How To Reach The Elusive $100K Travel Nurse Salary
One of the most pervasive myths in travel healthcare is the potential to earn a six-figure travel nurse salary while jet-setting across the country. It certainly sounds appealing, and plenty of recruiters or agencies will try to sell you with that exact same message–but do you actually have that much earning potential as a traveler? Here’s our semi-short breakdown of five tips you can follow to earn your way towards $100k. If you just got off a brutal shift and five tips are way more than you want to read right now, click here to skip to the summary with our take on the issue. 1. Find cold weather, small towns and high-paying states Earning the most as a traveler often means going where the money leads, regardless of the location or harshness of season weather. This means you’ll be headed north in the winter, swapping with the “snowbirds” in states like Illinois or Wisconsin to cover gaps in staffing. It can also mean working in small towns and underserved locations that have trouble recruiting travelers, retaining staff nurses or that just aren’t that popular destinations. Generally, working where people can’t, don’t or won’t will earn you more through potential bonuses and higher pay packages. You also need to be aware of what state offer routinely high pay packages year-round, like California, Texas and Massachusetts. Peppering in jobs from these states can help boost your earning potential. 2. Work when everyone isn’t Not many people want to work during the holiday season from November to January, so jumping on a short-term holiday contract is a great way to build your travel nurse salary. Holiday pay typically matches overtime rates. Speaking of overtime, adding in extra shifts is always an easy way to get more money from a travel assignment, so look for overtime opportunities when you can. Important note: Make sure you know the exact overtime stipulations of your contract before committing to more hours. Some hospitals may not offer overtime pay that matches up exactly with state laws. Some agencies may offer “blended” bill rates–which has no difference in pay between regular and overtime hours–in states that charge overtime when working more than eight hours a day, as opposed to 40 hours per week. You should be able to discuss these details clearly with your recruiter. 3. Always take the housing stipend If you’ve established a tax home and are eligible to take a tax-free housing stipend instead of using company housing, taking the stipend means more money in your pocket in most cases. It can be a bit risky and a huge hassle, since the task of finding housing now lands on your shoulders, but you can often find housing that’s less than the total stipend, letting you save the extra cash. There are tons of online resources (Airbnb is very popular among travelers) to find quick, affordable housing. You can check the rates for per diems, along with meals and incidentals by state by visiting the General Services Administration website. This shows the maximum rate offered by location, not the general rate, but it can still help you gauge how much you may receive for an assignment. 4. Look for rapid response or strike opportunities Nurses who stay flexible with their assignments can make great money responding to strikes or other unexpected staffing problems at a hospital. Crisis rate pay packages are often significantly higher than standard, adding up to $10 or more per hour to your pay. Keep in mind these jobs are fleeting and tough–you may get to the job to find the situation has resolved itself before you’ve even started, and you must have all necessary compliance docs ready at a moment’s notice to jump on job opportunities. You also won’t get tons of flexibility on job shifts, since you’re there to help during a critical period. 5. Specialize Nursing specialties that are more in demand or require extensive training will often pay more. Specialty bill rates between hospitals and agencies range from 2 to 10 percent higher than standard rates, which means higher pay packages overall. Specialties that commonly see these higher rates are ICU, L&D, CathLab, ER, OR, PICU, NICU and CVICU. Standard rates are associated with more common positions like Medical/Surgical, PSYCH, PEDS and Postpartum. Our summary If you skipped to the bottom, here’s the short answer if you want to make $100,000 a year as a travel nurse. Work as much as you can; at every available opportunity; in places you may have never wanted to visit; in economical housing; in extreme weather climates; during most holidays; with the lowest amount of downtime possible; in difficult or highly specialized positions. Also ignore the fact that a portion of those wages will go towards insurance, travel, compliance and tax home expenses, regardless of whether they are offered by your agency. If that’s not an ideal answer, it’s certainly not an ideal situation. There are travel nurses out there who do earn up to $100,000 a year, but they will be the first to tell you it’s not easy. It’s up to you to realistically decide what you want from your travel nurse career, and your recruiter and agency should be there to help you make informed decisions at every turn.
Ask a Recruiter: 5 Things a New Travel Nurse Should Know
Talk to most recruiters and they will tell you that the number of travel nurses is growing rapidly. A lot of that growth can be attributed to new nurses trying traveling for the first time. They hear stories of fun adventures or higher pay from a traveler working an assignment at their hospital, they check it out, and they decide to dive in–often with too little education to know what they are actually getting into. We sat down with David McKenzie, a recruiter with LiquidAgents Healthcare. McKenzie has been a recruiter for almost 5 years and is passionate about educating first-time travelers. HCT Today asked him what travelers should know before they hit the road for the first time. Here’s what he told us. The nuts and bolts of the pay package McKenzie says the pay package is the first thing that a first-time traveler should understand. That’s why McKenzie spends time with his new travelers or nurses just exploring traveling and breaks down the different elements of a pay package. The gross pay: The total value of the contract The non-taxed portion of the pay package: These are any stipends or per diems that are included in the package, as long as the nurse meets IRS requirements to receive them. The taxed portion of the pay package: These are the hourly wages, but can also include any stipends and per diems that are taxed because the nurse does not meet requirements to receive them tax free. The take-home: This is what the nurse gets at the end of the day Knowing how their pay breaks down and what they should expect on a paycheck helps the nurse, but it also helps McKenzie avoid panicked phone calls later from nurses who fear they’ve been somehow cheated. The Bucket Theory Many first-time travelers hear stories before they get into traveling about stipends, reimbursements and per diems and get visions in their heads of free money. McKenzie says that it’s not true. Many travelers, especially first-timers, don’t understand that there is essentially one big bucket of money that everything they are going to get paid comes from. That money comes from the hourly rate that the hospital is willing to pay for that traveler. How that money is divided is up to the nurse. So, they are free to ask for things like money for travel, but that doesn’t mean they are getting additional money. It means the pay rate is being lowered to account for the shift of money to cover travel, and the same goes for housing allowances or per diems. Both are money from the same bucket, so you aren’t getting anything additional. You decide whether it’s more important to get the tax-free money or have more in your take-home pay. Sometimes a traveler will be tempted to ask for more money on a contract. There are only two ways that kind of request gets approved. Either the hospital agrees to a rate increase, making the bucket bigger, or the agency wasn’t maxing out what it was able to pay in the first place. The 3 Pillars of Travel Nursing Pay, location and shift. That’s what McKenzie calls the pillars, and he tells first-time travelers that they need to pick one of these as the most important because they can’t all be the priority. As an experienced traveler will tell you, finding all three in a single placement is rare. New travel nurses should decide early whether the right shift is the priority. Or maybe it’s being someplace relatively close to home. Or maybe they’ll sacrifice both of those for a good-sized paycheck. Pick the most important. Be flexible on the others, and the recruiter can likely always find a job. “Having some wiggle room on one of those factors, you can get anything to move,” McKenzie says. Know how far is too far McKenzie says that even when first-time travelers decide that location is one of the pillars where they have some flexibility, it’s important for them to know how far from home is too far. Most traveling contracts are 13 weeks long, which can be a long time to be far from home for many first-timers. For some travelers, that adventure is what draws them to the job. But for many, having the ability to get back home easily, whether it’s for an emergency or just to recharge around familiar faces, is still a comfort, and one that McKenzie says first-timers should consider before taking an assignment. The process for getting hired There’s a bit of time between a new traveler deciding she wants to hit the road and when she starts her first job, and McKenzie said it’s important new travel nurses understand the steps it takes to land that first assignment. It starts with creating a resume that will get them hired, and the next step is to find jobs to submit the traveler to. Then a review by the facility, hopefully an interview, and then an offer. But things don’t end with the acceptance of an offer. Next comes verification of compliance documents, potential drug testing, and possible pre-employment testing. McKenzie says educating the first-time traveler on all those intermittent steps is important because it will ensure they don’t get confused as the process plays out.