Realistic Starting Salary

U.S.A. Illinois

Published

I am graduating in May with my BSN, and will be looking for work in the greater Chicago area. I realize that websites like salary.com post median/mean for salaries, and they don't look that bad for the area. However, I realize that median salary is not what I will be starting out at.

Could anyone working in the Chicago area give me an idea of how much (either annually or hourly) of what I should expect as a reasonable salary as a new grad RN, BSN with little-to-no experience?

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I'm not in Chicago but it depends on where you work. I work in a specialty area (graduated in December) and so I started out making more than a nurse working on the floor. It also depends on if you have any hospital experience. They took my years of service and halved them so I started out making what a nurse with 5 years of experience would make. There are a lot of things that factor into pay.

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I have always found this to be a good resource. I went ahead and looked up the salary for an RN in Chicago for you:

Salary: Registered Nurse in Chicago, IL | Glassdoor

I was not able to find a starting salary.

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27 an hour is reasonable. I'm in Chicago and have been working a year and a half. You'll also likely get some differential to bump it up a bit.

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I am a new graduate living in Chicago and applied to several hospitals in or around the downtown area and I would say that $27/hr is indeed a fair starting point. Base pay may differ by up to a dollar an hour but most comparable hospitals and units, especially the downtown ones tend to even out with the amounts they pay for night shift and weekend shift differentials. Hope this helps!

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I work in Chicago and I started as a new grad in a hospital a year ago at $26/ hr with differential of $2 extra for PM shift and $4 for night shift.

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Here in southwest WA state, new grad RN wages in the hospital are about 26 -27 dollars an hour before shift differentials. In Seattle the cost of living is higher, and so are the wages, but not by much.

When I graduated and was waiting 8 WEEKS for my RN license (after taking the paper NCLEX), my starting wage was $11.55 an hour. It went all the way up to $15 or so an hour after my RN was in place :D

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