What exactly is the difference between reserve and active duty?

Question

What exactly is the difference between being in military reserve and military active duty in terms of pay, benefit, life style change, traing, what the coutry (USA) requires of you?

Answer 1

When you are active duty that means your military service is your job. You and your spouse and children have benefits like health insurance and housing allowance, commissary and PX privileges, etc. If you are reserve, then you don't necessarily qualify for those benefits and often the spouse and children don't, unless you are activated. Typically, reserve only trains one weekend a month, then a longer two week training once a year, and you get paid for those, but you have to have a different full time job since that won't be enough. And then, especially now, when you are reservist, you stand a good chance of being activated, in other words you will be sent to Afghanistan or Iraq, or sometimes to a military post in the States or in Europe to cover the jobs that deployed active duty military members would be doing at their regular post if they weren't deployed. My husband went Active duty before Sept. 11, his friend stayed in the reserves. His friend actually ended up getting deployed more often than my husband did, which meant he was away from family more often than my husband was away from us. Active Duty isn't for everyone, but my husband likes it, and we have the best medical care we've had since getting married.

Answer 2

My husband is active duty and I'm a former Reserveist. As far as pay he makes way more then I ever did because I was only payed for one weekend a month usually around $200-300. He get's payed BAH (basic allowed housing) which depends on where you live. We're in Ca and we get 1,400 per month for housing alone. Plus he gets a base pay of around 1,500. He also has helth insurance provided for him. I'm not really sure how it works for the reserves because I had my own from another job and I used that, but it's not bad for active duty.
Training is exactly the same as far as bootcamp is concerned. You also go to the same job training.
In active duty you can be called at anytime to go out, and guess what it's the same in the reserves except generally you are givin' a bit more notice but they also deploy for a longer amount of time in most cases.

Answer 3

go here they'll answer your questions

www.Forces.ca