The contract-pay benchmark you can audit
Know what a travel healthcare offer is worth.
Look up a local pay benchmark, compare an offer’s taxable wage, and inspect every assumption. PayBeacon models the numbers from BLS wages, CMS hospital filings, and state rate caps—never anonymous tips or a black box.
- 9specialties
- 120metros
- 50states
- May 2025OEWS baseline
- FY2024HCRIS signal
Use the benchmark, not just the headline
Private tool · nothing submitted
Compare a real offer
Enter taxable hourly wage, hours, and an optional stipend. PayBeacon compares wage to wage while keeping the total package separate.
Open the travel nurse pay calculator →Side by side · shareable result
Compare two markets
Put the same specialty in two metros or states and compare weekly wage, hourly wage, ranges, ranks, and source samples.
Open the market comparison →Latest source update · 2026-07-19
CMS HCRIS FY2024 change report
See how 1,540 comparable benchmarks changed, with occupation summaries and an open row-level CSV.
Read the source-change report →Nine occupation datasets · one consistent model
Explore travel healthcare pay by specialty
Start with a specialty hub to compare every covered metro and state, see the middle benchmark, inspect the highest-ranked markets, and download the complete public CSV.
Featured metros
Modeled weekly gross-wage benchmarks before tax. They exclude housing and travel stipends and premium-pay components, and are benchmarks, not job offers. Sample sizes and source vintages appear on every page.
Dallas–Fort Worth, TX
Travel RN · est. weekly
$1,826$1,470–$1,992 p25–p75 band
Los Angeles–Long Beach, CA
Travel RN · est. weekly
$2,257$1,866–$2,793 p25–p75 band
Phoenix–Mesa, AZ
Travel RN · est. weekly
$2,170$1,771–$2,342 p25–p75 band
San Jose–Sunnyvale, CA
Travel RN · est. weekly
$3,608$2,747–$3,721 p25–p75 band
San Francisco–Oakland, CA
Travel RN · est. weekly
$3,106$2,283–$3,590 p25–p75 band
Sacramento–Roseville, CA
Travel RN · est. weekly
$2,854$2,195–$3,306 p25–p75 band
How it works — and why you can trust it
Government wages
We start from the BLS Occupational Employment & Wage Statistics median for your specialty in your metro — the same public survey economists cite.
Contract premium
We measure what facilities actually pay for contract labor from their CMS hospital cost reports, and divide by local staff wages to get a real premium multiplier.
Modeled gross wage
We subtract a disclosed agency-margin assumption, apply relevant state ceilings, and calculate a pre-tax weekly benchmark on a standard 36-hour week. Stipends and premium-pay components are not included.
Source · BLS
Wage baseline
Occupational Employment & Wage Statistics — median, p25 and p75 hourly wages by occupation and metro. Public domain.
Source · CMS HCRIS
Contract-labor rates
Hospitals report contract-labor hours and dollars in their Medicare cost reports. We derive the facility $/hr from those filings.
Source · State caps
Legal ceilings
Where a state publishes a maximum agency rate (e.g. Oregon, Minnesota, Massachusetts), we clip the estimate to it and flag the page.
Put a live pay benchmark on your site
Recruiters, staffing blogs and nurse communities embed PayBeacon to show credible, audit-ready pay numbers from the current published snapshot. One line of HTML, no framework, renders in an isolated shadow root so it never clashes with your styles.
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