Your Recruiter Says the Stipends Are Maxed. Here's How to Check.

"That's the max — the stipends are already maxed out."

Every traveler has heard it. It usually arrives at exactly the moment you were about to ask for more, and it lands like a closed door, because how would you know? The stipend is a number on a sheet. There's nothing on the sheet to compare it to.

There is something to compare it to. It's published by the federal government, it's free, and checking takes about thirty seconds once you know where to look.

What "maxed" actually means

The General Services Administration publishes a per-diem rate for every locality in the country, updated each federal fiscal year. Two numbers matter: a lodging rate per night, and a meals and incidentals rate per day.

Agencies use those rates as the ceiling for the tax-free portion of your package. Pay a stipend at or under the federal rate and it's straightforward to treat as a reimbursement. Go above it and the excess gets harder to defend as tax-free.

That word — ceiling — is the part to hold onto. The GSA rate is not a floor your agency owes you. Nobody is obligated to pay it. It's the most they can pay you tax-free, which makes it the natural target for a stipend negotiation and the natural limit of one.

It's also only half the picture on any offer. The stipend is the untaxed half of a package whose other half is your taxable hourly rate, and the two trade against each other — which is why the blended rate is the number to compare across offers, not the stipend alone.

How to check it by hand

1. Go to gsa.gov's per-diem lookup.
2. Search the ZIP code of the assignment — the facility, the city you'll actually work in. Not your home ZIP. This is the single most common mistake, and it produces a confident answer about the wrong place.
3. Read the two numbers: lodging per night, M&IE per day.
4. Convert your offer to a daily figure so you're comparing like with like. Pay sheets rarely quote per-day. Weekly stipend ÷ 7. Monthly ÷ 30.4, give or take — agencies differ slightly on the divisor, so if the sheet shows both, use theirs.
5. Compare each line separately. Lodging against lodging, meals against meals.

Two wrinkles worth knowing. GSA locality names often don't match the city you'd say out loud — ZIP 02360 comes back as "Plymouth / Taunton / New Bedford," and searching "Plymouth" alone can send you somewhere else entirely. And a little over half of localities charge different lodging rates by month, so a 13-week contract can span two or three of them. Check the months your assignment actually covers, not the annual average.

A real offer, worked through

Here's a contract a nurse posted publicly for feedback. Thirteen weeks, and the stipends were quoted monthly, which is part of why nobody spotted anything.

Converted to daily, the housing stipend came to $119.82/night. The federal lodging rate for that assignment's ZIP was $126.00/night.

That's a gap of $6.18 a night. Across 91 days, about $562 — sitting in the part of the package that generally isn't taxed.

The meals stipend, meanwhile, was exactly at the federal rate. Not a dollar under. Which is the detail that makes this worth doing line by line: the recruiter wasn't wrong across the board, and a nurse eyeballing the total would have had no reason to think anything was off. One line was maxed. The other was $562 short.

A commenter told her the stipends looked maxed. Nobody ran the numbers — because there's no habit of running them.

What to do with a gap

Send something like this:

Hi [name] — I looked up the GSA per diem for the assignment ZIP and the lodging rate for that locality is $126/night. The offer is at $119.82. Is there room to bring the housing stipend up to the federal rate? And if the bill rate doesn't support it, I'd rather put the difference on the taxable hourly than leave it — happy either way.

That last sentence matters. It's a reasonable ask, not an accusation, and it gives the recruiter somewhere to go if the answer is genuinely no.

Three honest caveats before you send it:

• The agency isn't obligated. The bill rate from the facility may not support a higher stipend, and that's a real constraint rather than a brush-off.
• Moving money into stipends isn't free. A lower taxable hourly means less documented income, which matters for mortgages, unemployment, disability, and overtime — overtime is usually calculated on the taxable base, so raising the stipend does nothing for it.
• None of it is tax-free unless your tax home holds. That's the assumption underneath every stipend dollar, and it's worth being certain about — see what actually makes a tax home, and talk to a tax professional about your situation specifically.

When the recruiter is right

Sometimes you'll run the check and the stipends really are at the federal rate. That's a useful answer too — arguably the more useful one, because it tells you where the remaining room actually is.

If the stipends are maxed, the conversation moves to the taxable hourly rate, or to the premium rates that quietly get set to bare minimums: overtime, holiday, call-back. Those are usually where the slack is on a contract whose stipends are already at the ceiling.

And a maxed stipend is not the same as a good contract. A package can hit every federal rate and still lose to a lower-paying offer somewhere cheaper — which is exactly what happens more often than it should.

The thirty-second version

You can do all of this by hand, and if you only ever check one contract, do it by hand — you'll understand your own pay sheet better for it.

If you'd rather not, our contract analyzer does the same comparison: enter the assignment ZIP and it resolves the federal locality, shows the rate next to your offer, and tells you the gap in dollars. It's free, no account, and it shows you which locality and which fiscal year it used, so you can check it against gsa.gov yourself.

Which is the whole point. The federal rates are public. The only reason "that's the max" works as a closing line is that almost nobody looks.