Travel nursing offers many unique opportunities as well as unique challenges. When considering whether or not to give it a try, each nurse should weigh the pros and cons to see if it would be a good fit for them and something they’d enjoy. Here’s a list of some travel nursing pros and cons to consider if you’re thinking of getting started!

travel nursing pros

travel & adventure

In general, I think the pros of travel nursing are perhaps more obvious than the cons. The first thing that many people think of when it comes to travel nursing is the opportunity for adventure that it offers. Each travel nurse contract is typically just about three months long, meaning you could theoretically try out living in four different cities within one year!

Dan started travel nursing in March/April of 2022 and worked three different contracts that year bringing us around the country to Myrtle Beach (South Carolina), York (Maine), and Phoenix (Arizona). On top of that, we travelled to and through countless other states on cross-country road trips and little trips here and there while Dan worked his contracts. The opportunities for travel and adventure are endless with travel nursing, especially as more and more states become a part of the NLC (Nurse Licensure Compact)!

good to great pay

If the first thing you think of when you think of travel nursing isn’t travel and adventure, it’s probably the higher pay that travel nursing often affords. As of now, March 2023, a travel nurse can expect to make as much as twice as much as a staff nurse at any given hospital. This is most definitely not always the case, but if you’re prioritizing pay over everything else when looking for a contract, you’ll likely find some like this.

As I’ve discussed in other posts, the biggest difference between the pay of a staff nurse versus a travel nurse is the (untaxed) housing stipend. If you maintain a tax home in your home state, then you qualify for your housing stipend to be untaxed which puts you in quite a low tax bracket most of the time. Usually the stipend makes up more than half of a travel nurses pay. There are some other qualifications to this which I’ll talk about in a later post. Travel nursing is certainly a unique opportunity to do a lot of travelling while making a lot of money.

looks good on a resume

Travel nursing requires a lot of flexibility, confidence, and ability to learn quickly. Training usually looks like a bunch of online modules and then two days of on the floor orientation. After that you’re expected to be ready to do your job, and do it well. On top of this, travel nurses often gain valuable experience working with all different management systems, patient populations, and documentation systems. Those are all impressive skills that having travel nursing on your resume attests to.

life skills

Not only does travel nursing require a lot of flexibility, confidence, and ability to move and learn quickly in the work setting, but also in general as you navigate the world of travel nursing. Things like finding housing and budgeting are made so much more complicated by travel nursing, but you come out of it more resilient than before and with new life skills. Most of us could use with a lesson or two on minimalism, and travel nursing will teach you fifty. I’m definitely not saying that Dan and I are minimalists (we’re not), but we’ve learned to hold our beloved things with a much looser grasp.

travel nursing cons

minimalism

As I was saying, travel nursing requires at least some level of minimalism. Moving every three or four months (if you don’t renew your contracts) necessitates finding furnished housing and travelling very lightly. This does teach some valuable life lessons, but it’s also just plain hard. Especially while you’re travelling the country and seeing so many incredible places, it can be hard to have to strictly limit what you can bring and what you can buy while there.

For Dan and I this was particularly difficult, partially because neither of us were minimalistic to begin with, but also because we had just gotten married. We were gifted so many beautiful things for our home from kitchen supplies to furniture that we were able to enjoy for a very short amount of time before our plans were upended and we decided to start travel nursing. It’s tough to leave behind the vast majority of your things and essentially live out of your car, though we are becoming excellent packers.

little opportunity for advancement

This is probably the most significant practical con to travel nursing. While having travel nursing on your resume when applying for a staff nursing job is impressive, you likely won’t have much experience working on different units from your time travel nursing. It all depends how much experience you start out with when you begin travel nursing, but assuming you only meet the experience requirements for one specialty, you’ll likely be stuck on that specialty for the entirety of your time as a travel nurse.

The minimum experience requirement for travel nursing is one year working in a specialty, but some specialties require multiple years. This is because the training is so expedited with travel nurses. They’re hiring you to fill a need quickly, not to spend months training you just in time for your three month contract to be up. For Dan, he started travel nursing with experience working on a Med Surg/Tele floor so he’s been working Med Surg or Med Surg/Tele jobs. Even getting a strict Telemetry position has been a challenge, though he did recently receive an offer for a Telemetry position.

lack of stability

A somewhat less practical/more experiential con to travel nursing is the extreme lack of stability. I’ve written before about the lack of protections for travel nurses in the field, and I think it’s worth mentioning again here. Just because you sign a contract or even start working one, doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get full time hours or even get to finish out your contract. Unlike with other jobs, severance isn’t a thing. Contracts get cancelled or the pay gets reduced, and there’s little to nothing you can do about it.

Even if none of that happens, travel nurses are still moving up to every three or so months which is incredibly challenging and destabilizing. Travel is fun and amazing, but hard. Anyone who has done any significant amount of travel will tell you that. It’s a bit of a chaotic lifestyle which does get easier with time (in our experience), but it’s tough to get used to.

There are a lot of challenges and risks inherent in travel nursing today, and a lot of flexibility that is required. It’s far from a perfect system and it can be challenging to learn how to navigate the world of travel nursing. My hope is that this blog will offer some helpful insight and tips to travel nurses that make this struggle a little bit easier.

what are some travel nursing pros and cons that you’ve noticed?