If you work per diem, part time, “extra help,” locums, or 1099, you know the question — and how hard it is to answer: is my hourly rate actually fair? Roughly one in six PAs is not a salaried employee, and nearly every salary tool out there quietly ignores us. I am one of you: I work part time with no benefits in California, and I built this calculator because I needed it myself.
Why the usual PA hourly rate comparison is wrong
Here is the trap. The usual advice is to compare your rate against the published BLS hourly wage for physician assistants. But that number is just the annual median divided by 2,080 hours — it counts a salaried PA’s paid vacation as hours worked and values their health insurance, retirement match, CME allowance, and licensure costs at exactly zero. Compare an unbenefitted rate against it and you can look 25% better off than you really are.
What a fair per diem, part-time, or 1099 PA rate includes
This calculator makes the honest comparison instead: what a benefited PA’s whole package is worth per hour they actually work in your market — built on the same live BLS dataset behind our PA salary report and cost-of-living analysis — versus everything you have to buy out of your own pocket to end up in the same place: marketplace health coverage (age-rated, with the 400% federal-poverty-level subsidy cliff back for 2026), your own retirement contribution, CME, DEA registration, state licensure, and malpractice. And because those replacement costs are fixed, working fewer hours pushes your break-even rate higher — the opposite of what most people assume.
Be honest with the toggles, and if the verdict surprises you, take it into your next contract conversation — and run your offer through the PA Contract Check while you are at it. Knowledge is negotiating power.
