The escalating costs led hospitals and their allies around the country to rally against what they saw as price gouging by staffing agencies. Desperate hospitals that could afford it offered signing bonuses as high as $40,000 for nurses willing to make multiyear commitments to join their staff instead. Some traveling intensive care unit nurses commanded $10,000 a week during the worst of the pandemic, prompting burned-out nurses across the country to leave their hospital staff jobs for more lucrative temporary assignments.

That platform alone listed over 645,000 active travel nurse jobs in the final three months of 2022.

But by December 2021, the average weekly travel nurse pay in the country had soared to $3,782, up from $1,896 in January 2020, according to a Becker’s Hospital Review analysis of data from hiring platform Vivian Health. Hospitals have long used temporary workers, who are often employed by third-party agencies, to help fill their staffing needs. These proposed regulations - and others in at least 11 more states, according to the American Staffing Association industry trade group - come after demand for travel nurses, who work temporary assignments at different facilities, surged to unprecedented levels during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

And a Texas measure would allow civil penalties against such agencies. To crack down on price gouging, proposed legislation in Missouri calls for allowing felony charges against health care staffing agencies that substantially raise their prices during a declared emergency.Ī New York bill includes a cap on the amount staffing agencies can charge health care facilities.

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