Nursing Salaries, Benefits, and Bonuses

Why Study Nursing Online ?

With many baby boomers retiring, there is a large nurse shortage growing by the day. The demand for nurses will create over a million new jobs, and is already lifting nursing wages. Studying nursing online allows you to improve your career and salary with flexible hours that work around your current schedule.

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One of the first questions every nursing student wants the answer to is: What is the salary of a nurse? How much does she or he earn as an RN, LPN, or as an advanced practitioner, and how much extra can a travel RN earn?

Nursing as a career appeals to so many people specifically for its stability, good benefits, and generally solid income. The salary is still low, in most people’s opinion, for the responsibilities an RN must assume, but it allows professionals to lead middle to upper middle class lives. Even during economic downturns nursing stays the line. It’s a profession that will always have a demand for new blood.

Salaries for nurses depend upon a variety of factors:

• Region of the country
• Rural or urban practice
• Type of nurse—RN or LPN, Associates degreed, Bachelors, Masters, or PhD
• Type of patient care facility – hospital, outpatient clinic, doctor’s office, nursing home, homecare nurse, midwife, etc.
• Type of nursing specialty – Critical Care nurse, O/EHN nurse, Nurse Anesthetist, Nurse Practitioner, ED or Trauma nurse, flight nurse, Nurse Manager, and more.
• Level of need
• Type of position – full-time permanent, per diem, traveler, etc.

Factors that Drive Nursing Salary Upward

Many factors contribute to general salary for a professional nurse. But beyond that a few more job situations can drive much higher nursing salaries. They include:

• Travel nursing
• Per Diem work
• Bonuses

Travel RN Salaries

If you ever take a travel nurse assignment you will have the opportunity to earn significantly more money than you do as a full-time permanent RN. Why? Travelers must choose from jobs where experienced nurses are in critically short supply. They pack up and hit the road for short-term stints of time and in exchange for that are paid quite well for their time and trouble.

Find out in-depth details of how and why travel nurses can net the big bucks and how they even boost those further with special add-on bonuses.

Per Diem Salaries

Nurses in some cases have the option to work on a per diem basis, or on a day-to-day or as needed basis. For this flexibility they may make significantly more per hour than does a permanent RN. However, per diem also means RNs take risks with overall need. When the need for nurses drops, so too does the per diem nursing staff.

Nursing Bonuses

The competition for nurses is stiff and when times are good for hospitals they are often able to dangle very attractive sign-on bonuses in front of the noses of new nurses. A few thousand dollars tacked onto the front of your earnings can really kick-start your earning as an RN. Learn about the pros and cons to monetary nursing bonuses.

 

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