This In-demand Health Care Job Lets You Travel the U.S. and Earn 6 Figures
You can earn more than $3,000 a week.
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The next big "travel job" just might be a health care gig: nursing.
Registered nurses in the United States can merge their professional skills with their passion for travel by signing up to be travel nurses. According to nurse.org, travel nurses fill in at hospitals, clinics, and other health care facilities experiencing nursing shortages. Each assignment typically lasts about 13 weeks.
These stints often pay well: At present, travel nurses can earn more than $3,000 per week. (In 2022, the national average pay for travel nurses was $150 an hour, CNBC reported. In comparison, the average registered nurse salary was $39.78 an hour, according to NurseJournal.org.) Plus, many agencies cover housing or provide a housing stipend.
The compensation varies by location, with the highest rates often seen in states like California, Texas, Massachusetts, Washington, and New York. And while escaping to the beaches of Hawaii for a few weeks sounds idyllic, “destination locations” like Hawaii and Florida can pay less.
Other variables for rates are how specialized the applicant is and what department they work in. According to Fortune, the highest-paying travel nurse jobs are in intensive care units, the emergency department, and medical surgery.
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To score the best assignments, nurse.org recommends nurses be flexible, work with reputable agencies known for pay transparency, connect with multiple agencies to increase the odds of finding placements, and maintain licenses in several states.
Being a nurse is not the only way to get paid to travel. Take flight attendants, for example, who travel on the job and have the perk of free flights. Or digital nomads, who parlay remote jobs into the freedom to travel the world.
Additionally, companies sometimes look to hire people for temporary jobs that allow them to travel to dreamy destinations, like when the Aruba Tourism Authority started looking for someone to become the island's weather person for a week. Or when Netflix said it would pay an experienced flight attendant up to $385,000 to work on its private plane.
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