Travel Nurse Contracts & A Breakdown of My First Contract

Patrick Callang
Mar 20, 2023
3 min read

Updated: Mar 29, 2023

Welcome back! If you haven’t read parts 1 to 3 of my “How I got my first travel nurse assignment…and maybe my last?” series, check them out here!

In my last blog post, I explained how I chose the agency that I went with and what agencies I researched. Now let's dive into the details of my initial contract and the extension of my contract.

Contract Offer #1

Contract Offer #2

Contract Offer #3

Why I chose this -

You might be thinking to yourself, why would he choose this contract? One reason was the hourly rate for a 36-hour-per-week contract. If you aren’t familiar with how some shifts at a hospital work, a lot of shifts are 12 hours, and 36 hours per week can be considered full-time hours. The previous offer with a $64 per hour rate was a 48-hour per week contract. Although that is a higher hourly rate, the caveat of choosing 48 hours is the lack of freedom to choose to pick up an extra shift which would then end up being overtime. Additionally, the extra 8 hours of a 48-hour contract isn’t considered overtime (at least in the case of this contract, some may vary from state to state).

Another reason for choosing this contract was that I would get to work at a level 1 trauma teaching hospital with a Magnet designation. This would mean that the majority of the nursing care provided would be the gold standard of nursing care. Additionally, physical and employee resources would be abundant!

Lastly, one of the charge nurses that had trained me at my old job was working at this hospital in the PACU. He had the opportunity to cross-train at the medical ICU and only had good things to say about their staffing, resources, and willingness to help new staff.

After my initial contract was up, I ended up extending it for another 8 weeks. I worked in a 5-week break before the start of my extension so I could get some much-needed R&R. Here’s a breakdown of my contract extension.

Extension of Current Contract

Why I extended -

My contract had me set up primarily as a medical ICU travel nurse. However, I would often float to the other specialty ICUs. These would include the trauma-surgical ICU, neuroscience ICU, and cardiovascular ICU. The managers and assistant managers made it a big point not to float ICU travelers to other floors and actively worked to keep us within the ICU cluster. Additionally, the charge nurses on each unit would do their best to find assignments that would best fit my skill set.

Oregon’s Nurse Staffing Laws help to protect nurse-to-patient ratios based on evidence-based best practices. This ensured that ICUs maintained a 1-to-2 nurse-to-patient ratio. The hospital also had quite a few nurses that represented the nurse union and were very knowledgeable when it came to staffing requirements. Having all this support for safe staffing pushed me to extend my contract.

Lastly, this is really only something I can say in retrospect, I chose to extend my contract to make some extra money before returning home. Surprisingly, despite taking a lower taxable hourly rate on my extension, I was paid more after taxes! If you’re interested in hearing about this, stay tuned for another blog post on the finances relating to my contract.

Extra Notes

I was able to get the fees for my Oregon license reimbursed after a discussion with my recruiter and modifications to my contract were made. If you’re interested in more details about travel contracts, how the stipends work, and what the tax implications are, I'll be posting a blog on that topic in the near future.

Want to hear more about the process of getting to Portland? Keep an eye out for my next blog post!

Until next time! Salamat and si yu’us ma’ase!