The Day I Learned California Nurses Make Over $100 an Hour

One phone call with an old coworker taught me that staff nurses in Northern California were making over $200,000 a year. Monica and I flew out to see it for ourselves. What we found about pay, ratios and housing changed our lives.

These rates are from August 2025, when this was first written. Pay changes every year, so check current rates in Map My Pay.

The friend who changed everything

I graduated from nursing school in 2012. For years, I thought working at a top hospital in New York City meant I was set. The name on my badge was the “best” hospital in the city. Then I found out how wrong I was.

One year into the job, a coworker of mine was gone. He left no goodbye and no warning. A few weeks later, I called him. He said, “I moved to California.”

At first, I thought he was joking. He had been living there for months. Then he told me something that turned my world upside down. Nurses in Northern California were making over $200,000 a year. Not travel nurses, but staff nurses.

That one phone call started a chain of events that changed Monica’s life and mine for good.

Our first trips to California

When Monica and I heard the numbers, we couldn’t ignore them. In late 2016, we booked flights to San Diego. We thought the whole state paid nurses huge money, so we figured we would start there.

San Diego was beautiful, but it felt dry and desert-like next to the green we were used to on the East Coast. The homes all looked the same. The prices on Zillow shocked us. Something decent cost over a million dollars.

Then came the biggest gut punch. Pay in San Diego wasn’t even that much higher than what we made in New York. It felt like we had been misled.

When I called my friend, he laughed. “The money’s in Northern California,” he said. “Come up here instead.”

So a month later, we flew again, this time to San Francisco. The Bay Area blew us away with its Victorian homes and the Golden Gate Bridge. But the housing costs were insane. There were million-dollar price tags everywhere, even in areas we wouldn’t want to live in. The weather wasn’t as warm as we thought, either. It stayed cool most of the year.

We started to think California wasn’t for us. Then we drove two hours east to visit my friend in Roseville.

Pulling into Roseville

We expected to find him renting a small apartment. Instead, we pulled into a neighborhood full of brand-new homes. My friend opened the door and casually said, “We bought this place.”

He had only been in California for eight months. He was a staff nurse, not a manager. And here he was in a 4,000 sq ft home with his wife, also a nurse, and their three kids.

That visit flipped all we thought we knew about nursing pay.

Ratios, pay and benefits we had never seen

Inside his house, he told us what life was like as a nurse in California.

• Ratios are set by law. In the ER, a nurse has no more than four patients. With a critical patient, you could go 1-to-1. In New York, we could have 7, 8 or even 9 patients, so this blew our minds.
• The overtime rules are better than anything we had. You get time and a half after 8 hours and double time after 12. If you worked 7 days in a row, the seventh shift was double time for the whole day. I had never heard of anything like it.
• The pay is higher. He was making over $80 an hour on nights. That was in 2017. Today, those same jobs pay six figures more a year.
• The union is strong. He said their contract was the model every other nurses’ union tried to copy.

That was enough to convince me right there. Then we looked at housing.

In Roseville, three-bedroom apartments rented for $1,500-$1,600. Homes of 2,000 to 3,000 square feet sold for $450K to $650K. My friend and his wife bought their 4,000 sq ft home for $650K.

We were paying $2,500 for an 800 sq ft apartment in New York. The difference was night and day.

The numbers then vs now

Back then, it felt like stepping into another world. The 2025 numbers tell the same story. Here is a simple snapshot of three cities.

*Housing numbers are the median home price or average rent.

Sacramento jumps out right away. Nurses there keep twice as much as in New York, even after paying for housing. For more on that, see why Sacramento beats other cities for nurses.

The median vs our pay

The median RN in Sacramento earns about $78 an hour. That’s $163K a year working full time. That alone beats New York and San Diego.

I make $109 an hour in the ER. Monica makes $142 an hour as a per diem tele nurse. If we worked the same full-time hours as the median, that would push our pay to $220K and $250K.

But here is the key: we don’t work full-time hours.

We work less, stay debt free and have more time with our kids. Even on short schedules, we have more left over than the median nurse. That is the power of Northern California nursing. You can earn above average without burning out.

The move that changed our lives

Within months of that Roseville visit, I had a job offer. A few months later, Monica joined me. Since then:

• We paid off $128,000 of debt in under a year.
• We bought a home.
• We work fewer hours than we ever did in New York.
• We live with far less stress, both with money and at the bedside.

The takeaway

• Don’t assume a “top hospital” means the best life.
• Always compare pay with cost of living.
• Land the right hospital in the right city, and you can work less and build wealth faster.

For us, it meant tripling what we could earn, buying a home and freeing up our time. For you, it could be just as big a change. If you are weighing the move, read whether nurses should still move to Sacramento.

Written by Jason, RN. I went from $37 an hour in New York to $143 an hour in California and paid off $128K of debt in under a year. I share our numbers in the Nurses to Riches newsletter and on YouTube.