Tax home tracker for travel healthcare

Your stipend is tax-free. Until you can't prove it.

MedicBase is an app for travel nurses and allied health travelers that collects the proof your home is really your home — so your housing stipend stays untaxed.

The Readiness Score screen: 56 percent documented, five of nine checkpoints complete, each listed as done or missing.
The MedicBase home screen: a Readiness Score ring, $62,400 in tax-free stipends at stake this year, and a 12-month rule counter for Austin, Texas.
$14,400
rides on your paperwork every year

The rules are simple. The paperwork isn't.

A traveler taking around $1,200 a week in housing and meal stipends gets roughly $57,600 a year untaxed. Keep a real home, stay under twelve months in one place, and hold the receipts, and it stays that way.

Miss any of it and every stipend dollar becomes taxable — with interest and penalties on top. The IRS doesn't have to prove you were wrong. You have to prove you were right, up to seven years later.

The rules described here come from IRS Publication 463 and IRS Topic No. 511. MedicBase organizes your documents. It does not give tax advice.

Three things to set up. Then it mostly runs itself.

Most of the work happens once, at the start of a contract.

The tax home setup screen asking for a home address, monthly housing cost, and whether you rent, own or pay family.
Step one

Say where home is

Your address, what you pay, and one photo of the lease. Renting from family? It tells you exactly what that needs to look like.

An assignment record for St. Anne Medical Center in Austin, with dates, weekly wage and stipend, the 12-month counter and attached documents.
Step two

Add each assignment

Facility, dates, agency, and how your pay splits. Drop in the contract and the pay stubs before the agency portal shuts you out.

The tax home folder in the vault: lease, signed declaration, utility bills, driver's license, vehicle and voter registration, renter's insurance.
Step three

Answer one reminder a month

Photograph this month's rent proof and a utility bill. Thirty seconds. That habit is the whole difference.

Everything the proof needs, in one place.

The clock nobody else is watching

Work in the same area for more than twelve months and your stipend becomes taxable — even if you switched hospitals, even if you never noticed. Renewing three times does it.

MedicBase counts your days by metro area, not by employer, and warns you at nine, ten and eleven months.

This is the mistake that costs travelers money without an audit ever happening.

The 12-month rule counter showing 47 of 365 days used in the Austin metro area, with the assignment's documents attached below.

One file for your CPA. Or the IRS.

At the end of the year, one tap builds the whole thing: your declared tax home, every month of home costs, every assignment, the lodging you paid for, and an index of every document.

Inside it sits the ledger — your home cost next to your assignment cost, month by month, every figure linked to the document behind it. That is the page an examiner asks for first.

Your accountant charges by how much untangling you make them do. Arrive with this instead.

A page of the exported MedicBase report: declared tax home, assignments with dates and pay split, and the duplicated expense ledger totalling $19,800 against $7,540.
The export screen for tax year 2026, listing the six sections of the report with an Export PDF button.

You're handing over a license and a lease. Here's how that's held.

  • Encrypted on the way up and while it sits there.
  • Face ID or a passcode on the app itself.
  • Your documents are never sold, shared or used to train anything.
  • Take everything back out whenever you want — with or without a plan. If MedicBase ever disappears, your files leave with you.
The security settings screen with Face ID enabled, password options, two-factor authentication, and a note that data is encrypted at rest and in transit and never sold.

$99 a year, against about $14,400.

Roughly one hour of your pay. Try everything free for 14 days, then decide.

Every plan includes
  • Unlimited assignments and documents
  • Your Readiness Score and the 12-month warning
  • The tax-year PDF for your CPA
  • The duplicated expense ledger
  • Monthly reminders and home visit log
  • Seven years of history in one place
14 days free, then
$99.99 / year
  • Or $14.99 a month
  • Or $249.99 once, for life

The free trial comes with the annual plan. Cancel in your App Store settings at least 24 hours before it ends and you're not charged. Your documents stay yours either way: open and export them any time, with or without a plan.

Questions travelers actually ask

Is MedicBase giving me tax advice?
No, and it never will. MedicBase organizes records and counts days. It shows what the IRS is known to weigh and where your documentation stands against it. Whether you qualify is a question for a CPA, ideally one who specialises in travel healthcare.
Doesn't my agency handle this?
No. Agencies pay the stipend and will usually ask you to sign a declaration that you have a tax home, but they don't verify it. If it's ever questioned, the burden of proof sits with you, not with them.
Does switching hospitals reset the twelve-month clock?
Not if the new hospital is in the same metro area. The rule follows geography, not employers. This is the single most common misunderstanding in travel healthcare, and it's expensive.
Isn't there a fifty-mile rule?
No. There's no distance requirement in the tax code. The test is whether the assignment is far enough that you reasonably need rest and sleep before returning, not a mileage figure. Some agencies use fifty miles as an internal policy, which is where the confusion comes from.
I stay with family between assignments. Does that count?
It can, but only with a genuine arrangement: fair market rent, paid by traceable transfer, ideally with something in writing. Token payments in cash are among the first things disallowed.
I've been travelling for years with no records. Is it too late?
No. Start with the current year, then work backwards as you find things. A partial record beats none, and most of what you need still exists in old emails and lease paperwork.
Do I need to connect my bank?
No. MedicBase never touches your bank accounts. The evidence in a tax home case is documents, not transactions, so documents are what it stores.
What happens to my documents if MedicBase shuts down?
You can export everything as a ZIP at any time, with or without a plan, without asking. That's deliberate. Records this important shouldn't live anywhere you can't walk away from.

Something not answered here? support@getmedicbase.com

Hey — I'm Jonathan. I'm not a nurse. My dad is.

A few years ago I went bankrupt and spent a long time paying tax penalties I could have avoided if my paperwork had been in better shape. It taught me one thing about dealing with the government: overprepare. A few minutes a month costs you nothing. Underpreparing costs thousands, years later, when you've long forgotten the details.

Then I started properly listening to my dad and the people he works with. Travel healthcare hands you thousands a year tax-free, then quietly asks you to prove you earned it — from documents spread across six apps, years after the fact. The same trap I fell into, with more money on the line.

So I built the one place that holds all of it. You already have enough to remember on shift. This shouldn't be one of them.

Jonathan Founder, MedicBase

Start the record before you need it.

Built one month at a time it takes seconds. Rebuilt three years later from memory, it takes a weekend — if it can be done at all.

Every month you travel without a record is a month you'd have to reconstruct. The first upload is the one that matters.