The rate in the ad is not the number in your account.
Two ABA jobs can advertise the same hourly rate and pay you thousands of dollars apart over a year. The difference is almost never the rate — it’s how many hours you actually get paid for. Here’s how to read an offer properly.
Where the money leaks out
Five things stand between an advertised rate and your paycheck. Ask about every one of them before you accept anything.
Cancellations
Kids get sick. Families travel. If you're only paid for delivered sessions, every cancellation is money gone. Ask what percentage of scheduled hours their technicians actually worked last quarter — a good employer knows the number.
Guaranteed hours
The single most valuable clause in an ABA offer. Paid for 30 hours whether or not the week cooperates beats a higher rate on a schedule that keeps collapsing.
Drive time and mileage
In-home routes can eat an hour a day. Ask whether between-client travel is paid, at what rate, and whether mileage is reimbursed on top.
Documentation and meetings
Session notes, supervision, team meetings, and training are all real time. Ask whether they're paid at your full rate, a lower non-billable rate, or — the wrong answer — not at all.
The benefits threshold
Health coverage, PTO, and retirement usually kick in at an hours-per-week line. A schedule that hovers just under it is a pay cut that never appears on the offer letter.
The credential ladder
If you intend to become a BCBA, an employer's supervision structure is worth more than a couple of dollars an hour. Getting there a year sooner dwarfs the difference.
Do this math before you decide
Use your own numbers. It takes five minutes and it changes people’s minds regularly.
- 1
Start with paid hours, not scheduled hours
Take the hours they'll actually pay you in a typical week — guaranteed hours if there's a guarantee, otherwise the realistic number after cancellations, which is always lower than the number in the job ad.
- 2
Add the paid non-billable time
Drive time, documentation, meetings, and supervision, at whatever rate each is paid. If any of it is unpaid, it doesn't add income — but it still costs you hours you can't work elsewhere.
- 3
Multiply out to a year, then subtract the unpaid gaps
School-year-only caseloads, holiday closures, and the weeks between clients are real. Annualize honestly rather than multiplying a good week by 52.
- 4
Add the value of what you don't pay for
Employer-covered certification, supervision toward a credential, health coverage, and mileage are all income you don't get taxed on the same way. If one employer's supervision gets you certified a year earlier, put a number on that year.
Pay by state
We haven’t published state-by-state pay tables yet, and we aren’t going to guess. Most of the “average salary” numbers you’ll find for this field are scraped from self-reported aggregator data, mixed across roles and settings, and years out of date — which is exactly why two sites can be $8 an hour apart about the same job.
What we’ll do instead: tell you a real range for your market, on the phone, in the first conversation. Ask us directly and we’ll answer directly.
Ask for a real rangePay questions, straight answers
Ask us the awkward questions.
Guarantees, drive time, what happens in a slow week. If an employer won’t answer those plainly, that is the answer.