Travel Nurse Pay in West Virginia (2026)

Key numbers at a glance

Travel nurse pay in West Virginia: the numbers

The staff baseline sits low. Per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey (May 2025), West Virginia employs 23,430 registered nurses at a median wage of $38.52 an hour — $80,130 a year — with a mean of $86,970. The national median is $46.90 an hour ($97,550), so West Virginia staff RNs trail it by roughly 18%. That is precisely the setup where travel pay outperforms: rural hospitals across the southern coalfields and the Alleghenies cannot recruit specialty nurses at local wage scales, so agencies get called, and bill rates rise with the shortage rather than the local payroll.

Read the travel band as hedged context — a small-town med-surg opening can quote below it while ICU, L&D or cath lab needs in Morgantown or Charleston clear above it. The tax row is the 2026 story: West Virginia cut its personal income tax again, dropping the top marginal rate from 4.82% to 4.58% retroactive to January 1, 2026, with every bracket reduced proportionally (the bottom rate is now 2.11%), per the West Virginia Tax Division. For a traveler on a 13-week contract, that is a modest but real improvement to net pay — and the direction of travel for the state's rates has been steadily down.

The map is three anchors plus rural everything else. Morgantown is the academic center — WVU Medicine's J.W. Ruby Hospital is the state's largest and posts the most specialty needs. Charleston (the CAMC system) and Huntington (Marshall Health) carry the population centers. The rural hospitals sprinkled through the southern coalfields and the I-79 corridor post the best premiums precisely because fewer travelers want them. West Virginia is a Nurse Licensure Compact member (43 jurisdictions as of late 2026, per NurseCompact), and its northern panhandle touches Ohio and Pennsylvania while its western edge touches Ohio and Kentucky — all compact-or-nearby territory worth comparing on the travel nurse pay by state hub.

How stipends change the math in West Virginia

West Virginia is a state where stipends quietly do more work than the headline suggests. Housing and meal stipends are tax-free only while you maintain a valid tax home and duplicated living expenses, capped by the GSA per diem tables for the assignment city. The GSA lodging ceilings in West Virginia cities are modest — but so are the actual rents, which is the rare market where a compliant stipend can cover most of a real apartment and still leave margin. That dynamic beats a Seattle-sized stipend that dies entirely in a Seattle-sized lease. Price the stipend versus agency housing tradeoff with local numbers before you sign.

An illustrative Morgantown 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 West Virginia income tax roughly $38 at the new 4.58% top rate. That leaves about $667 net from the taxable side. Add $1,500 housing plus $400 meals and incidentals — untaxed with a valid tax home — and weekly take-home is about $2,570, a blended rate near $71 an hour. A 13-week contract lands around $33,400, and unusually for this series, most of the $1,900 stipend is genuinely spendable in-state. Run your own offer through the take-home pay calculator; this is an estimate, not tax advice.

Two filing notes. Nonresidents generally owe West Virginia tax on West Virginia-earned wages, with a credit typically available in the home state — if your home state is one of the no-tax states, you still file the nonresident return here. And because the 2026 rate cut was retroactive, make sure your agency's withholding tables reflect 4.58%, not last year's figures, or you will lend the state money until spring. Compare any two offers after-tax with the contract comparison calculator, score counters with the blended rate calculator, and new travelers should walk the first assignment checklist first.