Most nursing pay advice is a number somebody wrote down once. Nobody checked it again.
This is the opposite of that: what the board is holding this morning, pulled fresh, and next week it will say something else.
Two in three postings will not tell you what they pay
There are 10,827 nursing roles live. 3,844 of them will tell you what the job pays.
See the data
What the board holds this morning
Live roles, what they state, and what they pay.
Live right now
The sign-on bonus is stated on one priced posting in eleven, at a median of $7,500 once. The quartile spread is $29,882, every year. Only one of those is negotiable.
That gap is the first thing worth knowing. Most of the board wants your application before it will discuss money, and that is a choice somebody made rather than a fact about the job. Of everything live, 1,109 are travel contracts and 589 state outright that new graduates are welcome.
The width matters more than the middle
The median across every employment type is $98,441. That number is the least interesting thing on this page, because a quarter of postings sit below $84,934 and a quarter sit above $114,816, which means the middle describes almost nobody.
See the spread
$29,882between the quartiles — the room you have in a negotiation
Carry the width, not the middle. $29,882 separates the quartiles, and that is your room. An offer at the bottom of the band and an offer at the top are the same job, described the same way, $29,882 apart.
Hourly, the same board reads $40 at the median, running $35 to $50 across the quartiles. Split by how you are hired, the medians run: travel $110,169, PRN $96,533, staff $96,512, agency $88,400. Travel's figure is annualized from a weekly rate at fifty-two weeks, which almost nobody works, so read it beside the staff number rather than against it.
The bonus is smaller than the band
A sign-on bonus appears on 354 of the priced postings, about one in eleven, and where it appears the median is $7,500.
Hold those two next to each other. The bonus arrives once, and it gets taxed. The quartile spread is $29,882 every single year, it compounds into every raise you are ever offered off that base, and unlike the bonus nobody puts it in the advert.
Who this doesn't apply to
If you work nights, weekends or charge, none of it is in here. Shift differentials sit in a different field from the salary range, so every figure on this page is posted base, and nurses will tell you the differential is where the money turns up.
These are advertised ranges, not earnings. A range is what an employer will say in public before it has met you, which is a different thing from what it will pay once it wants you.
Find your own band first
filter the board to your specialty and your state before you look at any single offer. One number means nothing without the two either side of it.
Ask where the offer sits in it
bottom, middle or top. A recruiter who will not place it has answered you.
Ask what moves it
years, certification, shift, charge, weekend commitment. Get the list, then price each line.
Ask about the differential separately
it is not in any figure on this page, and it is usually worth more than a lateral move.
Check the date at the bottom
if this page is more than a week old, so are its numbers.
Sources
- Nursing Mastery job corpus, read August 5, 2026 at 03:09 UTC; freshest listing August 4, 2026.
- Percentiles are midpoints of advertised salary ranges on live postings. Values outside $20,000 to $800,000 a year are dropped as parse artifacts and groups under five postings are suppressed.
- Shift differentials live in a separate field and are not included in any figure here.
