The average in-house RN in your facility may earn around $50 per hour, whereas the aggregate bill rate for a travel nurse could be nearly double. This pay disparity often causes management to resist relying on travel nurses. Travel nursing contracts do tend to place a strain on facilities’ budgets, but the pay rate turns out not to be the main reason.
Learn about the true costs of travel nursing compared to in-house and PRN staffing: how much does a travel nurse cost? Where does the money go? And what unexpected costs may be straining your budget the most?
How much do travel nurses cost per hour?
The aggregate bill rate for travel nurses was $90.54 per hour in 2025, up marginally from $90.13 in 2024, according to the SIA and NATHO Travel Nurse Benchmarking Survey.
That figure blends every specialty, market, and contract type nationally, so answering how much travel nurses cost per hour for your unit means adjusting up for high-acuity specialties, rural placements, and crisis coverage, and down for low-acuity assignments in well-supplied markets.
How much does a travel nurse cost per week?
At that average, a travel nurse costs roughly $3,260 per week for a 36-hour schedule and about $4,350 for a 48-hour schedule. Over a 13-week assignment, the cost of travel nurses ranges from roughly $42,400 to $56,500 per clinician, before bonuses, overtime, or orientation.
What travel nurses cost compared to staff nurses
The comparison facility leaders need is loaded cost against loaded cost. A staff nurse's wage is not what that nurse costs, because payroll taxes, insurance, retirement, and paid leave all add to it.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) measures exactly this. Per the Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for March 2026, private-sector employers spend $80.05 per hour worked on registered nurse occupations in hospitals, comprising $51.99 in wages and $28.05 in benefits. Benefits alone add about 54% to wages. Across all healthcare and social assistance settings, total compensation costs per RN are $78.37.
Set against the $90.54 travel aggregate, the cost of travel nurses vs. staff nurses looks like this.
Notes: The $90.54 is a national figure that blends across all specialties, markets, and settings, so it doesn't price either setting exactly and likely overstates what SNF assignments actually bill. The staff hospital figure is published BLS data, while the staff skilled nursing figure is derived. That derived estimate applies the hospital benefit ratio to the median SNF registered nurse wage, which likely overstates what post-acute employers pay.
Those 2 effects push in opposite directions, so treat 44% as a reasonable midpoint rather than a measured figure, and check both premiums against your own invoices.
In a hospital, the premium works out to roughly $10.50 per hour, or about $4,900 across a 13-week assignment at 36 hours per week. That is real money, but not as significant as many people think, which means the cost problem lies somewhere other than the rate—it lies in what the contract obligates you to buy.
What makes up a travel nurse's bill rate
The travel nurse bill rate bundles everything the agency pays out, plus what it retains. A useful travel nurse cost breakdown separates the portion that reaches the clinician from the portion that covers agency operations.
SIA puts aggregate agency gross margin at 19% in 2025, down from 25% in 2019. Applied to the $90.54 average, roughly $17 per hour stays with the agency, and roughly $73 funds the pay package and the employer costs attached to it.
Below is a typical travel nurse pay package breakdown from the facility's side of the invoice.
Note: Only the 19% gross margin figure is sourced to SIA. The remaining shares are illustrative allocations of the balance and vary by agency and contract.
Housing stipends and travel reimbursements
Housing is the second-largest line in most packages. Agencies set stipends against regional lodging benchmarks, which is why the same assignment costs materially more in a high-cost-of-living metro than in a secondary market.
The travel nurse housing stipend cost is funded entirely through the bill rate. Whether the clinician takes agency-arranged housing or pockets the allowance and finds their own, the facility pays either way.
This line is the clearest structural difference between travel and local coverage, because a clinician who already lives in your market has no lodging to fund.
The stipend is tax-free to the clinician only when these conditions hold:
- IRS Publication 463 treats an assignment as temporary when it is realistically expected to last, and does in fact last, 1 year or less.
- The clinician must maintain a qualifying tax home elsewhere.
The agency must also reimburse under an accountable plan, which is what keeps the allowance off the clinician's W-2. If an assignment is expected to last longer than a year, the work location becomes the clinician's tax home, and living-expense allowances are treated as taxable income. Publication 463 also notes that a series of short assignments to the same location, together covering a long period, may be treated as indefinite.
Compliance with the rule is the agency's responsibility, not yours, but the rule still shapes your options. Repeatedly extending the same traveler can push an assignment past the temporary threshold. At this point, the clinician either absorbs a pay cut or asks for a higher taxable rate to stay. It is one reason travelers rotate out rather than settle in, and a constraint that local PRN coverage does not impose.
Bonuses and incentive pay
Sign-on, completion, referral, extension, and crisis pay all flow through the same invoice. Travel nurse reimbursements and bonuses are the most volatile part of the stack because they spike exactly when your need is greatest. Extension bonuses do it more quietly, adding cost when you have the least leverage to renegotiate.
Agency markup and overhead
The travel nurse agency markup funds recruiting, credentialing, insurance, payroll processing, billing, and profit.
At 19% gross margin and 4% earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) in 2025—both down sharply from the 25% and 11% recorded for 2019—agency profit is not where the bulk of your spend goes.
That matters for how you negotiate. When leaders ask how much hospitals pay travel nurse agencies, the margin is smaller than most assume, leaving little room to squeeze. The better answer to why travel nurses are so expensive is that the expense sits in the commitment structure, not the hourly rate.
For how markup, placement fees, and conversion fees work across staffing models, see our guide to healthcare staffing agency costs.
Managed service provider fees
SIA reports that 74% of aggregate travel nurse staffing revenue was routed through a managed service provider (MSP) in 2025, indicating that most facilities no longer contract with agencies directly.
An MSP consolidates vendor management, credentialing, and invoicing into one relationship, which is real value for a system juggling dozens of suppliers. It also adds an administrative layer whose cost is recovered somewhere, either as a vendor-funded fee added to the bill rate or as a direct charge to you. Ask which model your contract uses, because the answer determines whether the rate you see is the rate you pay.
Hidden travel nurse costs facilities overlook
This is where the spending actually concentrates. Several hidden costs of travel nurses land in your operating budget without appearing as a line item on any invoice.
Guaranteed hours you cannot use
Most contracts obligate you to pay for a set number of hours per week, whether or not the census supports them. Staff hours flex when volume drops; guaranteed contract hours do not.
At the 2025 average rate, 1 unused guaranteed week costs roughly $3,260 per clinician on a 36-hour schedule. The full 13-week hourly premium over a staff nurse is about $4,900. Two slow weeks, therefore, cost more than the entire rate difference that budget conversations tend to focus on.
Onboarding, orientation, and credentialing
Every new clinician requires paid orientation hours, competency verification, and system access setup, billed at the full rate. A staff nurse is oriented once and stays for years; a traveler is oriented every 13 weeks, or 4 times a year, for a position you keep continuously filled.
Your educators and charge nurses absorb that time as well, and those hours usually sit in an education or administrative budget rather than the staffing line you use to compare travel against staff. The position reads as filled, while a share of what you are paying for goes into getting someone up to speed, which is the difference between headcount and real staffing efficiency.
Cancellation and contract terms
Contracts carry minimum lengths, cancellation windows, and early-termination penalties. The advertised travel nurse contract cost rarely reflects what happens when you end an assignment early or cut hours mid-contract. That clause determines how much flexibility you actually purchased.
Turnover and continuity of care
Every 13 weeks, a clinician who finally knows your unit and your escalation pathways leaves, and the replacement starts at zero. That cycle costs you in error risk and core-staff workload, and it feeds the nurse understaffing pressures that drove the decision to bring in travelers.
What drives travel nurse costs up or down
Higher-acuity specialties price above the $90.54 aggregate because the qualified pool is smaller, with ICU, OR, ER, and labor and delivery typically running above medical-surgical. Certification depth and experience drive higher travel nurse staffing costs across specialties.
Geography moves the number just as much. Rural sites pay for the difficulty of recruiting anyone to relocate, while expensive metros pay for the lodging benchmark. The cost of travel nurses in a market is largely a function of how many qualified clinicians already live nearby. Your payment model also shapes how much premium labor your margin absorbs, and requirements differ across types of healthcare facilities.
Timing is the third lever. Respiratory season, holidays, and summer PTO clusters raise rates, and short contracts are priced higher per hour because recruiting costs are spread across fewer billable hours.
Travel nurses vs. PRN staffing costs
Seen whole, the travel nurse cost problem is not the hourly premium but the commitment attached to it. The fix is a model that separates them. PRN does exactly that: a transparent rate for hours actually worked, with no guarantee attached and no penalty for adjusting.
The travel nurse vs. PRN staffing cost comparison looks like this.
How block booking PRN shifts lowers costs
Nursa is a marketplace, not an agency. Facilities post shifts directly to a network of more than 500,000 credentialed 1099 independent-contractor clinicians across 31 states, and clinicians claim the shifts they want.
There is no housing stipend to fund and no relocation to underwrite, because the clinicians picking up your shifts already live in your market. There is also no MSP layer, no subscription fee, and no charge for hiring a clinician into a full-time role.
Block booking closes the gap between PRN flexibility and contract stability. Post a defined block, such as multiple 12-hour shifts per week for 8 weeks, and fill it with local clinicians who can return. You get the predictable coverage a travel contract provides without the lock-in or the guaranteed-hours exposure. That is the core of a flexible staffing model.
How to reduce your travel nurse spend
The 2025 data points to a clear conclusion about how to reduce travel nurse costs: the savings are in hours and terms, not in rates.
Facilities pulled 12.5% of hours out of the travel channel last year, and the price per hour still ticked up. Rates are not coming down, so facilities are buying less rather than buying cheaper. Three moves follow.
- Reserve travel contracts for roles that genuinely require them, typically hard-to-fill specialties and long-vacancy positions in tight markets. Cover predictable recurring gaps with block-booked shifts and absorb call outs and census spikes with PRN, phasing down travel contracts gradually enough that you do not reopen the coverage gaps you closed.
- Negotiate the terms before the rate. With the industry gross margin at 19%, the hourly number has little give, but guaranteed-hours minimums, cancellation windows, and orientation billing are all negotiable and carry more dollars than a rate concession would.
- Match contract length to coverage you can actually forecast, and ask your MSP how its fee is recovered. Premium labor is rarely the only line under pressure, so these moves work best as part of a broader approach to healthcare cost containment rather than as a one-time procurement fix.
Cover open shifts with Nursa
After accounting for benefits, travel nurse rates are closer to in-house staff costs than most budget conversations assume—roughly 13% in hospitals.
However, the comparison is not that simple.
Travel nursing contracts commit facilities to paying travel nurses a minimum number of hours over a fixed period. A facility may also incur additional costs if it cancels the contract or hires the travel nurse for a permanent role.
None of these conditions apply when posting open shifts on Nursa. Facilities can post a single shift or a block of shifts over several weeks and only pay for the hours worked. No minimum quota. No long-term contract. No hire-away fees.
Sign up with Nursa and start posting your open shifts.
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