Nurse Net Pay at the Top-Paying California Hospitals

A nurse with five years of experience working nights can gross $204,896 to $223,921.78 a year at the top 5 highest-paying hospitals in Northern California. After taxes, a single nurse would net $10,880.63 to $11,828.89 a month.

Here is how I worked that out, and how Monica and I found our way to Sacramento.

These rates are from July 2024, when this was first written. Pay changes every year, so check current rates in Map My Pay.

How we ended up in Sacramento

I have been a nurse since 2012. Monica has been a nurse since 2013. We worked in NYC until 2017. Then we found out what it means to be a nurse in Northern California.

A nurse I used to work with in NYC moved to Roseville, California. He would not stop talking about the great pay and benefits. That was enough for us to book a few trips to California, a state we had never been to.

San Diego

Our first stop was San Diego. The weather there is perfect all year. But we learned that once you count the high cost of living, nurse pay there was just as low as ours in NYC. It made no sense for us to move there.

San Francisco

Our next stop was San Francisco. It was not the one either.

I pulled up Zillow while we walked through some neighborhoods we loved. The prices were wild. There was no way we could buy a home without spending more than half of our combined income.

Roseville and Sacramento

Then we went to Roseville, where my old coworker had settled down with his family. It often ranks as one of the best places to raise a family because of its great schools and low crime.

We spent several months trying to find a city and a hospital that would put us in a better spot than we were in NYC. In the end, we settled in Sacramento. You can read why in why Sacramento nurses beat all other cities.

The median home price in Sacramento is now $487,136. It was $303,122 when we first moved here.

For more on how the city has changed, read Sacramento is becoming less affordable.

How the salary spreadsheet started

Since our move, I have built what some might call an unhealthy obsession. I pull numbers from nurse union contracts and online data to help other nurses make better money choices with fewer mistakes.

In 2021, we started a YouTube channel to teach nurses. We also began making spreadsheets to back up my research. One of the first was a sheet that let me, and others, compare wages at all the high-paying hospitals in Northern California.

As I built it, I saw that base hourly rates alone did not tell the whole story.

Adding overtime and double time

Something was still missing. Nurses across the US often work overtime, and California nurses do even more of it.

That is because California law is on our side. We earn overtime between the 8th and 12th hour of work in one day, and double time between the 12th and 16th hour.

So I made the next version.

Now nurses who use the sheet can see their wages with overtime and double time added in. It took me months to build that feature. To see how overtime adds up, read how to work less and earn more as a nurse.

Adding taxes

I had my sights on something bigger.

If you have ever used a paycheck calculator website, you may not know this. Some of those sites use old tax brackets.

So I added a tax sheet to the salary spreadsheet with the 2024 tax brackets. This update took a toll on me. I spent months on it and even had to hire a spreadsheet expert.

Net pay at the top 5 hospitals

Here is a scenario. Say you are a nurse with five years of experience who works nights. You could gross $204,896 to $223,921.78 a year at the top 5 highest-paying hospitals.

The next tab in the spreadsheet lets you fine-tune your net income.

Say your filing status is single. You would net between $5,021.82 every two weeks at Kaiser Permanente and $5,459.49 every two weeks at El Camino Hospital.

You can change all of the settings. If you want to see net pay by month, a Kaiser nurse would bring in $10,880.63. An El Camino nurse would bring in $11,828.89.

That is just a glimpse of what the spreadsheet can do.

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.