Be a Smart Nurse: Work Less and Earn More

Most nurses work overtime the wrong way. They come in on their days off. In California, you can earn more by staying longer on the days you already work.

Monica and I learned this the hard way. Now we work a combined 32.23 hours a week, and we still booked a $16,039 vacation to Bora Bora. We never thought that was possible.

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

We used to be cash poor

We were like most other nurses. We made good money, but we were cash poor.

We worked over 40 hours every week. Most of those hours were paid at our regular rate, not one and a half times our rate. That is how it works outside of California.

We learned a lot of lessons along the way that let us do this the right way.

Scenario 1: 32 hours a week at your regular rate

First, this only works if you move to California, and more so Northern California.

Say you are hired to work 32 hours a week at Kaiser Permanente. They credit you with 5 years of experience. You work 8-hour shifts with the evening shift differential.

If you do this every week for a full year, you will earn $172,610.

Scenario 2: 24 hours a week plus one 16-hour shift

Now say you take a job where you only have to work 24 hours a week.

As a smart nurse, you pick up 4 hours of overtime and 4 hours of double time once a week. That means you work one 16-hour shift a week for the whole year.

Here is what you gain:

• You don’t have to come in on your days off.
• You work fewer days a year.
• You get an extra day off every week. You can plan a trip around your own schedule without asking your boss.

The best part is the pay. You would earn $204,975 a year. That is $32,365 more than the nurse in scenario 1, for the same 32 hours a week.

You also don’t have to work extra shifts to pay for a trip like you used to. To see what one of these long shifts pays, read a nurse’s pay on a 16-hour shift.

Watch the video

I see a lot of nurses working for straight pay on their days on. That is not how to work overtime if you want the most pay in California.

In this video, I go over our Top California Hospitals spreadsheet. I compare working many days in a row with picking up extra hours on your days off.

How we live now

We don’t have to overwork ourselves anymore to earn a good living. We still go on several trips a year, just the two of us and with family.

We work a lot less at our W-2 jobs now. Our business is on its way to earning more than our nursing jobs in the next two to three years.

This is the life we want for every nurse in the US. To see a nurse who works her overtime this way, read about the nurse who made $21K in two weeks.

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.