Hey there! Welcome to (or back to) the blog! Today I’m excited to talk about a topic that I get questions about all the time – travel nursing salary and pay. I’m going to go into as much detail as I can to make travel nursing pay make sense, but if you still have questions at the end, feel free to drop me a comment, or shoot me a message on my Instagram or in my email!
[PS – If you want the quick inside scoop on my highest paying L&D travel nursing contracts, check out this reel that I made! And enjoy some awkward dancing for your entertainment LOL.]
What is the Average Travel Nursing Salary?
Do you feel like you’ve tried to Google this question a million times and never get a straightforward answer? Just to demonstrate how inaccurate this search can be, I typed the same question into Google. It popped up with the answer that the average travel nurse salary in Washington (where I’m currently on assignment) is $2,119/week. However, on my current assignment I’m making $4,400 per week.
The reason it’s so hard to find a consistent answer to the travel nurse salary question is because there are SO many factors that go into determining your pay. Things like location, specialty, agency, and even time of year will affect pay packages for travel nurses. Chances are your pay won’t be the same from one contract to the next. The one thing you can expect to stay consistent is that you’ll be making more as a travel nurse than you would as a staff nurse. Let’s dig a little deeper into all the different things that can affect travel nursing pay.
What Factors Determine Travel Nursing Salary?
As I mentioned above, there are so many factors that determine pay as a travel nurse, and typically your pay package will change a little with each assignment. For me, it’s easier to consider my pay for each specific assignment than to discuss salary overall. Each travel nurses’ salary at the end of the year will be different depending on their contract rates as well as how much time out of the year they spent not working. The beauty of this job is that you have the flexibility to decide what’s best for you and your family! You could choose to make about the same as you made as a staff nurse but only work 6 months out of the year, or you could work year round and more than double your income! Here are some things to be aware of when you’re on the hunt for those high paying contracts:
Nursing Specialty and Level of Education
Level of Education, but only sortof…
Your nursing specialty, as well as your level of education, will have an impact on your pay. Generally speaking, LPN pay packages tend to be lower and these contracts can be harder to find because many inpatient hospitals are using RNs for most nursing care these days. In my experience, the pay from ADN to RN to MSN is relatively consistent across the board for travel nursing contracts. If furthering your education by getting your MSN is part of your career plan anyway, go for it, but know that having an MSN won’t really help you in the bedside travel nursing world.
Clinical Specialty
Your specialty will also determine your pay. Specialties that are in higher demand typically pay more, but it’s also important to remember that this fluctuates based on need as well. For example, I’m a labor and delivery nurse. Before the pandemic, L&D was one of the higher paying travel nursing specialties. There just aren’t as many L&D travel nurses as there are for other specialties like med/surg, so we tend to be in “higher demand” and therefore get higher pay. However, when Covid hit, L&D was one of the lower paying specialties (although we did still see significant increases in pay). The nurses that were making 10k+ a week were those in ER and ICU, because those were the departments that were so overrun with patients.
Of course we never know when something like a pandemic will come in and disrupt the industry as we know it. Generally speaking, it’s safe to assume that the more specialized roles will have higher paying contracts available to them. However, this can be variable dependent on a lot of different factors, including the time of year. I’ll touch more on that in a bit, so hang with me!
Location of the Contract
Where you’ll be working on your travel nursing assignment will have a big impact on how much you’re paid, because it’s heavily based on the cost of living. As travel nurses, we receive stipends to cover expenses while away from home for work, so the general expectation is that the stipends are adjusted accordingly to ensure that the cost of living is covered. The simple version of what that means is, places like California tend to pay really well, but it’s also really expensive to live there.
When your pay package is broken up into hourly, stipends, and reimbursements, your agency should be maxing out stipends to get you the most tax free money possible. In order to calculate that amount, they use the GSA website. What’s super nice is this is a public site, so you could also go on and look up GSA rates for any location for the dates you’d be there, and it will pop out a daily amount that you’d be eligible for in stipends. This can also be a nice thing to do early on in the process when you’re shopping around for contracts, because you can pop the dates into the GSA and see how the stipends compare to the posted pay package.
Also, while this isn’t entirely related, this feels like the right time to tell you that when you finish this post, you need to head over to Traveltax.com and check out their FAQs for travel nurses. This website saved my life as a newbie. It’ll cover everything you need to know about tax compliance, maintaining a tax home, etc. They’ll even do your taxes for you if you want, and they have a workbook you can download to ensure you’re keeping all the right records and not saving unnecessary things.
Time of Year
Believe it or not, the time of year can actually impact travel nursing pay for many specialties. In L&D, summer tends to be our busier time, whereas the winter months are usually a little lower volume (although Covid did really eff with my head on this trend..). In pediatrics, it tends to be busier in the fall and winter when kids are going back to school and sharing germs.
Just as retail stores hire seasonal employees, hospitals do as well. Believe it or not, it actually makes way more financial sense to hire a few travel nurses at a premium rate to get you through a busy season than it does to hire on staff nurses for long term jobs.
Higher patient volume means higher demand for nurses, which in turn means higher paying contracts for travel nurses. To be completely honest, I’m not as familiar with what is poppin’ when outside of my own specialty, but check out some of the travel nursing Facebook groups, or even ask your recruiter!
Agency
I saved this one for last because there’s really a lot that goes into this that’s outside of the nurse’s control and there’s a lot to unpack. I’m gonna try to cover this part in a way that makes sense without writing a novel, so bear with me.
So the really high level overview of how this works is that hospitals really only give out these contracts directly to a few agencies. One of those is AYA, I can’t remember who the others are off the top of my head. From there, those companies essentially sell the contracts to all the other agencies out there by allowing them to fill the positions for a certain percentage of the pay that the agency will get from the hospital.
I keep hearing the term “bill rate.” What the heck is that?
From there, the agency has a bill rate, meaning the amount that the agency can bill the hospital for the hours that a travel nurse works. Out of that bill rate comes percentages for the agency’s overhead and expenses, paying back the company they got the contract from, paying into things like unemployment and social security, and then the rest goes to pay the traveler.
Okay cool, but why would this be different from one agency to another?
The agency has some leeway in how they build your pay package and how much they keep, so this is where you’ll generally see slightly differing rates from agency to agency. However, there may also be parts they can’t control like how much of a percentage they have to give back to the other company (if applicable), and how much they’re required to pay into taxes, social security, benefits, etc.
So what if two agencies have the same pay package posted at different rates?
If you’re working with a recruiter you like and they send you a pay package, but you’ve seen the same contract posted somewhere else for higher pay, just ask that recruiter if they can match it. In theory, the agency should be able to match it or get pretty close. If they can’t, then it’s up to you to decide whether or not you want to keep working with that recruiter, or switch to another agency.
Also, if you’re totally overwhelmed with picking a recruiter or an agency, I have a post dedicated to just that! You can check it out or bookmark it here. One thing I will say is that finding a recruiter (or recruiters) that you can trust is the absolute most important thing. Find someone who is transparent and who you trust to have your back. Both of my recruiters were former travel nurses. I loved working with them because I knew they knew where I was coming from and they wouldn’t screw me. Highly recommend this hack 😉
How Can I Maximize My Travel Nursing Salary?
There are two main ways to maximize your travel nursing salary: research and flexibility. Let’s chat a little bit more about each. And while I’m here, thanks for hanging in! I know this post is long, but it’s only because I want to make sure you’re so prepared its stupid. We’re almost done, promise.
Research
In order to maximize the amount you’re bringing home weekly as a travel nurse, you have to be an expert on the ins and outs of travel nursing pay. Make sure you read your contracts and understand your pay breakdown. Double check the GSA website to ensure your tax free stipends are maximized. Read TravelTax 100 times to make sure you understand how to be tax compliant.
You also need to research the areas where you’ll be taking assignments before you sign the contract. Get an idea of how much you’ll be spending on housing monthly, as well as what it’ll cost you to get to the location. Flying and renting a car or shipping yours is a lot more expensive than driving to your assignment, but you may need to take more time off in between contracts in order drive. These are all factors you have to weigh!
The most lucrative travel nursing contracts are those that pay high rates in a low cost of living area. Which brings me to my second point…
Flexibility
If you’re taking a travel contract for the money above all else, you have to be flexible. Chances are you’re not going to find a contract for $10k a week in a really popular city like Denver or . On top of that, you’d be lucky to find short term furnished housing for under $1,500 a month unless you want a shared space.
When you think about travel contracts and money, you have to remember to weigh all the options and be flexible. Say you have two contracts to choose from – one is for $5k a week in Boston, MA, the other is for $4,800 a week in rural PA. On the surface, it looks like you’ll be pumped to be making $200 more a week to live in a cool place like Boston. Until you realize that renting a ROOM in Boston costs about $1,500 a month, and if you want your own space you’ll be looking at more like $3,500. That’s before parking, which will also cost several hundred a month. Rural PA isn’t looking so bad anymore is it?
My point here is, when you really hash out the details, you won’t usually find something in a really popular area (think Colorado in the winter or Florida beach towns basically ever) that pays enough for it to actually be a lucrative contract. Those locations capitalize on those of us who travel for the travel itself more than the money 😅.
In order to maximize your take home pay and increase your bottom line, you’re going to have to go somewhere that’s cheaper to live. Not only is housing cheaper in smaller towns, but groceries, eating out, drinks at the bar, literally almost everything is cheaper. So if you’re traveling for the money only, be flexible on your location.
A note on ”local travel”…
If you’re jumping into travel nursing strictly for the money, you should also be willing to chase the pay. Crisis contracts and high needs can pop up anywhere at anytime, so don’t limit yourself to a specific location. If you say, “I want to be a travel nurse, but I only want to go within 4 hours of home so I can still be close to family,” you’re probably not going to be able to prioritize high paying contracts as well because you’re really limited geographically. The further you’re willing to go to chase the money, the more likely you are to snag a really high paying contract. So get out of that comfort zone! You can do anything for 13 weeks.
*Bonus note, if you want to hate your life for 2 weeks but make stupid money really fast, check out Krucial Staffing. I would NOT under any circumstance recommend this type of contract to a first time traveler, but if you have some experience under your belt this may be for you. They do emergency deployment staffing, so basically you sign up to go and you’re leaving the next day. You work 6 days on 1 day off for 2 weeks. After 2 weeks you can choose to stay, or you can leave anytime. The pay is ridiculous, like multiple thousands a week sometimes. I haven’t personally done one of these, but you better believe if they ever post L&D needs, I will be.
Final Thoughts on Travel Nursing Pay and Salary
Okay, I’m going to go on a little bit of a rant here so please bear with me. There is almost nothing in the travel nursing world that pisses me off more than the chaos that people create when they realize another traveler on their unit is making like $100 more a week than them. People go nuts over this – angry facebook posts, threats to cancel the contracts, bashing their agencies for shorting them, screenshots of nasty text messages they sent their recruiter, literally the most unprofessional behavior I’ve ever seen. It’s embarrassing to our profession honestly.
Anyway, I digress. If you’ve read the rest of this post, you know that there are SO many factors that go into travel nursing contracts. There’s quite a bit that could make two contracts slightly different in pay. One traveler may take benefits while the other doesn’t. One may work with AYA who has a direct sourcing contract, while the other works with another agency who has to buy those contracts from AYA. I’ve also seen contract rates differ based on start dates. I had a friend start the same contract a month after me, and her recruiter wasn’t able to match her stipends to mine because the GSA rates had changed, and weren’t as high during the time she was there.
The one and only thing that you need to make absolutely sure of before you sign any travel nursing contract is that you are comfortable with the rate you’re being paid for the work you’ll be doing. If the salary you’ll be making for the next 13 weeks is comfortable for you and your family, awesome. You’re taken care of, your family is taken care of, life is good, and that should be that. Now, this doesn’t mean that if you find out someone is making more than you that you can’t send that information to your recruiter and ask them to match it. You absolutely can, and you should! But you should also know that you signed an agreement to work for X length of time for X pay, and you committed to that. If you were comfortable with that rate before you signed, a pay raise should be an added bonus. But if it can’t happen for one reason or another, please don’t show your ass to the world. Be professional, fulfill your commitment, and then at the end of the 13 weeks decide what changes you want to make the next go round.
I hope this helps to answer some of your burning questions about travel nursing salary and pay! I know this is a super complex topic and it’s enough to make your head spin. Trust me, I’ve been a TN since 2018 and mine’s still spinning. If you have questions or want to bounce ideas around, don’t be afraid to hit me up! You can shoot me and email, but generally shooting me a message on Instagram is the quickest way to get a response. I love chatting with you guys and I’m a real person so don’t be afraid to say hi!
Happy Travels,
@adventuresofarealgirl 👇🏻
