An empirical relation for the bed concentration of suspended sediment defined at a few grain diameters above the bed is developed. Its derivation is based on the experimental data sets of Guy et al. in 1966. The values of the near‐bed concentration were obtained by first isolating the suspended load transport from the observed rates of total load transport by use of a bed‐load formula. The suspended load was then equated to Einstein's formulation, which allowed the determination of . The influence of large concentrations of suspended sediment and of the reference level for on the calculated values of bed concentration has been analyzed. The proposed relation compares satisfactorily to values of near‐bed concentration obtained from independent data sets. The procedure used to derive provides a simple method for the calculation of the total transport rate of noncohesive sediment.