What Are Travel Nursing Agencies?
Learn about the agencies behind traveling, their pay packages, onboarding experiences, and benefits.
Learn about the agencies behind traveling, their pay packages, onboarding experiences, and benefits.
If you’re ready to start choosing between travel nursing agencies, you’ve likely decided to give travel nursing a shot. There’s a good chance you’ve even begun your search with questions like, “What are the best travel nursing agencies?,” or “What are the highest paying travel nurse agencies?”
While those are great questions to ask, you need to think a little bit more deeply about exactly what you’re looking for in a nursing agency.
Typically, travel nurse agencies advertise open positions with basic information, such as location, unit type, and pay up front to help you make an informed decision. However, it's not always as simple as comparing a few numbers. The advertised weekly pay won’t necessarily give you the whole story.
Travel nurse compensation packages are made up of both taxable income and nontaxable income, and this ratio can differ between travel assignments, facilities, and—of course—travel nursing agencies. There are a variety of factors that can influence this, from the travel agency's profit margins to employee insurance costs to licensing reimbursements.
High pay is important but a bad experience can make no amount of money worth it.
You should be careful not to assume that the highest paying travel nurse agencies are the best agencies to work for, or that they always offer the highest pay rates. Money can’t buy happiness, especially if you want to maintain that happiness during the onboarding experience.
To maximize your nursing salary, as well as your peace of mind, you need to find a travel nursing company that operates in a way that empowers their nurses to make the best decisions for themselves―both professionally and personally. To do so requires an agency that values trustworthiness, integrity, and has recruiters (or Nurse Advocates) who genuinely advocate for you throughout the job-search process.
When choosing between travel nursing agencies, there are three things you should consider:
Additionally, another crucial—and often under appreciated—responsibility that travel nurse agencies should commit to is taking care of their nurses through the entire duration of their travel assignment. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for many agencies to approach travel nursing candidates from a transactional lens―that is, once each of you are able to get what you want from the other, the relationship comes to an end.
At Trusted, we don’t think it should be this way. Our goal is to promote lasting relationships that truly benefit our working nurses. To learn more about how Trusted operated, check out How Trusted Health Works.
Lastly, a travel nurse agency’s pay pack isn’t complete with a clear list of benefits. The most common benefits you’re likely to receive are insurance and a variety of reimbursements, but each company uses its own unique blend of ingredients to provide for its nurses.
Here are some possible benefit to look for and consider:
With over 300 travel nursing companies to choose from, it may be worthwhile to keep your options open. In Working with Multiple Travel Nursing Agencies, we share four reasons you should keep your staffing agency options open:
Not only can you open yourself up to opportunities with new nurse staffing agencies that may be better suited to your needs, but you may also end up finding an opportunity with that first agency at a later point! Trust us, it’s always worth it to leave an agency on honest, up-front terms; they're familiar with this game.
Simply create a free Trusted profile, enter some basic information, set your job preferences, and get matched with your next travel nursing job (we promise we won’t call, text, or email you like other agencies… we’re not about that life)!
