cnbc travel nurse

The pros and cons of being a 29-year-old nurse making six figures who works just 9 months a year

• Aspen Tucker, 29, has been working as a travel nurse since earning his associate's degree in 2020.
• Tucker earned $187,000 in 2022, yet works only 9 months out of the year, CNBC reports.
• Many nurses have turned to travel contracts as a way to combat burnout and earn more money.

One travel nurse got candid about the ups and downs of working all over the country, and, spoiler alert, there weren't many downs.

Aspen Tucker, 29, has been working as a travel nurse for the last three years after leaving his South Carolina hospital job at the height of the pandemic. He was lured away by an offer of $6,700 per week in Amarillo, Texas, according to CNBC.

"I hate to say this, but I didn't give notice. I got my stuff, went to Texas, and told my manager when I got there, 'I'm sorry, I've got to go. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,'" Tucker told the outlet.

He added that the staff nursing job he left behind paid about $2,000 biweekly. In 2022, two years after becoming a travel nurse, Tucker brought home about $187,000 for the year, per CNBC.

Tucker, who began his career after getting an associate's degree, also told CNBC that he works between 48 and 60 hours per week to allow for time off. His current schedule means he works about nine months each year and spends the rest of his time in his hometown of Spartanburg, South Carolina, or vacationing.

Tucker isn't alone in opting to be a contract travel nurse with higher pay, rather than in a staff job. Ali Brown, a travel nurse from Baltimore, Maryland, began working around the country in 2014.

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In November 2022, Brown, a travel nurse for eight years, said that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, a good contract was about $2,000 per week, but she saw the number skyrocket to $6,000 in 2020.

On average, travel nurses make about 50% more than staff nurses due to high demand. However, the big paydays come with some guidelines, according to Brown.

Travel nurses get a living expense stipend and a housing stipend, which are considered reimbursements, not income, she said.

"Travelers have to be really careful to follow the rules, though," Brown told Insider. "You need to show that you're really paying a mortgage that is fair market value, not just taking the money for other uses."

She continued: " If you get audited, you'll end up having to pay taxes on that, which will be a lot of money."

While staff workers may turn to travel nursing as a way to lessen burnout, Tucker warned that not every facility will feel friendly, especially when working with staff nurses who likely are getting paid a lot less.

"In their mind they're thinking, 'This company doesn't want to pay us, but they're willing to pay somebody to come here for a short period of time to make this kind of money.' It creates a little bit of animosity there," he told CNBC.

Additionally, Tucker said, being away from his family and having unreliable health care are also downsides. While under contract, travel nurses have health insurance, but not when they're between jobs. 

 "I used to play a lot of basketball and stuff. And now I'm like, 'If I don't have health insurance, I can't go ahead and break my leg,'" Tucker said to CNBC.

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Many travel nurses opt for temporary assignments because of the autonomy and opportunities − not just the big boost in pay

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, University of Houston-Downtown

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Ivan Gan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Travel nurses take short-term contracts that can require long commutes or temporarily living away from home. Time and again, they have to get used to new co-workers, new protocols and new workplaces.

So why would staff nurses quit their stable jobs to become travel nurses?

Well, for one, they get bigger paychecks . But U.S. nurses have other rationales besides making more money, according to a study I conducted .

To do this research, I interviewed 27 registered nurses based in different places.

Many of the people I interviewed disclosed that they left permanent positions to combat burnout. Although they welcomed the bump in pay, travel nursing also gave them the autonomy to decide when and where to work. That autonomy allowed them to pursue personal and professional interests that were meaningful to them, and it made some of the other hassles, such as long commutes, worth it.

On top of earning more money, travel nursing “gives you an opportunity to explore different areas,” said a nurse I’ll call Cynthia, because research rules require anonymity. “When you actually live there for three months, it gives you a chance to really immerse yourself in the area and really get to know not just the touristy stuff, but really hang out with the locals and really be exposed to that area.”

Other study participants said they enjoyed the novelty and educational opportunities.

“You don’t get bored or stuck in a routine,” Michelle said. “You’re always trying to learn new policies at the new hospital that you’re in, learning about the new doctors, nursing staff, new ways of doing things, where things are located. That helps keep me from feeling burned out so quickly.”

Said Patricia: “I want to see how other operating rooms across the country do things and how they do things differently. I do learn a lot of things going from place to place.”

Why it matters

A growing number of U.S. nurses were obtaining temporary assignments before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

But travel nursing became much more widespread in 2020, when hospitals were scrambling to keep their staffing levels high enough as millions of Americans were becoming infected with the coronavirus, straining capacity in many communities.

While compensation varies widely, the median pay of registered nurses in 2022 was US$81,220 , about 35% less than the $110,000 that registered nurses who traveled earned .

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, travel nurses could earn an even bigger premium . Many were paid twice as much as staff nurses.

Once the number of Americans with severe symptoms fell, that premium declined too . But there are still over 1.7 million travel nurses in the U.S. Hiring them is one of the main ways that hospitals cope with a long-term shortage of nurses .

But nurses with permanent jobs can get aggravated by this arrangement when they learn how much more travel nurses earn for doing the same work, as I found through another research project .

What other research is being done

Research supports a widely reported trend: More Americans have temporary jobs and freelance employment than in the past.

While travel nurses can help hospitals, nursing homes and doctors’ offices meet staffing needs, there are signs that patients don’t always fare as well with their care.

And a Canadian study found that when hospitals let staff nurses work part time and offer other alternative arrangements, their retention rates may rise .

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Travel nurses raced to help during Covid. Now they're facing abrupt cuts.

Tiffanie Jones was a few tanks of gas into her drive from Tampa, Florida, to Cheyenne, Wyoming, when she found out her travel nurse contract had been canceled.

Jones, who has been a nurse for 17 years, caught up with a Facebook group for travel nurses and saw she wasn’t alone. Nurses had reported abruptly losing jobs and seeing their rates slashed as much as 50 percent midcontract.

“One lady packed up her whole family and was canceled during orientation,” she said.

Many career nurses like Jones turned to travel gigs during the pandemic, when hospitals crowded with Covid-19 patients urgently needed the help. Some travelers — who made double, sometimes triple, what staff registered nurses earned — gathered on TikTok and other social media platforms to celebrate payday , share tips on how to calculate net income from contracts , and boast about how much they were taking home weekly . So great was their good fortune that federal and state lawmakers considered capping their pay , mobilizing nurses in protest.

The tide has swiftly turned. As Covid hospitalization rates stabilize, at least for now , and federal and state Covid relief funding dries up, travel nurse contracts that were plentiful and lucrative are vanishing. And after the pressure cooker of the past two-plus years led to staff turnover and a rash of early retirements, hospitals nationwide are focused on recruiting full-time nurses.

Nationally, demand for registered nurse travelers dropped by a third in the month leading up to April 10, according to data from staffing agency Aya Healthcare, although openings have rebounded slightly in recent weeks.

When Oregon’s governor declared the pandemic emergency over April 1, state-level Covid relief money evaporated. Oregon Health & Science University Hospital in Portland lost funding for close to 100 travel nurses. That, along with lower Covid rates and more full-time hires, has led to “a bursting of the bubble,” said Dr. John Hunter, CEO of OHSU Health.

The health system had about 50 contractors of all kinds before the pandemic, compared with 450 at its height, when patients, many in need of close monitoring, flooded in and turned the hospital’s recovery room into an intensive care unit.

“It has been very expensive,” Hunter said. But things are turning around, he said, and in recent weeks the hospital has negotiated contract rates with its travel nurse agency down as much as 50 percent.

Staff nurses make far less than their traveling counterparts. Rates for a new staff nurse at Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital in St. Johnsbury, for example, start at $30 an hour — plus benefits and extra for night shifts. At the pandemic peak, the hospital paid staffing agencies about $175 an hour for each travel nurse. The rate remains well over $100 an hour, but the hospital is trying to negotiate it down. Because the hospital pays the agency directly, how much nurses pocket is unclear, said CEO Shawn Tester.

For some travel nurses, the abrupt drop in pay has been a shock. Since December, registered nurse Jessica Campbell had extended her 13-week contract at an Illinois hospital without any hiccups. In early April, a week into Campbell’s latest contract, her recruiter said that her rate would drop by $10 an hour and that she could take it or leave it.

“I ended up accepting it because I felt like I had no other option,” Campbell said.

The situation for some travel nurses has gotten so bad that a law firm in Kansas City, Missouri, said it is considering legal action against more than 35 staffing agencies. Austin Moore, an attorney at Stueve Siegel Hanson, said some agencies are “breaching their contracts” and in other cases “committing outright fraud” through bait-and-switch maneuvers on travel nursing contracts.

The firm opened an investigation in March, drawing comments from hundreds of nurses, Moore said. “Our phones are ringing off the hook,” he said. “Nobody has experienced it like this — historically, contracts have been honored.”

How much is a nurse worth?

Stephen Dwyer, senior vice president and chief legal and operating officer of the American Staffing Association, the trade group that represents the travel nurse staffing industry, said in an emailed statement that “as market conditions change, hospitals and other healthcare facilities may change the terms of travel nurse contracts.”

“For rate reductions or contract cancellations that take place mid-assignment, staffing companies often recommend advance notice,” he said.

Moore said that the fine print can vary but that when a staffing agency cancels a contract at the last minute or gives a nurse one or two days to consider a lower rate, the agency is often breaching a contract. According to the contracts, the loss should fall to the agency, not the nurses, when a hospital requests a lower rate, Moore added.

Pay rates have always fluctuated seasonally as the demand for nurses to plug staffing holes at hospitals changes, said XueXia Bruton, an ICU nurse based in Houston. She has traveled since 2018, drawn to the flexibility and financial freedom, and has no plans to return to staff nursing. Along the way, Bruton has cataloged her experiences on TikTok and Instagram, telling her more than 91,000 followers that, for instance, “it may make more sense to wait to take a contract until rates go back up.”

“It was very hard across the board during Covid when cases were really high,” Bruton said. “We were all burned out and exhausted, so it was important to be able to take as much time off as needed.”

Bruton saw crisis rates as high as $10,000 a week. Travel nurse rates now average about $3,100, according to online hiring marketplace Vivian Health . Still that’s higher than before the pandemic, and well above what a typical staff nurse makes.

Last year was particularly profitable for staffing agencies. Cross Country Healthcare, one of the few publicly traded companies that staff travel nurses and other health care workers, posted a profit of $132 million in 2021 , compared with a loss of $13 million the previous year and even bigger losses in 2019. Then-CEO Kevin Clark called the company’s 2021 financial results a “historic milestone for both revenue and profitability.”

Big profits across the nurse staffing industry have drawn the attention of lawmakers, including U.S. Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), who said he feared that private equity firms that were buying up staffing agencies were charging exorbitant fees during the pandemic, a pattern reported on by Stat . In January, Welch and U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) wrote the White House a letter requesting an investigation of possible “anticompetitive activity” by staffing agencies after receiving reports that they were “vastly inflating price, by two, three or more times pre-pandemic rates.”

Some travel nurses are returning to full-time gigs, drawn by hefty incentives and stability. Jones, whose contract in Wyoming was canceled in early March, considered a staff nurse position in Montana — swayed in part by a $10,000 starting bonus. But she ended up in a travel nurse contract in rural Kansas, where the pay is better than a staff job’s would be but not quite what she’d gotten used to during the pandemic.

Jones said her traveling stint raised a big question: How much is a nurse worth?

On the road, Jones said, she “could breathe financially for the first time in years,” at times making almost double what she made as a staff nurse.

“It’s a tough profession,” she said. “We love doing it, but we have bills to pay, too.”

Hannah Norman is a digital producer for Kaiser Health News. 

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