ER travel nurse salary: hourly and weekly pay by state

How much do ER travel nurses make an hour?

We looked at 17,862 postings for ER nurses, emergency room RNs and emergency department nurses over 180 days. 14,651 were travel contracts, with a median of $59.47; the all-postings median was $59.44. Percentiles for all ER postings:

ER pay is a little more tightly bunched than ICU pay: about $28 an hour separates the 10th and 90th percentiles, against $33 for ICU. Fewer ER contracts sit at the extreme top of the market.

Turning an ER posting into weekly and annual pay

Emergency departments mostly schedule 12-hour shifts, three a week. Some ER contracts are built on 8- or 10-hour shifts, so check the guaranteed hours before you multiply.

Worked through: 52 weeks at the ER travel median comes to $111,327.84. With four weeks off between contracts, 48 weeks gives $102,764.16. Neither is a salary in the W-2 sense. A traveler earns contract by contract, and each contract may pay a different rate.

The bigger trap is comparing different kinds of numbers. Travel postings commonly advertise a blended hourly or weekly gross, which combines a taxable hourly wage with housing and meal stipends. A staff ER job quotes only the taxable wage. If you're asking “how much does an ER nurse make an hour,” decide first whether you mean the blended travel figure or a staff wage, then compare like with like. How the blend is built is explained in how travel nurse stipends work and the travel nurse pay breakdown.

Does an ER nurse make more money than ICU or med-surg?

On travel contracts, ER pays more than telemetry and med-surg and slightly less than ICU. Same 180-day window for every row:

The ER-to-ICU gap at the median is under $2 an hour, about $61 a week. It widens in winter: in January 2026 ICU postings ran almost $11 an hour above ER. ER beats med-surg by about $3.33 an hour across the full window, but not in January, when the med-surg median ($66.22) edged past ER ($65.00).

Why would ICU hold a small edge? Critical care contracts tend to ask for narrower experience, such as drips, ventilators, CRRT or post-surgical cardiac patients, and the pool of nurses who can be submitted is smaller. ER contracts draw on a broad base of emergency nurses, and many departments are large enough to hire several travelers at once, which keeps rates closer together. That said, the gap is small enough that a high-paying state or a well-timed start date matters far more than the choice between the two specialties.

For staff jobs the comparison is much thinner. Staff ER postings had a median of $34.84 an hour, but on only 451 postings, against $35.32 for staff ICU (371 postings). Those samples are too small to say that one specialty pays staff nurses more than the other, and some hospitals pay ER and ICU nurses on the same base scale with differentials on top. The full specialty comparison is in how much travel nurses make.

Emergency room travel nurse salary by state

States with at least 150 ER postings, top and bottom by median:

Massachusetts led ER pay on a large sample, ahead of California, which tops the ICU table. The three biggest high-paying ER markets (Massachusetts, New York and California) each had over 1,000 postings, so their medians are well supported. A median ER contract in Massachusetts paid about $25 an hour more than one in Texas, close to $900 a week.

Several smaller states, including Rhode Island and Alaska, posted medians near $70 but on fewer than 150 postings each, so they're left out of the table. Within any state, rates also vary by metro and by facility type.

How ER travel pay moved month by month

ER rates rose 26% from August to their December peak, then eased in January while ICU kept climbing. One plausible reading: emergency departments feel respiratory season and holiday volume early, while ICUs carry the sicker patients for longer. With only 828 January postings, the dip may also be noise. Either way, the top quartile of January ER postings still paid $78.19 or more.

For staffing agencies, a 26% swing in four months is the difference between a package that fills and one that doesn't. ClinicalRate for staffing agencies tracks pay and bill rates for ER and 400+ other clinical roles by state and metro, refreshed every business day, so recruiters can quote against the current market.

Contract length and shift: what changes ER pay

• Long contracts pay much less. ER postings of 26+ weeks had a median of $46.89 (543 postings), 21% below the $59.40 median for 9–13 week contracts (15,504 postings). That is a much steeper drop than in ICU.
• Short contracts pay only slightly more. 1–4 week ER contracts had a median of $61.21 (124 postings) and 5–8 week contracts $60.11, both close to the standard rate.
• 14–26 week contracts held up. $61.25 on 1,159 postings, a touch above the 13-week median.
• Nights and days were level. $59.11 for nights (9,983 postings) and $58.97 for days (5,144). Rotating schedules paid $65.26 on 468 postings.

In practice, the best lever for ER travelers is the state and start date, not the shift. Extension offers on long assignments deserve a check against the current market before you sign.

What raises an emergency department RN’s travel rate

Our posting data doesn't isolate each of these, so read them as qualitative factors that tend to move ER offers:

• Trauma level and acuity. Level I and II trauma centers and high-volume urban departments often require more experience and pay accordingly.
• Certifications. ER contracts commonly require BLS, ACLS and PALS, and many add TNCC or ENPC. CEN is less often required but can help a submission stand out.
• Pediatric emergency. Dedicated pediatric EDs draw from a smaller pool of nurses and can price differently from adult departments.
• Facility type and location. Rural and critical access emergency departments can be hard to fill and may pay more to attract travelers. Large academic EDs often hire several travelers at once and may hold rates closer to their rate card.
• Urgency. Crisis, strike and holiday-coverage contracts carry higher rates and stricter terms.
• Package structure. The same blended rate can hide very different taxable bases, overtime rates and cancellation terms, depending on the agency.

If ICU is an option for you, the ICU travel nurse salary guide covers the same data cuts for critical care.

Methodology and caveats

• Source. ClinicalRate collected 17,862 ER nurse postings from 233 companies in 1,006 cities, July 29, 2025 to January 25, 2026. 14,651 were travel contracts. Telemetry and med-surg comparisons use the same window.
• Advertised rates. These are posted pay rates, not verified payroll. Many travel postings advertise a blended figure that includes stipends.
• State labels. Where a state appears under both its abbreviation and its full name, we use the label with more postings, and we show only states with 150+ postings.
• Small samples. Staff, permanent and per diem ER postings number in the hundreds or fewer. Read those comparisons as directional.

Collection and normalization are described in our methodology.

Frequently asked questions