best paid state for nurses

Aprox $32/hr for day shift, with 10% diff for evenings, and 20% for nights, 10% for weekends.

But and this is a huge but, the cost of living is very high! Don't just look at hourly wages alone. What will be left in your pocket at the end of the month or year!

Check out www.salary.com

You might find help there.

If I were to choose one of those states to move to for wages and all around living conditions, I guess I would pick Maryland or New York.

I worked in Hawaii before. There's no money to be made there, and the cost of living is atrocious!

Georgia doesn't pay their nurses well at all, but the cost of living in some parts of Georgia are reasonable....not in Atlanta or the outer suburbs though.

I don't know anything about Nevada, so can't comment on that state.

My favorite state to live in is and always will be California. It's very costly to live there, but the state has the most beautiful landscape, oceans and beaches, food, entertainment, and weather to die for (most of the year anyway). The wages there do NOT match up with the cost of living however. That's the downside to living in CA.

This is SO true. Higher pay means virtually nothing if the cost of living is high. And it's really not the state you should worry about but the region, because everything varies tremendously within an hour's drive.

Sure, you can make $35 or more an hour in Bay Area, but if your rent/mortgage is upwards of $3,000 a month, that won't help very much.

The cheapest places to live in California are inland areas like the Southern California desert or places like Fresno or Bakersfield. (Although even places like Sacramento are getting expensive.)

I bought a house in the desert for $150,000 with a relatively small mortgage of $1,100 a month. Hourly pay for new nursing grads in this area is $20-$25 per hour, depending on how far you're willing to drive and, with additional experience, goes up from there.

The salary.com link is pretty accurate, but be sure to look up rentals and housing prices too because, depending on where you live, you may not have any money left over at the end of the month.