How to calculate take-home pay as an SLP

If you’re looking outside Informed Jobs:

Step 1) Understand your contract type

Most of the time, you won't know what you’ll be paid by looking at the job post. Even when pay is disclosed, it’s often very misleading. Before trying to calculate pay, you’ll need to know:

a) What contract type you’re looking at. Learn the differences between salaried vs hourly vs PPV here.

b) How you’re being classified. Learn the difference between 1099 and W2, here.

Knowing that a job pays $50/hour isn’t enough information to predict pay, because a $50/hour job could earn you under $50,000 per year to over $100,000 per year. The details matter, a lot! Once you understand what you’re looking at, you’re ready to: 

Step 2) Input details into a calculator to predict take-home pay

We’ve built a Pay Calculator to to help you with this! It considers:

• 1099 vs W2, and the tax and write-off implications
• Employment benefits (401K, health insurance, etc.)
• Whether you’re paid for both direct and indirect services, or direct only
• And more, to get you as close as possible to being able to estimate the value of a job offer and take-home pay.

Find our Pay Calculator here, then compare it to other options here.

Step 3) Compare that to local and national norms

Now that you know what the true pay is for the job you’re considering, you’ll want to know if that’s normal. And “normal” will vary primarily by:

• Local cost of living
• Work setting
• Years of experience

Unfortunately, this is where things get even trickier, because wage norms for SLPs aren’t as strong as you’d think. We know it seems like you should just be able to Google or ChatGPT this question, or ask other SLPs on Facebook or Reddit. But when you do that, you’re very likely to get both bad and good information, and not know which is which. Read our resource on SLP Pay Norms to figure this out!

If you’re looking at jobs here with us:

If you’re searching for a job inside our database, you can skip everything in steps (1) and (2) above, because we’ve already done all this math for you! We ask all the right questions to get clear, transparent information about both your pay and job quality.

Then if you want to proceed to Step 3 to compare against wage norms, that’d be smart. A couple things to note:

• We block jobs below the 10^th percentile and restrict bulk-posting from companies whose jobs are consistently in the 10^th–20^th percentile.
• Because we do the right math to calculate true pay in the first place, our sorting features are accurate, unlike most jobs databases. Sort by hourly, annual, or Informed Pay. We generally recommend using annual or Informed Pay first, because they’re most representative of what you’ll be making.