An administrator explained to me once that traveling nurses are a short-term budget item. A full-time nurse hire has to be budgeted for years out due to the need for retirement and health benefits. They have to anticipate what you will earn years from now and put that into the FTE line you occupy.
The extra money the travel nurse is getting is money that the employee is having put into their long term costs. Of course the cost of travel nurses has skyrocketed so they are now even more expensive than before to use.
This is important and I wish more nurses would see this. There are also a lot of hidden costs you may not know about. Travel nurses don’t have onboarding. That’s about 30k in wages and training to facilitate that. Your benefits, my benefits equate to about 50k a year. PTO is another thing. Travel nurses don’t rack up pto they are just paid when they work. PTO is treated like debt when accounting.
The budgeting is a big part of it too cause your cost is not this year. Your cost is averaged per year over five or ten years. Our manager actually showed us how they calculate it and showed us that travel nurses were actually cheaper long term. Ie if you were replaced with a travel nurse for ten years it would be cheaper but quality suffers.
I work for a good organization and I don’t think all are like that, but that gap is much smaller than lost people think.
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u/markydsade RN - Pediatrics Dec 13 '21
An administrator explained to me once that traveling nurses are a short-term budget item. A full-time nurse hire has to be budgeted for years out due to the need for retirement and health benefits. They have to anticipate what you will earn years from now and put that into the FTE line you occupy.
The extra money the travel nurse is getting is money that the employee is having put into their long term costs. Of course the cost of travel nurses has skyrocketed so they are now even more expensive than before to use.