Travel Nurse Salary by State 2026: Real Wage Data for All 50

TL;DR: The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the average registered nurse wage at $48.76 an hour, $101,420 a year across 3,379,720 nurses. That single number hides two different countries: the top-paying state pays $72.25 an hour and the bottom-paying state $37.03 an hour for the same license, a 1.95× gap. Only 12 of the 51 jurisdictions sit above the national average, so the headline figure is pulled up by a handful of expensive states. Every travel offer you are quoted is built on your state’s line in this table, plus the non-taxable stipends on top of it.

What These Numbers Measure

This is the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey for May 2025, the latest release. It covers nurses working in every industry (hospitals, nursing homes, physicians’ offices, home health) in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It is the only government wage series that goes state by state and occupation by occupation, which is why every serious answer to “what do nurses earn here” eventually quotes it.

What it is not: a list of travel agency offers. No survey separates travel nurses from staff nurses. The BLS does not tag workers by staffing model, agency payroll companies do not publish their rates anywhere public, and any page that quotes a tidy “travel premium” percentage is inventing it. So this page gives you the measured baseline and shows how the travel package sits on top of it.

The baseline still matters, because a travel hourly is anchored to the local staff rate. Agencies recruit against the hospital’s own payroll, and the hospital’s payroll is what this table measures. When a recruiter offers $72.25 an hour in California and $37.03 in Alabama, that is not a difference in negotiation skill. It is this dataset.

How a Travel Package Is Built From the State Rate

Two components, taxed completely differently:

1. Taxable hourly: the state figure above, times your hours. At the national RN mean, a 36-hour week is $1,755 of taxable pay and a 13-week contract is $22,815.
2. Non-taxable stipends: meals and housing, paid up to the federal ceiling for your county and season: $68 to $92 a day for meals, and $113 a night for lodging as the standard, rising to $499 in the priciest destination. This part does not depend on your hourly rate at all.

Which is why comparing recruiters on hourly alone misleads people. Two nurses at $48.76 an hour can keep very different amounts: one in a state with no income tax on a documented housing stipend, one in California paying state tax on a blended “all in” rate that the tax code treats as wages in full. The take-home pay calculator turns a specific offer into what actually reaches your bank, and the state tax rankings show what each state does to the numbers on this page.

The Top and Bottom of the Table

For registered nurses the spread runs from California at $72.25 an hour ($150,280 a year, $2,601 on a 36-hour week) to Alabama at $37.03 an hour ($77,020 a year, $1,333 a week). Over one 13-week contract that is a $73,260 gap in taxable pay before a dollar of stipend is added.

Three things worth noticing in that ordering:

• The top of the wage table is a cost-of-living list. California has the eighth highest federal lodging ceiling in the country ($325 a night in San Francisco) while Alabama peaks at $221 a night in Gulf Shores. A high hourly in an expensive state can leave you with less in savings than a lower hourly somewhere rent is cheap, which is why the cost column is in the table.
• The states with the most nurses per resident are not the high-paying ones. West Virginia employs 33.4 nurses for every 1,000 workers, the densest in the country, at $41.81 an hour. Utah has the fewest, 15.8 per 1,000, at $43.72. Chasing the money and chasing the demand are two different strategies on this data, and they barely overlap.
• Alabama, South Dakota and Mississippi are the three lowest on annual pay: $77,020, $77,140 and $78,950. If your tax home is in one of them, an assignment almost anywhere else on this table is a raise. Read the tax-home rules before acting on that, though: letting go of your tax home to follow the work is what makes the stipend vanish.

Pay by Role, Nationally

Travel nursing is not one wage. These are the May 2025 national figures for every clinical role an agency books, so you can see where your license sits:

Role	Median per hour	Mean per year	Bottom 10 percent	Top 10 percent	US jobs
Registered Nurse (RN)	$46.90	$101,420	$68,940	$137,470	3,379,720
Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN)	$30.96	$67,050	$49,740	$83,440	648,410
Nurse Practitioner (NP)	$63.61	$137,300	$101,340	$174,420	323,040
Physician Assistant (PA)	$65.33	$141,280	$99,380	$190,280	162,150
Diagnostic Medical Sonographer	$46.44	$97,240	$67,820	$129,370	90,160
Radiologic Technologist	$38.52	$83,840	$55,980	$118,660	230,490
Surgical Technologist	$31.08	$68,710	$45,940	$96,940	117,460
Respiratory Therapist	$39.56	$87,300	$63,660	$118,050	139,790
Medical Assistant	$21.97	$46,120	$36,050	$59,310	817,870
Emergency Medical Technician	$21.38	$46,830	$34,130	$62,500	180,510

The spread inside one role is wider than the gap between most roles: the bottom tenth of RNs clears $33.14 an hour and the top tenth $66.09. Shift, state and specialty move that more than the job title does, which is the whole argument for using the state table instead of a national average.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which state pays travel nurses the most?

On measured staff wages, California: $72.25 an hour, $150,280 a year. It also carries the eighth highest federal lodging ceiling in the country at $325 a night, so run the housing maths before treating it as the answer. Switch the role selector in the table before assuming it: licensed practical nurses peak in Washington rather than California, and the bottom of that table is Mississippi instead of Alabama.

How much do travel nurses make per week?

Take your state’s mean hourly from the table and multiply by scheduled hours. At the national RN mean that is $1,755 for 36 hours and $2,340 for 48 hours of taxable pay, before stipends. The stipend line is the one that is not taxed at all, so the honest weekly figure is the two added together, and the per diem ceiling table has your city’s number.

Do travel nurses really earn more than staff nurses?

No dataset answers that, and you should distrust a site that claims one does. What is measurable is the structure: a travel package pays a comparable hourly and then adds an expense reimbursement that wages never include. Whether that stays untaxed depends on three tests, not on the amount, the per diem taxability tests walk through them line by line.

Do travel nurses get paid for orientation and gap weeks?

Per diem reimburses expenses on assignment, so unpaid weeks usually carry no stipend, the most common reason a strong annual rate turns into a weak actual income. The free budget spreadsheet has a column for unpaid weeks specifically because averaging them away hides the problem.

Is this 2025 or 2026 data?

Wages are the BLS May 2025 release, the most recent published: government wage data runs about a year behind. Stipend ceilings are FY2027 federal rates, effective 1 October 2026 through 30 September 2027. Those two clocks mean a contract that straddles 1 October is measured against two different rate files.

Sources we checked

Every figure on this page came from one of the documents below, not from another blog. Links checked 10 October 2026.

• BLS OEWS wage data, interactive tables: The same May 2025 state and national estimates, filterable by occupation and area.
• BLS OEWS data tables, all releases: The May 2025 national and state release pages behind every wage line on this page.
• BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 state estimates: The state-by-state wage table every hourly figure on this page is read from.
• BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook - Registered Nurses: National median pay of $97,550 for 2025 and the state and area data links behind the tables here.