Nursing Wiki

Where the Assignments Are

Nobody counts travel nurses. There is no register of them, no licence category, and no federal survey that asks. What exists is a set of partial measures, and read together they point the same way: travel work concentrates in states with thin local nurse supply, and those are almost never the states nurses ask to be sent to.

How many travel nurses are there

The nearest thing to an official count is federal wage data by industry, which reports nurses employed in the staffing industry rather than by a hospital or nursing home.

On that measure, registered nurses employed by staffing agencies went from 57,270 in 2019 to 130,890 in 2023, an increase of 129 percent. Over the same four years the number of registered nurses employed by nursing homes fell 18 percent. Licensed practical nurses at agencies rose 56 percent to 33,840, and nursing assistants 58 percent to 59,480.

That count includes per diem placement as well as travel contracts, and it misses anyone a hospital employs directly on a temporary basis, so it is a floor rather than a headcount. Survey work puts travel nurses at roughly 2 percent of registered nurses before the pandemic, with estimates running as high as one in ten of all nursing staff at the 2022 peak. See the history of travel nursing.

The one official state-by-state measure

Nursing homes have to report their staffing hours to Medicare, including hours worked by contract staff. That makes agency use public, facility by facility, and it can be added up by state. Nothing equivalent exists for hospitals.

Nationally, contract staff were 7.5 percent of nursing home nurse hours in the first quarter of 2024, down from 10.1 percent a year earlier and still above the 3 to 4 percent of 2019.

The state spread is enormous. In mid-2025 contract staff were 25.1 percent of nurse hours in Vermont, and 13.4 percent in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, against 1.0 percent in Alabama, 2.5 percent in Nevada and 2.8 percent in Oklahoma.

What the job board shows

NurseRecruiter's listings give a second view, covering hospitals and every other setting rather than nursing homes alone. The figures below use the whole archive, 4.68 million travel postings dated between 2009 and September 2026, rather than a recent slice; the reason is set out at the end.

Dividing each state's travel postings by the number of registered nurses employed there produces a ranking of how travel-heavy its advertised market is. The top of it:

Idaho, Alaska, New Mexico, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Montana, Washington, Wyoming and Oregon, followed by the District of Columbia and Maryland.

The bottom: Mississippi, Utah, Minnesota, Delaware, Alabama and Michigan.

Vermont is fifth here and first in the federal nursing home table, which is the closest thing to independent corroboration this kind of measure gets.

The pattern is about supply, not size. States at the top are mostly rural, with few nurses relative to the facilities that need them, long distances to the next hospital and no large metropolitan labour pool to recruit from. California, Texas and New York have far more postings than Idaho in absolute terms and sit in the middle or lower half once their own nursing workforces are taken into account. See rural and frontier nursing and critical access hospitals.

Eight of the top ten are members of the Nurse Licensure Compact, and 71 percent of travel postings are in compact states. The exceptions at the top are Alaska and Oregon, where an assignment requires that state's own licence. See Nurse Licensure Compact.

What nurses ask for is not where the work is

The same database holds nurse profiles, and the mismatch between the two halves is the most useful thing in it.

Among registered nurses who name states they would go to, the most requested are Florida, California, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, New York, Tennessee, Hawaii, South Carolina and Colorado.

Not one of those ten appears in the top fifteen states by assignments per nurse. Tennessee is the highest at sixteenth of fifty-one; California is twenty-second, Texas twenty-fourth, New York forty-first and Florida forty-second.

Willingness to travel is not evenly spread either. Of the 375,448 registered nurse profiles on the site, 38.9 percent say they will take travel work and 45.7 percent per diem shifts. By home state, willingness to travel runs from about 50 percent in Montana, Mississippi and Hawaii and 47 percent in Alabama, South Dakota and Oklahoma, down to about 30 percent in New Jersey and Connecticut and 33 percent in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. It is highest across the rural west and the south and lowest along the north-eastern corridor. Hawaii sits high on that list and also has the highest nurse pay in the country, so this is not simply a matter of local wages.

Mississippi is the sharpest case in the whole dataset. Its nurses are the second most willing in the country to travel, and its own market advertises fewer travel assignments per nurse than any other state. The nurses leave; the work is elsewhere.

Put the two halves together and the market makes sense. A hospital in Idaho or North Dakota is bidding for a nurse who lives somewhere with plenty of nurses and would rather be in Florida, which is why the rate in the least fashionable places has to be a premium.

Using this

For a nurse. Demand and desirability are close to inversely related. If you are willing to take a winter in Boise or Burlington, you are competing with fewer people for the work than you would be in Tampa. Check whether the state is in the compact before committing, since a licence application can cost more weeks than the assignment is worth; see licensing a travel assignment.

For an employer. If you are in one of the high-intensity states, agency use is the norm around you rather than a local failure, and the nurses you are trying to hire permanently are being offered contracts constantly. If you are in Mississippi, Utah or Minnesota, the opposite: local supply is deep enough relative to demand that heavy agency spend is usually a recruiting problem rather than a market one. See using travel nurses and building a per diem roster.

Method, and what these figures cannot show

The federal figures are surveys and mandatory reports, cited below.

The job board figures cover every travel posting in NurseRecruiter's archive, 2009 to September 2026, counted by state and divided where noted by the number of registered nurses employed in each state in the federal occupational wage survey for May 2024. The nurse figures cover all registered nurse profiles on the site.

The whole archive is used rather than a recent window on purpose. Any short window is dominated by whichever agencies happened to be feeding listings at the time: in a single year one agency can account for 85 percent of a state's postings. Across the full record the largest agency accounts for a median of 32 percent of a state's postings, ranging from 20 to 58 percent, and a median of 146 agencies contribute to each state. As a check, recomputing the ranking so that every agency counts equally regardless of how many jobs it posts returns eight of the same top ten.

Three limits remain.

A posting is not an assignment. Agencies advertise the same requirement more than once, and several agencies advertise the same hospital's requirement, so this measures advertised demand rather than filled contracts.

City-level figures are not published here. In 38 percent of postings the city recorded belongs to a different state than the job does, an artefact of how feed locations are matched, so only state-level figures are sound.

The nurse figures describe nurses registered on one job board, which is not a random sample of the profession, and profiles accumulate over many years.

Sources

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