HONORED HEROES?

Travel Nurse Wages Dip as America Pretends COVID Is Over—and Death Spiral Continues

Some nurses are still making roughly twice what they did before the pandemic. Others are suddenly seeing the rug pulled out from under them.

With coronavirus hospitalization rates becoming more manageable in the pandemic’s third year, many travel nurses are finding their wages dropping in tandem, according to NBC News. During the worst months of the first and second waves of the virus, some travel nurses had reported earning triple what full-time staffers did, moving to fill in at hospitals struggling to staff their wards with burned-out and fatigued staff. But with demand shifting back to recruiting full-time employees, some contractual workers are seeing their gigs vanish mid-contract. Others are just earning less: One health system in Oregon told the outlet that it had negotiated down its travel nurses’ contract rates by as much as 50 percent. Still, a travel nurse in May could still expect to earn $3,100 a week—nearly double the rate they averaged in December 2019, according to online healthcare labor marketplace Vivian Health.