost every time they’re on the job hunt!

Quick tips:

DO:

• Use Informed Pay to quickly compare jobs in our database to each other, on the metric of pay. (***It will help you to not over-value jobs where the contracted rate is e.g. $50 per hour, but you’re not paid for all hours worked, so your real take-home pay is much lower than that.)

DO NOT:

• Compare Informed Pay rates to contracted rates outside our database– they’re not the same thing.
  • To compare jobs outside our database, use our Pay Calculator (Informed Pay is something we do for you; the Pay Calculator is something you can do for yourself. Compare them here.)
• Assume Informed Pay is your after-tax take home pay. It’s not; it’s just a comparison tool. To precisely calculate true take-home pay, you’d want to use another calculator:
  • OPTION 1: Use our Pay Calculator as-is, but realize there’s state, local, and personal tax exceptions that it’s not considering.
  • OPTION 2: Use the top two numbers on the final page of our Pay Calculator (hourly rate or annual rate), then use another calculator that considers local data like this one to get the most precise number you can without an accountant.

Why is this important? Won’t it just confuse SLPs?

Most SLPs are already incredibly confused (or misled) by job post norms in our field, and the Informed Pay metric simply lifts the veil.

For example, one of the most common missteps we see novice job-seekers make when comparing SLP jobs to each other is to think that these two jobs pay the same:

Job 1: $50/hour, W2, full-time, salaried

Job 2: $50/hour, 1099, billable hours 

…whereas an employer or seasoned SLP knows that the first job pays a lot better– and how much better depends on several factors. For example, Job 1 will pay around $104,000 per year, whereas Job 2 could pay anywhere from $40,000 to over $100,000 per year, depending entirely on other undisclosed details. And because Job 1 is W2, it could be even more valuable if it also includes employer-provided benefits like health insurance or a retirement plan. And Job 2 will, no matter what, will have the SLP paying 7% of their income in self-employment taxes that otherwise would have been paid by their employer were it a W2 role.

Employers know all this, because contracts and business finance are among their areas of expertise. They’re writing contracts and making financial decisions regularly, based on how those contracts are set up. They follow employment and tax laws daily, and know the impact on their bottom line. Employers can often estimate the implications in their head of these two different contract types, so for THEM they wouldn’t need job posts to be more detailed than this, because they know the implications of what’s left unsaid. 

But most SLPs don’t. Not only do they not always have the same HR and tax expertise, but most SLPs only think about this occasionally– when they’re on the job market! So while we believe that most employers have good intentions and aren’t trying to purposely mislead SLPs, that doesn’t change the fact that job posts in our field are misleading if you don’t have the expertise to make sense of them at first glance. 

We believe that wanting SLPs to have clarity in being able to predict their pay from a job post should be a minimum ethical requirement of posting a job in the first place. And the employers who post jobs at Informed Jobs agree, via their participation in our posting process, which requires high levels of transparency.

Finally, SLPs uniquely need something like this (compared to, say, teachers) because we have many more 1099 “direct time only” jobs than most other professions, where norms may be salaried W2 work or 1099 pay for all hours worked. In short: Our pay is much harder to estimate than most jobs! 

Our field is unique, and the Informed Pay calculation helps SLPs compare jobs to each other more easily, using data from employers who value clarity and transparency in the job search process.

How is Informed Pay calculated?

The math section! Follow along to understand exactly what goes into our calculations.

First, we do have to make some assumptions because the data we don’t have (yet 🙂) is job-seekers’ individual data. So the assumptions we make to standardize this process are:

1. The assumption that job seeker is a young single person with no dependents and no family on their health insurance (if applicable),
2. And national (rather than local) averages for all input numbers in the calculation.

As such, Informed Pay then uses each of the following numbers: 

• effective tax bracket of 22%,
• value of employer-provided portion of health insurance benefits estimated at $4320/year (unless otherwise specified),
• value of 401K benefit estimated at median 3% match (unless otherwise specified), or value of other retirement account type
• self-employment tax paid above what would occur for W2 (incremental, 7%),
• insurance estimated at $300/year (1099 only),
• supplies and job expenses estimated at $400/year for 1099s above SLP W2 role norms, minus the value of write-offs (1099 only), 

• and any other financial benefits included in the job listing (e.g. unrestricted stipends; W2 only)

   

We then take these numbers along with your estimated paid work hours and the hourly or annual rate in your contract, to include the value of benefits, cost of self-employment tax, and cost of expenses unique to contract type (1099). All of these are accounted for so that these job types can be directly compared.

Below is a spreadsheet to help you understand the difference between contracted pay and Informed Pay, and give you a line-by-line explanation of what’s included.

Remember– Informed Pay doesn’t take individual data into account. So if you’d like to take it a step further, you’d want to use our Pay Calculator. Options and further descriptions are here. 

Informed Pay and our Pay Calculator, were developed in collaboration with, 

and approved by, multiple licensed CPAs at Ong & Company.

Click to view Pay Calculator spreadsheet