How the RN contract pay figures are calculated

Figures as of September 16, 2026. Threshold measurement dated September 15, 2026.

What is measured

Every figure on the pay pages is an advertised rate from a live RN job listing. It is what an employer or staffing agency wrote in the posting, at the moment we last fetched it. It is not a survey of nurses, not payroll data, and not what anyone was paid. Where a page says “pay”, read “advertised contract rate”.

94% of listings with posted pay are travel contracts, so the figures describe the contract market above all. Travel rates are typically quoted as a weekly package that includes tax-free housing and meal stipends; comparing them directly with a staff nurse's hourly wage overstates the gap. Staff, per diem and part-time listings are included and broken out by work type on every page, but they are a small share of the inventory.

Where the listings come from

The same feeds that populate this job board: employer and staffing-agency listings supplied through recruitment-marketing partners, re-ingested every six hours. Listings that leave the feed are marked expired and drop out of every figure on the next recompute. Duplicate postings of one job across two feeds are suppressed to a single copy before anything is counted.

How a listing's pay becomes a weekly figure

• Weekly equivalent. Weekly rates are used as posted. Hourly rates are multiplied by 36 (the standard three-twelves contract week), monthly by 12/52, yearly by 1/52.
• Top of the range. When a listing advertises a range, the weekly figure is the top of it — the number the listing leads with. “Up to” figures are treated the same way, so every figure here is the most a listing advertised, not a guaranteed rate.
• Plausibility bands. A figure is stored only inside a plausible band for its period: $20–$200 an hour, $800–$8,000 a week, $3,000–$35,000 a month, $40,000–$300,000 a year. A figure outside every band is discarded; one that fits exactly one other band is re-labelled. This is why no outlier trimming is done afterwards — nothing implausible reaches the aggregate.
• Hourly equivalent. Weekly figure divided by the hours the listing posts, only where it posts between 8 and 84 hours a week. Listings without posted hours contribute to the weekly figures only; each hourly figure states how many listings it rests on.
• Bonuses and stipends are not added. Sign-on bonuses are stored separately and never folded into pay. Stipends are whatever the advertised weekly package already includes.

What is excluded

• Listings that post no rate: 4,940 of 160,120 live RN listings today. Each page states its own excluded count.
• Listings for other credentials (LPN/LVN, NP, CRNA, CNA and allied roles), which this site does not serve.
• Suppressed duplicates, expired listings, and listings whose pay failed the plausibility bands.
• Slices below the sample-size threshold (next section) and Guam, which has no page on this site.

Why a slice needs 200 listings before it gets a page

A median from too few listings moves from one ingest to the next by more than the gaps it would be ranked by, and a table that reorders overnight is the kind of number that gets cited wrongly. To set the threshold we resampled Texas's 11,131 pay-bearing listings 2,000 times at each sample size and measured how far the median and quartiles wander:

At 200 listings the median's error is under a tenth of the gap between the 25th percentile and the median, so quartiles do not reorder and neighbouring states keep their order between ingests. Today 50 states and 31 specialties clear it; the hub page names the ones that do not, with their counts.

A published slice is not withdrawn the moment it dips: it keeps its page down to 150 listings, and is withdrawn only after 3 consecutive ingests below 200, so a page you cite is not a notice by the time your readers arrive because one ingest ran thin. Inside a page, a breakdown row (a work type, a shift, a specialty within a state) prints figures only from 30 listings or more; below that it shows its count and says it is too small.

How this differs from BLS

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics report what employed registered nurses earned, from employer surveys, published annually with a lag. These pages report what listings advertised, this week, weighted toward contract work. The two answer different questions; use BLS for earned staff wages and these pages for the current contract market.

Licence: CC BY 4.0

The figures, tables, charts and CSV files on these pages are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You may copy, reproduce, redistribute and adapt them, commercially or not, on one condition: credit RN Jobs Near Me and link to the page you took them from. No permission needed, no request to make. The licence is declared in each page's Dataset structured data, in its “Cite this page” block, and on the first line of every CSV, so the terms travel with the data.

Using and citing the data

Every pay page has a “Cite this page” block, a CSV download whose first line is the citation and licence, and an embed snippet — plain HTML with an inline SVG and the complete table, no scripts or iframes. Corrections: contact@rnjobsnearme.com.