A couple of months ago I posted a survey to assess how various locum tenens nurse practitioners are being paid and which states paid them the highest rate. I wanted to share the results with my readers to make sure you are requesting the correct rates.
The hourly rate between family nurse practitioners and acute care nurse practitioners were pretty similar. However, there was such a vast range of pay rates for locum tenens nurse practitioners as a whole. Here is a summary of the survey results.
- Locum tenens family nurse practitioners have made as little as $50/h and as high as $95/h.
- Locum tenens acute care nurse practitioners have made as little as $60/h and as high as $100/h.
- The average nurse practitioner made $70/h while on assignment.
- Some of the highest paying states are Washington, California, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Connecticut.
- Some of the lowest paying states are Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Texas.
What does this mean?
Your hourly pay rate will depend on experience and location. If you have at least 1 year of experience as a nurse practitioner, please try not to accept less than $60/h.
If your goal is to be in a certain location or you are passionate about helping the native American population, then by all means you can take the temporary pay cut.
If you are driven to work in a state that pays well, see the above recommendations. Note that it is often rural areas that will pay the highest rate.
Just because someone noted they have been paid $85/h before doesn’t mean they will be paid this rate EVERYWHERE they go. They possibly worked in a rural area with a large need. Maybe on their next assignment they wanted to be in a big city in a different state and had to take a $5-$10 pay cut. I personally don’t mind a pay cut if it’s a prime location I want to be in or if the clinic is not that busy.
During nurse practitioner week, I remember reading somewhere “everyone wants a nurse practitioner but no one wants to pay for one.” That’s awesome that we are helping fill the primary care gap and especially in rural populations. But let’s remember that in order for us to be compensated appropriately, we’ll need to ask for fair pay and to work together. There should not be any nurse practitioner seeing ~30 patients per day (non-urgent care), nor should there be nurse practitioners being paid <$60/h.
Any thoughts?
Made $ 80!plus in hour in AK
After high cost of living..groceries etc
No better than $60 in the lower 48.
It’s al about where you wanna be
Agree that we need to join together to demand our worth. Remember that these rates are not employee rates so we have to automatically deduct a percentage (20-25%) for taxes etc. so $50 is really $40 and part of the reason people hire locum is because they have a need! Agree that if you are doing locum somewhere prime just to defer the cost of living and traveling then weigh and ,measure pay out, as mentioned in the article. But $60 is a low bar and we should not be seeing 30+ patients anywhere! Because nursing has no generalized concensus, we APRN’s sometimes have a hard time advocating for ourselves nationally. I often hear ” well, my area only pays $45 an hour ” when in reality, that’s what people are accepting! There are some great tools to help NPs see what they actually bring into a clinic as far as billing and revenue to help negotiate salary. Barton just had an article about salary based only on revenue and the minimum NP employee rate after all overhead, including physician collaboration fees, etc was $130-160,000 a year and this was based on the lower end of billing codes! We need to have the facts and demand more as a united front!