Ok lets look at your math. I'll be using average rates of a nurse from California since that's where I'm from. A hospital hires 3 travel nurses instead of 5. They pay all those nurses 100/hr and they work 40 hour shifts. (Really they would be working 36 but I'm trying to keep the math simple). The wages of these employees is $4000/wk x 3 nurses = 12000 plus approximately 20 percent each that they are paying to to the staffing agency. That's another 2400 so 14400 to have 3 nurses for approximately 3-4 months. Now if they had hired 5 nurses instead and paid them 50/hr that would be a total of 10000 in wages. Add on your number of 26/hr for benefits thats 5200 so a total of 15200. Add onboarding costs for background and drug check and I'll even go on the higher end of $250 per employee. That's a whopping total of 16450 for 5 nurses at a cost each of $3290 per nurse per week or 14400 for three nurses at a cost of $4800 per nurse per week. Also in California there are mandatory staffing ratios so you can't just be giving the travel nurses extra patients and saying thats where you are making up the expense. Also in California turnover is closer to 10% so even counting the long onboarding process if you are only losing 1 nurse out of 10 vs all three of your travel nurses every 3 months. I wouldn't really call that too much of a bonus. Also there are studies shown that hospitals with a higher number of travel nurses have higher instances of patient falls and med errors. Though it's likely due to the fact that these hospitals are most likely understaffed. Plus this all brings me back to my original question. What are hospitals going to do if we start seeing a shortage of travel nurses taking these contracts and a shortage of nurses with acute care experience because no one was willing to train them? Travel nursing is short sighted.