Texas asks 24 hours. South Dakota asks 24. One of them means 48.

Texas and South Dakota both want 24 hours a week from a campground host. Both hand over a mostly full-hookup site. Same job, same uniform, same folding chair by the entrance.

Texas counts those hours per site. South Dakota counts them per person.

If you're traveling solo, the offers are identical. If there are two of you in the rig — and there usually are — Texas wants 24 hours out of your household and South Dakota wants 48.

Double the work. Same campsite. The only visible difference is three words buried in the fine print, and most people never see them, because 24 of the 40 state programs we've documented don't say either way.

That's the whole reason this newsletter exists. Not to find you jobs. There are plenty of jobs. To tell you what they actually cost you.

Colorado did something nobody else has

Here is the thing that makes seasonal compensation nearly impossible to compare: everyone publishes the hours and nobody publishes the value.

You can find out that Michigan wants 30 hours a week. You cannot find out what Michigan thinks the site is worth. So the most important number in the equation — what you're being paid — is simply absent, and you're left doing vibes-based math on a campground you've never seen.

Then there's Colorado.

State Forest State Park lists its full-hookup host site at $46 a day, water, sewer, electric and propane included, in exchange for 20 to 25 hours a week.

That's roughly $1,400 a month of value against 87 to 108 hours of work. Which comes out to about $13 to $16 an hour, tax-free, with no cash changing hands.

(Our arithmetic, from their published figures.)

Is that good? It depends entirely on what you wanted. It beats a lot of paid seasonal work once you account for the tax treatment and the fact that your housing cost went to zero. It's also below what the same hours would earn you at a concessionaire-run campground fifteen minutes down the road.

But you can know that, which is more than any other state lets you do.

Apply this week

Cal-Am Resorts, Arizona. Hiring now for winter 2026-2027 at active-adult resorts near Phoenix. $18-25/hr, W-2, and the clearest compensation structure we've found anywhere: a full-hookup site is covered by roughly 24 hours a week in regular season, about 14 in fall, and a higher wage reduces the hours owed toward it. This is the strongest currently-open opportunity in the directory.

Paid federal-land hosting, Colorado. Recreation Resource Management operates campgrounds under contract for the Forest Service and hires hosts as actual employees with actual wages. Their 2026 season board shows Arizona, Idaho, Montana and New Mexico mostly filled — but Colorado still has several openings. Aggregator data puts Forest Service host roles in the $14–25/hr range, median near $16.80, though neither RRM nor American Land & Leisure publishes a rate anywhere on their sites. Ask for the number in writing before you drive.

Christmas tree lots. Training starts mid-November, selling runs roughly November 18 to December 24. Operators including Pete's and Queens Trees and Bennett's Best are recruiting now. Reported pay runs from $1,000 to $5,000 depending on whether you're on commission, with some couples reporting $4,000–5,000 plus a full-hookup site. Wide range, thin evidence, most figures several years old — ask for the base, the bonus threshold, and who pays for the site.

Gate guarding, Texas. Rolling hiring, year round, and you can start within days. Reported at $4,500–6,000 a month per couple. Before you get excited: most gates are 24/7 and two people split round-the-clock coverage. That's roughly 336 person-hours in a fortnight. High cash, low hourly. It's the single best argument for running the numbers before saying yes.

Opens next month

National park concessions, summer 2027. Xanterra, Aramark, Delaware North and the rest hire about six months ahead, which means summer roles start appearing in October and fill through spring. Glacier listed $14.65/hr for entry kitchen work and $21.25/hr for higher-skill roles this past season.

The thing nobody tells you: most park housing is a dormitory, not an RV pad. Listings rarely say whether a site exists, what it costs, or whether it comes out of your check. Confirm the site before you confirm the job.

Federal seasonal on USAJOBS starts posting in November for next summer. There's no central announcement — individual parks post individually and some close within two weeks. Set your saved searches now, because nobody is going to tell you when it opens.

One thing worth knowing: the ski resort trap

It's September, which means resorts are recruiting hard, and the pay can be genuinely good — instructor roles were listed as high as $64/hr for the coming winter.

Here's the part that catches RVers. Resort employee housing is dormitory-style, and there's not much of it. Winter Park states plainly that its employee housing is extremely limited and that fewer than 20% of resort employees live in it. Mountain-town vacancy rates hover near zero. And a winter site needs real power and genuine freeze protection, not a summer pad with a 30-amp pedestal.

The job is not the problem. The parking is the problem. Sort out where you're plugging in before you accept anything.

Six questions that settle any offer

Whatever the job, these are the answers you need. Everything else is detail.

1. How many hours — and are they per site or per person?
2. Are any hours paid, and at what rate?
3. Full hookups, water and electric, or dry? Is electric metered and billed back?
4. Is anything deducted from your pay for the site?
5. What's the minimum stay, and what happens if you leave early?
6. Is there a background check, and who pays for it?

Six answers is all our Offer Check calculator needs to tell you what an offer is worth per hour and what actually lands in your bank.

This week's question

We have compensation terms for 40 of 50 state programs. Ten states publish nothing statewide at all — Arkansas, Connecticut, Kansas, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Rhode Island — and in most of those the only route is a phone call to an individual park.

So: what was your site actually like?

Which state, how many hours they really wanted, what the hookups really were, and whether the hours were per person or per site. If you hosted somewhere that isn't in our table, you know something we don't.

— Dennis