Making 100k salary/ income as a nurse?

Nurses Career Support Nursing Q/A

I am interested in what specialties are making 100k. I have 3 daughters in nursing school and can advise them on a lot, but not necessarily give them a big pic of the financial opportunities from across the nation. I am a 25 year RN and have a 65k salary, but double it most years with ot. not much fun working 68-72 hour weeks though. please tell me your specialty, experience , salary, and salary with diff and ot. oh, and where you r in the USA thank you all and hope your practice is professionally and financially rewarding

Specializes in ER.

Floatpool (resource RN) + Night + Weekends + few OT here and there = easily exceed 100k. Easy.

That's my friend's situation in DFW in TX, and you can live really well with 100k in TX in my opinion. I work at salary position at a desk, but I much rather prefer to make less now and maybe climb up the corporate ladder than to work at a humiliating job where I can't people what's wrong is wrong, and just take in all the crap they throw at you. Couldn't do that for money.

In my experience, to earn 100,000 as an RN you usually have to work a lot of overtime. For me, 100,000 isn't worth working 70+ hours (especially including weekends, holiday, etc.) There's nothing wrong with doing that, but it's not easy and it's not for everyone.

The other, most common alternative is to become an NP. New NPs in many regions of the country can make upwards of 100,000. Keep in mind, though, that these jobs are often in areas with a high cost-of-living (think costal/metropolitan areas). I'm a new NP and took an 85,000 job over a 105,000 because the former is in an area with a much lower cost-of-living (and also a place I grew up near and love, but that's beside the point). Additionally, they provide tuition reimbursement and excellent loan repayment, which brings me to my next point... you may find that it will be difficult to be in a position to earn 100,000 without also being in a sizable amount of debt.

Certainly there are nurses who make 100,000 plus with little/no debt. In fact, I know there are at least a couple of people on this site who have managed to do just that. However, don't expect to find these jobs easily or immediately.

Specializes in 8 yrs LTC, 12 yrs school nursing.

I live in MA and work as a school nurse (7 years) but has been a nurse since 1995. I make $86K with summers and all school holidays off. I sometimes work in the summer (school nurse too) and make $45/hr. I love my job and thoroughly enjoy the people I work with (young and old)- not many nurses can say that so I am very lucky.

I work in Virginia in a low-mid cost of living area that is fairly rural. I took a pay cut to work at my current job, so I will speak to the job I had beforehand. That was my highest paying job.

It was in the PICU at a nationally renowned university hospital. When I left, I had 13 years experience. My base pay was $37/hour; that was determined by the hospital's experience based pay scale and was non-negotiable. I worked night shift, which had a shift differential of $4/hour. I also worked my every other weekend requirement, which was an additional $3/hour on top of base pay plus night shift diff. I worked 36 hours per week and no overtime (never wanted to work OT).

So, that made my AVERAGE hourly salary about $42.50/hour for 72 hours. That equals $79,560 a year. That was also the highest paying hospital in my area.

Specializes in TSICU.

In it for the money? Quit nursing and do law school. Otherwise work in an area they like and enjoy going to work and it will be a good salary to live on anywhere. More schooling (graduate) opens higher paying opportunities if they want to specialize in an area.

Easy to make 100k/yr in NY but cost of living is high. Base 80k, night diff 6k, experience 1.2k/yr, BSN 1.5k, certification 1.5k, per diem 54$/hr-56$/hr, 3% raise March 1st. Other hospitals maybe a little hig/low

Specializes in Psych ICU, addictions.
nicktexas said:
Keep in mind all "South" is not equal. Salaries in Fort Worth are typically higher than South Carolina, for example

I did say "somewhere"... 

I lived in the South for more than a decade. Generally, the deeper south you go in the South, the less the wages are. Though better pay is found in larger metro areas like Charlotte, Atlanta, and such. But the cost of living is also lower in the South, which helps compensate for the lower wages.

I wouldn't consider Fort Worth as being in the South, because Texas is its own world. And yes, I lived in Texas too ?

The best thing you could do is to tell your daughters to change their major & get out of the nursing curriculum. Nursing has gone down the toilet & it's only going to get worse. I'm a CRNA, make a great salary, but also tolerate a lot of B.S. from nurse managers about O.R. turnover time and other ridiculous stuff because they clearly do not understand that paralyzed patients cannot breathe on their own & if removed from the anesthesia machine vent, they'll die. You can't take a patient that isn't breathing to PACU on a t-piece, but the nurse managers think you can. There is a lot of conflict with MD anesthesiologists because they think we are taking jobs away from them.

Even if nurses were paid $100k/year, they would still be underpaid. Healthcare IS NOT the place to be if your daughters want to make $100k+ a year. Tell them to change their major to architecture, accounting or business, where it is quite possible to make $100k/year after just a few years of being out of college.

I may not make any friends with this but when did nursing become a career based on $$$ instead of a calling. I am lucky to have 2 pretty good careers and neither were started based on the amount of money I was going to sock away. The first was Law Enforcement which I certainly didn't choose to get rich. After coming out of the military during Vietnam I started at 369.00 a month. I waited for my 21st birthday to become a cop. I made around 40,000. Of course with raises and OT I was comfortable. Having worked in ESB. When I hit 41 my time was in and chose to become a nurse. I wasn't making a million dollars but working my butt off. I was divorced with 3 girls and paying child support I could make a round 90,000.. Ive been around nurses all of my adult life. I've seen the attitudes change. Most of the time I wasn't impressed. I fell out of bed and broke my face. I spent 5 days in the hospital and the care was superb. These weren't 5 or 10 year nurses they were at the bottom rung.

Maybe Im just an old guy who is stuck in the stoneage (I was a Hospice Nurse) and now my oldest daughter started like the old days. 2 years in med-surg, 2 years in a specialty, now she's in Hospice working on her FNP. She will make her money but she had to work her butt off.

My question is when did nursing stop being a calling?

My question is when did nursing stop being a calling?

I'm not so sure it ever was for most people. No doubt the powers that be would love to keep beating the drum that nursing is a calling, hoping to dampen the expectation of reasonable compensation with some kind of insinuation that asking for good wages is somehow greedy or immoral.

Nurses have families and financial obligations just like people in any other career. They educate themselves, make efforts to stay current, and often obtain higher degrees in order to advance. There is absolutely NOTHING wrong with choosing a career based on the desire to succeed financially. Nurses don't break laws in order to make their money, they don't displace other workers to make money, they pay taxes and other withholding costs, make personal sacrifices on holidays and weekends, work nights in contradiction to their bodies' natural rhythms, etc. Expecting decent pay for these sacrifices is not unreasonable. Working for peanuts in order to follow a "calling" is largely an artificial construct inflicted upon the profession by people who have a vested interest in seeing their own pocketbooks swell at the expense of the employees doing the hard work in the field.

Specializes in Government.

I am a salaried RN case manager and I make 100K a year. However I have 30 years of experience. I live in the Midwest in a modest cost region.

I work at night in an ICU, and I know new grads aren't hired into our unit. Like anything they have to be willing to put TIME into their career, getting EXPERIENCE that translates into higher pay eventually. Not many new grad RNs are going to make 100k straight out of nursing school. Most specialties require a minimum of BSN. I have worked 20 years as a BSN but I work part-time. Working full time and picking up extra shifts while working per dem somewhere else might get someone with my experience the 100k.

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