Imagine choosing between two summer jobs. One pays $15.95 an hour and is three miles from home. The other pays $18 an hour but is eighteen miles away.
At first, the $18 job seems like the obvious choice. If both jobs offer thirty hours a week for eight weeks, the distant job pays $4,320 before taxes and the nearby job pays $3,828, a difference of $492 in favor of the higher-paying job. But the hourly wage does not include the time or money required to get to work, and once those are counted the distant job can provide more total cash while giving the worker less money for every hour of the summer that the job takes up.
Beginning July 1, 2026, Montgomery County’s minimum wage is $18 for large employers, $16.50 for midsized employers and $15.95 for small employers. That range makes the comparison realistic, because a large employer farther away could easily offer a higher wage than a smaller business close to home.
For this example, both workers are scheduled five days a week over eight weeks. The nearby job requires a six-mile round trip and twenty total minutes of commuting each day, while the distant job requires a thirty-six-mile round trip and seventy minutes of commuting. Those commute times are examples, not survey results, and actual traffic and transportation options would change the answer.
Over forty workdays, the nearby worker drives 240 miles and the distant worker drives 1,440. Using a car that gets twenty-eight miles per gallon and the Central Atlantic regular-gas average of about $3.93 per gallon in mid-July, the nearby worker spends roughly $34 on gas while the distant worker spends about $202. After gasoline, the nearby worker has about $3,794 before taxes and the distant worker has approximately $4,118, so the distant job still produces about $324 more in total cash.
That distinction matters, and it cuts in the distant job’s favor. Someone saving for one specific expense might reasonably choose the distant job precisely because it leaves more money at the end of the summer.
The distant job also takes much more time. Across the summer the nearby worker spends about thirteen hours commuting, while the distant worker spends almost forty-seven. If those unpaid hours are counted as time committed to the job, the nearby job produces an effective return of about $14.98 an hour and the distant job produces approximately $14.37. Measured this way, the job advertising an $18 wage pays less for every combined hour of working and traveling.
This calculation includes an important simplification: it treats one hour spent commuting as equal to one hour spent working. Some people may view commuting as easier because they can listen to music or relax, while others may view it as worse because it is unpaid and still prevents them from doing something else. There is no single correct way to value that hour, which is exactly why the wage alone cannot settle the comparison.
Gas is also not the complete cost of driving, because cars require maintenance, tires, repairs, insurance and eventually replacement. The IRS business-mileage rate increased to 76 cents per mile beginning July 1, 2026, and the agency said the midyear change resulted from rising fuel prices. That rate is meant to estimate a broad range of vehicle costs rather than gasoline alone.
Using that rate, the nearby commute represents about $182 in vehicle costs and the distant commute represents approximately $1,094. After including commuting time, the nearby job produces an effective return of around $14.39 an hour and the distant job falls to about $11.25, leaving the nearby worker with roughly $420 more by the end of the summer.
The IRS rate should still be treated as something close to an upper estimate for many teenagers. A teenager using a parent’s already-insured car may not personally pay for registration, depreciation or every repair, and some of those expenses would have existed even without the summer job. The most realistic cost probably falls somewhere between the gas-only estimate and the full mileage estimate.
Other expenses can reduce a paycheck too. Buying an $8 meal during four shifts each week would cost $256 over eight weeks, and a worker may also need to pay for parking, transit, work clothes or equipment. Those meal costs would not necessarily change which job is better, because a worker might buy food at either one, but they do change how much of the advertised paycheck is actually available for saving.
There are also benefits that cannot be placed neatly into the calculation. A farther job might offer better experience, stronger references, more reliable hours or a chance to keep working during the school year, and any of those could be worth more than the difference in effective wage.
The point is not that the nearest job is always the best job. The point is that an advertised wage does not tell the entire story, and a better comparison is the amount of money left after job-related expenses divided by both paid work time and unpaid commuting time. The $18 job produces the larger paycheck in the gas-only example, but it does not necessarily produce the better return for each hour of a teenager’s summer.