The 5 Most Profitable Nursing Businesses

The most profitable nursing businesses all have one thing in common. They make money whether or not the nurse is there in person.

People ask me all the time which nursing business makes the most money. There isn’t much research on it. But I interview nurses who make money from what they know, and some of these numbers will surprise you. As you read, notice why some of these businesses earn more than others. You can use the same ideas in your own business.

1. Legal nurse consulting

Legal nurse consulting has only started to get attention on social media in the last few years. Some nurses, like Nurse Liz, work as independent contractors. Others, like Lori, the Nurse Attorney, run a full legal nurse consulting business with many nurses on staff.

As a legal nurse, you help lawyers with hard medical cases. Lawyers may not know the medical terms or steps that nurses know well. You can help them see things like how a med error might have happened.

A legal nurse consulting business can earn from $120,000 to $500,000 a year. Watch our episodes with Nurse Liz and Nurse Attorney Lori to see how they made money from their businesses.

2. Travel nurse coaching

Travel nursing is one of the highest-paying paths in nursing. There is also a side of travel nursing called strike nursing. It pays tens of thousands of dollars for short contracts, usually 1 to 2 weeks long.

Now picture this. You are a travel nurse and you land your first strike assignment. You make $30,000 in 10 days, and you want to share what you learned with every nurse in the country.

That is what Nurse Lois did. A patient attacked her during one of her regular nursing contracts, and she ended up in the hospital. It took her time to heal, and she needed a way to make back the income she lost.

I want to be clear that I do not promote strike nursing. I also have nothing against strike nurses who want to earn more.

Here is why. When nurses’ unions go on strike, hospitals have to hire strike nurses to replace them. Hospital leaders cannot pay a strike nurse $1,000 to $2,000 a day forever. It also isn’t smart to hire nurses without the right training and tools.

When the strike nurses leave, the hospital leaders usually give in to what the staff nurses asked for. The history of nurses’ unions backs this up. Nurses who go on strike will always win in the long run.

Lois went on to build a coaching program. She teaches other travel nurses how to make money with strike contracts. In 2023, she was on track to earn half a million a year from her coaching programs.

3. Medspa business

You have probably seen a lot more medspas over the last 2 to 3 years. Here’s why. A medical spa is a business where nurses can do Botox and other treatments. They do lip fillers, chemical skin treatments, eyelash extensions and tattoo removal. They can do this on their own in 27 states without a supervising doctor.

I interviewed Tasha Moon at the start of 2023. She is a nurse who opened her medspa in March 2022. By the end of that year, she had already brought in $360,000.

I got to see up close how she runs her business and how she made so much so fast. Make sure you watch that video.

Dr. Kiiyona Jones is another nurse who quit her $95/hr nursing job at UCLA to start her medspa. She made over $150,000 as a medspa owner. Then she started teaching other nurses how to open their own medspa. In 2023, she was on track to earn over $500,000 from her coaching business.

4. NCLEX prep courses

Some nurses make and sell their own NCLEX prep courses, and they make a lot of money doing it. A few nurses on social media have turned their love of test-taking into multi-six-figure and seven-figure businesses.

You can find them on Instagram and YouTube. One example is @nursingandnclexmastery on Instagram. Another is @SimpleNursing on YouTube. Mohamad Younes was a guest on our YouTube channel, and he earns a lot of money each month.

This business makes so much because the market is huge. There are 266,651+ nursing students who graduate in the US each year. On top of that, there are nursing students from other countries. They want to move to the US and need help passing their boards and getting licensed here.

If you are good at school or good at tests, I want you to help new nurses. With the right steps, you can earn more than you thought you could.

5. Nursing school study guides

This is where you can change lives if you do it right. Think back to all those nights in nursing school when you searched for help. You wanted to understand what your professors taught, but they did not explain it well.

I bet you bought a ton of extra books. Pocket pharmacology, med-surg, electrolytes and more. You brought them to study sessions, class and clinicals.

Nurse Stephanee Beggs was featured in Forbes. She made over $2 million selling study guides to nursing students.

She started as a hobby. She used her phone to record her study sessions and posted them on TikTok. Lots of students asked in her comments if they could buy her notes. That gave her the idea to sell them and use the money to support herself after school. She did not expect to make millions in her first two years of sales, but that is what happened.

Then there is Kristine Tuttle, who owns @NurseInTheMaking. She sells flashcards and study guides. Say Kristine has 213,004 sales in her Etsy shop. If she makes an average of $55 a sale, that is an estimated $11,715,220 from Etsy alone. That does not count her website sales, affiliate programs or other income.

The pattern behind the biggest earners

Aim for a business that makes money with or without you there. Nurses who have to show up in person to earn have fewer chances than nurses who sell to many people at once.

Stephanee and Kristine turned what they love into a product that sells around the world. Now they mostly just market it.

For more nurses who built businesses like these, read about a nurse who lands high-paying clients and a nurse business that brings in six figures a month.

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.