- Community
-
Programs
- Schools
-
Careers
- RN Specialties
- Best RN Jobs and Salaries
- Aesthetic Nurse
- Nursing Informatics
- Nurse Case Manager
- NICU Nurse
- Forensic Nurse
- Labor and Delivery Nurse
- Psychiatric Nurse
- Pediatric Nurse
- Travel Nurse
- Telemetry Nurse
- Dermatology Nurse
- Nurse Practitioner
- Best NP Jobs and Salaries
- Family NP (FNP)
- Pediatric NP
- Neonatal NP
- Oncology NP
- Acute Care NP
- Aesthetic NP
- Women's Health NP
- Adult-Gerontology NP
- Orthopedic NP
- Emergency NP
- Psychiatric-Mental Health NP (PMHNP)
- APRN
- Nurse Educator
- Nurse Administrator
- Certified Nurse Midwife (CNM)
- Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS)
- Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA)
- Resources
- Education
NedRN
1 Article; 5,785 Posts
Your stipends total $104 per day. Times 7 days a week is $728. Divide $728 into 36 hours equals $20.22 cents an hour. Add base pay of $24.59 an hour and (rounded up slightly) you get $45 an hour.
I didn't say you are getting low balled. That might be fair market for that particular assignment. What I said is that is low for any travel assignment and I suspected you left certain compensation items out of it, such as health insurance and travel reimbursement. Travel usually is around $500 thus adding about a dollar to your hourly pay. Insurance can be nothing all the way to $800 a month (which would be unusual if the agency paid that much without a payroll deduction). But if the insurance value provided is say $400 a month, that would be another $2.50 an hour, bringing the total close enough to $50 to be acceptable. By the way, when you consider your benefits (good health insurance, education, paid vacations, holidays, PTO, and possibly retirement), you are making close to $50 an hour at your staff job in Chicago.
There is a free online resource for you, a calculator just for travelers! Google PanTravelers, sign up for free membership (a choice after you start signing up), and the calculator is now available (along with a ton of content on every aspect of travel nursing). It is a little hard to use right now (new easier version just waiting for new site to go live). Just ignore the housing box and put your total stipends into the per diem entry box. Get insurance information with quotes you get from your agency, and your travel pay (never heard of an agency not providing a travel reimbursement). Do that for each of your quotes and you will be able to determine which agency is paying the most overall, and the most take home pay (often different). If the assignments are in different areas, you also need to find out what housing is likely to cost you. That will help you to determine which assignment will provide the most bankable pay after your costs are paid (again, not necessarily the best overall paying). Craigslist will give you a quick idea about housing costs (and availability) in most places.
All that said, forget about best pay of any sort, best overall, best take-home, or best after housing costs, for your first assignment or two. Your first goal is to have a successful assignment or two for your work history. Then you can start chasing the money. You don't know what you don't know right now and you want a traveler friendly assignment well within your clinical comfort zone. You will have enough stress from learning a new area culture, hospital culture, different patient population, different acuity and patient load, different patient flow, and different charting software (which can really take some time to use). You want to find recruiters that you communicate well with and share this goal of successful first assignment (but verify working conditions during your interview with the hospital manager). I would recommend going for such an assignment anywhere in the country.
Frankly, you will be much less likely to find such assignments in Texas. Of your options so far, without knowing if your recruiters are trustworthy or share the goal I suggested above or the hospitals involved, I'd pick Seattle first, LA second, and Texas last. Reason being the unionized workforce in Seattle and LA (mandated maximum staffing ratios in LA), and the known bad working conditions in Texas (and no unions).