Travel Nurse Pay in Tennessee (2026)

Key numbers at a glance

Travel nurse pay in Tennessee: the numbers

The staff baseline first. Per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey (May 2025), Tennessee employs 72,200 registered nurses at a median wage of $39.18 an hour — $81,500 a year — with a mean of $85,390. Against the national median of $46.90 an hour ($97,550 a year), Tennessee staff RNs earn roughly 16% less. Tennessee hospitals filled a large share of pandemic-era gaps with travelers, and the state has stayed a high-volume travel market since, even if weekly quotes have normalized from the crisis peaks.

Read the travel row as a hedged band, not a promise: routine med-surg offers in Knoxville or Chattanooga can sit below it, while Nashville ICU, NICU or L&D contracts and crisis extensions can clear above it. The tax row is the structural advantage — Tennessee levies no income tax on wages, and its last remaining levy on investment income (the Hall tax) was fully repealed effective January 2021, per the Tennessee Department of Revenue. A traveler whose home state has an income tax still files there, but the assignment state takes nothing.

Geography matters more in Tennessee than in most states. Nashville is a healthcare company town — Vanderbilt University Medical Center, the HCA Healthcare system, TriStar and Saint Thomas all run large campuses and compete for the same clinicians, which keeps contract flow unusually steady through the year. Memphis (Methodist Le Bonheur, Regional One) is the western anchor; Knoxville, Chattanooga and the Tri-Cities add steady mid-size demand. Tennessee is a Nurse Licensure Compact member (43 jurisdictions as of late 2026, per NurseCompact), so a multistate license covers all of it. See how the state stacks up next door on the travel nurse pay by state hub.

How stipends change the math in Tennessee

Every Tennessee offer is two buckets. The taxable bucket — hourly base times guaranteed hours — loses federal income tax and FICA on the way to your account. The stipend bucket — housing plus meals and incidentals — is tax-free when you keep a valid tax home and duplicated expenses, capped by the GSA per diem tables for your city. Nashville GSA lodging rates run well above the small-town Tennessee standard, so identical job titles in different cities can hide meaningfully different stipend money. The housing stipend vs agency housing decision is worth several hundred dollars a week either way.

An illustrative contract: $23 an hour taxable times 36 guaranteed hours is $828 of weekly taxable gross. Federal income tax runs about $60 a week for a single filer after the standard deduction, FICA about $63, and Tennessee income tax zero. That leaves roughly $705 net from the taxable side. Add $1,500 housing plus $400 meals and incidentals — untaxed with a valid tax home — and weekly take-home lands near $2,600, a blended rate around $72 an hour. Thirteen weeks is about $33,900. Punch your real offer into the take-home pay calculator; this is an estimate, not tax advice.

The Tennessee twist is that the state's zero wage tax quietly widens the gap against nominally higher-paying states. A contract in a state with a 5–7% income tax has to quote roughly $40–$90 more per week just to match the same take-home on the taxable portion. That does not make Tennessee automatically the winner — a Seattle package can still dwarf it — but it does mean you must compare after-tax numbers, never gross quotes. Score every counteroffer with the blended rate calculator, and if you are weighing two cities inside Tennessee, put both through the contract comparison tool with their real stipend splits before you sign.