ICU travel nurse salary: hourly and weekly pay by state

How much do ICU travel nurses make per hour?

ClinicalRate analyzed 22,249 ICU nurse postings (ICU RN, critical care nurse, CCU nurse and similar titles) over the 180-day window. Of those, 19,453 were travel contracts, so the travel median ($61.19) and the all-postings median ($61.14) are almost identical. The distribution below is for all ICU postings.

The spread between the 10th and 90th percentile is about $33 an hour, close to $1,200 a week. Very little of that is explained by the nurse. Most of it is location, timing and how urgently the facility needs coverage, which the sections below take one at a time.

What does an ICU travel nurse make per week and per year?

Most ICU contracts are three 12-hour shifts a week, so 36 hours is the right multiplier. Many postings list a weekly gross directly; others list an hourly figure. Either way, the math is the same:

At the travel median: $61.19 × 36 = $2,202.84 a week, or $28,636.92 over a 13-week contract. If a nurse worked 52 straight weeks at that rate, the year would come to $114,547.68. Few travelers do. With four weeks unpaid between contracts (48 weeks worked), the same rate gives $105,736.32.

Treat any annual figure as an illustration, not a salary. Travel nurses are paid per contract, rates change from one assignment to the next, and gaps between contracts, cancelled shifts and unpaid orientation all come out of the total. You'll also see higher annual numbers calculated on 2,080 hours (40 × 52), which overstates pay for a 36-hour schedule.

ICU travel nurse salary by state

Among states with at least 150 ICU postings in the window, the highest and lowest medians were:

The gap between Alaska and Texas is about $30 an hour, or roughly $1,075 a week. California stands out for combining a high median with a very large sample, so its number is one of the most reliable in the set. The two biggest ICU markets after California sit near the national median: Arizona at $61.72 (2,049 postings) and Illinois at $63.25 (1,103).

Higher-paying states tend to share high living costs, staffing rules that limit how far a unit can stretch, or remote locations that are hard to fill. Lower-paying states often have large local nurse supply and many competing agencies. A state median also hides metro differences: a rural critical access hospital and an urban academic center in the same state can post very different rates.

When do ICU travel nurse pay rates peak?

Rates climbed steadily through the window. Monthly medians for ICU postings:

From August to January the median rose about 34%, from $56.44 to $75.85. At 36 hours, that is the difference between $2,032 and $2,731 a week for the same specialty. The pattern fits the usual winter story: respiratory illness season fills ICU beds while holidays and staff time off thin the schedule, and facilities raise rates to fill contracts that start in late fall and winter. Posting volume varies a lot by month (October alone is about 14,400), so treat the monthly figures as a trend, not precise point estimates.

A rate card or pay package set in early autumn can be well behind the market by December. ClinicalRate's Rate Explorer tracks ICU and other clinical pay and bill rates by state and metro as they move, so agencies and hospitals can check where a rate sits today rather than where it sat last quarter.

Do shorter ICU contracts and night shifts pay more?

Contract length matters at the edges. The standard 13-week contract dominates:

Short contracts, often called crisis or rapid-response assignments, pay a premium because the facility needs someone fast and for a short window. Long assignments trade rate for security. The short-contract sample is small (176 postings), so read the +16% as directional.

Shift matters less than many nurses expect. Night ICU postings had a median of $61.03 (11,983 postings) and day postings $60.71 (7,916). Rotating schedules were higher at $68.00, but on only 641 postings. Travel packages often fold differentials into a single quoted rate, which helps explain why the day/night gap is so small.

What drives critical care travel nurse pay?

Beyond state, season and contract length, these factors push an ICU offer toward the top or bottom of the range. We don't have posting-level data to price each one, so treat this as a qualitative checklist:

• Unit type. Cardiovascular ICU (CVICU), cardiothoracic, neuro, trauma, burn and transplant units ask for narrower experience, such as fresh open-heart patients, ECMO, CRRT or external ventricular drains. Fewer qualified nurses means facilities often pay more to fill them than a general medical-surgical ICU.
• Certifications. CCRN (and CSC or CMC for cardiac units) rarely changes the quoted rate on its own, but it can be required for the better-paying units and makes a submission more competitive.
• Recent, relevant experience. Many ICU contracts ask for one to two years of recent ICU experience in a comparable setting. Level I trauma or academic medical center experience widens the jobs you can be submitted to.
• Crisis and strike coverage. Urgent and labor-action contracts pay well above standard rates, but are short, unpredictable and sometimes come with guaranteed-hours terms worth reading closely.
• Flexibility. Rotating schedules, floating to other critical care units and extra shifts all add pay. Overtime is usually calculated on the taxable base, not the blended rate.
• Agency economics. The same contract can pay differently through different agencies, because each carries different program fees, margin targets and benefits costs out of the same facility bill rate.

How an ICU travel nurse pay package is structured

An ICU travel offer of $2,200 a week is rarely $2,200 of hourly wages. It is usually a taxable hourly base well below the headline, plus weekly housing and meals and incidentals stipends, plus any travel reimbursement and bonuses. The stipends can be paid tax-free only when the nurse keeps a qualifying tax home and is working away from it. How those stipends are capped and what the tax home rule requires is covered in how travel nurse stipends work, and the component-by-component breakdown is in the travel nurse pay breakdown.

Practical advice when comparing ICU offers: convert every offer to the same blended hourly rate, then ask for the taxable base. Two offers with the same blended rate can differ in overtime value, retirement match and the pay you lose if a shift is cancelled. For how ICU compares with other specialties, see ER travel nurse salary and how much travel nurses make across ICU, ER, telemetry, med-surg and dialysis.

Methodology and caveats

• Source. 22,249 ICU nurse job postings collected by ClinicalRate from July 29, 2025 to January 25, 2026 (180 days), from 251 companies across 958 cities. 19,453 were travel contracts.
• Advertised, not paid. Figures are the hourly pay rates posted by agencies and employers. Final offers can differ, and some postings never fill.
• Blended rates. Travel postings commonly advertise a blended hourly or weekly gross that includes stipends. We report the advertised figure as posted.
• State labels. Some postings record a state as an abbreviation and others as a full name. Where both appear, we report the label with the larger sample, and we only show states with at least 150 postings.
• Small cuts. Staff and permanent ICU postings were a few hundred each, too few to compare reliably with travel pay. Short contracts and some monthly cuts are also small.

For how ClinicalRate collects, cleans and normalizes postings, see our data methodology.

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