Travel Nurse Pay in Wyoming (2026)

Key numbers at a glance

Travel nurse pay in Wyoming: the numbers

The baseline, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey (May 2025): Wyoming employs 5,330 registered nurses — the smallest RN workforce among the ten states in this series — at a median wage of $40.27 an hour ($83,760 a year), with a mean of $88,600. The national median is $46.90 an hour ($97,550), so Wyoming staff RNs trail it by about 14%. Small numbers cut both ways: the contract volume is thin, but every coverage gap is structural, because there is no local pipeline to fill it. That is the entire Wyoming thesis — scarce coverage, zero state tax, and a cost of living that is low everywhere except where it is spectacularly high.

Read the travel band as hedged context, with one big asterisk: Jackson is not in that band. St. John's Health sits at the gateway to Grand Teton and Yellowstone, runs a small specialty slate, and competes for help in a town where seasonal workers outnumber beds — tourism-season contracts there can quote well above the rest of the state, and the housing stipends run equally outsized. The tax row is the quiet advantage: the Wyoming Department of Revenue collects no individual income tax on wages, which makes Wyoming travel contracts famous alongside Texas, Washington and South Dakota. Your home state may still tax those wages — the assignment state's zero applies to the state, not to your residency.

Geography is three islands. Cheyenne (Cheyenne Regional, plus UCHealth's campus drawing on the Front Range pipeline) and Casper (Banner Health's Wyoming Medical Center) carry the year-round volume. Jackson runs the seasonal premium play. The I-80 corridor — Laramie, Rawlins, Rock Springs — adds rural critical-access needs where fewer travelers compete. Wyoming is a Nurse Licensure Compact member (43 jurisdictions as of late 2026, per NurseCompact), which pairs neatly with the state's own no-income-tax reputation: many travelers base their tax home in a compact no-tax state and let the multistate license reach assignments like these. Compare Wyoming against its neighbors on the travel nurse pay by state hub.

How stipends change the math in Wyoming

Wyoming is a case study in how the same federal stipend rules produce wildly different outcomes by zip code. 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 and season. In Casper or Cheyenne, GSA lodging rates are modest and actual rents are lower still — a compliant stipend can comfortably cover housing and leave real margin. In Jackson during peak season, GSA rates are among the highest in the Rockies precisely because rents are too, and a big stipend can vanish entirely into a seasonal lease. Same state, same rules, opposite economics: always price the actual housing before treating the stipend as profit, and weigh agency housing versus the stipend for Jackson especially.

An illustrative Casper 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 Wyoming income tax zero — 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 is about $2,600, a blended rate near $72 an hour. A 13-week contract lands around $33,900, and in most of Wyoming that money buys a genuinely low cost of living. Run your own offer through the take-home pay calculator; this is an estimate, not tax advice.

The comparison move experienced travelers make with Wyoming: treat it as a tax-efficiency and lifestyle play, not a volume play. The no-income-tax structure means a Wyoming gross competes well against nominally larger grosses in high-tax states — a 7% tax state has to quote roughly $55–$80 more per week to match it — but the thin contract flow means you should have a fallback market (Denver, Salt Lake) lined up before you commit. Score any two offers after-tax with the contract comparison calculator or the blended rate calculator, keep the duplicated-expense paper trail, and start with the first assignment checklist if this is your first contract.