RN Salary Ranked by Specialty

If you’re looking for RN salary information, then chances are that you’re either considering a career as a Registered Nurse or you’re already a Registered Nurse and you’re engaged in salary negotiations or you want to see how your salary stacks up against others. In any case, obtaining reliable data is critical. In this blog post, we’ll examine the RN salary data provided by two of the top salary reporting services and discuss their methodologies so you can decide which might be the more reliable set of data.

Salary.com and PayScale.Com

Salary.com and PayScale.com are two of the top salary reporting services on the market. Salary.com started out as a branch of Kenexa Corporation which was purchased by IBM in 2012 for $1.3 billion. The private equity firm Warburg Pincus recently paid $100 million for a majority stake in PayScale.com. The point is, these are both massive companies with tons of compensation related data.

They also utilize two very different methodologies to collect their data. We point this out because the two services report strikingly different RN salary information. Before we discuss the methodologies, let’s take a look at the results.

Please note that each service had its own RN job titles. The job titles were often the same or close enough, but in some cases, salary data was provided for an RN job title by one service but not the other. Again, we’ll discuss this in greater detail below because there are some important implications.

RN Salary by Specialty

We recorded the median RN salary reported by each service. The median figure represents the figure at which 50% of RNs are making less and 50% are making more. We also recorded the top 10% figure reported by each service. The 10% figure represents the RN salary at which the top 10% of all RNs make as much or more. We organized the rankings from highest to lowest based on Salary.com’s top 10% figures.

Why are the numbers so different? Methodology

As you can see, there are striking differences between the salary figures reported by these services. For example, there is a difference of over $16,000 between the median salaries reported for CCU Registered Nurses and a difference of over $20,000 between the top 10% figures for the same specialty. Moreover, the smallest difference we could find between the various top 10% figures was for Research RNs and it was still a 3.5% difference, which is huge when it comes to compensation.

The numbers are different because the services use different methodologies. PayScale.com relies on self reported data. This means that individual users fill out PaysScale’s compensation questionnaires and the company uses the information to compile its reports. New visitors to the site are asked to complete a compensation survey before they can view the site’s data. The site receives millions of visitors per month.

Salary.com relies on information it purchases from compensation consulting firms. Employers provide the compensation consulting firms with detailed payroll information and the consulting firms compile reports that Salary.com purchases. Salray.com’s employees scrutinize the reports and enter applicable data into Salary.com’s database.

Additionally, Salary.com reports only salaries for RNs while PayScale reports salaries and hourly rates for RNs. In fact, the majority of PayScale’s  RN reports are hourly. This is an important distinction.

In order to determine the annual salary figures for PayScale, we had to multiply the hourly rates they reported by an estimated number of hours per year. We chose to use 36 hour work weeks because over 65% of Registered Nurses report working 12 hour shifts.  We also chose to use 52 weeks in our calculation because PayScale does not factor Paid Time Off as a benefit in any of its calculations and most nurses receive at least two weeks of Paid Time Off per year. Therefore, the total annual hours we used was 1872.

If you believe that utilizing 40 hour work weeks would provide more accurate numbers, then you can divide the annual figures we reported for PayScale by 1872 to get the hourly rates they reported and then run your calculations from there. Adding the additional 4 hours per week will certainly bring the reports closer together, but major differences will remain.

We should also consider Salary.com’s use of annual salaries as opposed to hourly rates. As you know, the vast majority of RNs are paid hourly unless they are in management positions. Therefore, it’s difficult to tell how many hours the salary calculations cover. However, we believe it’s fair to say that the average RN works somewhere between 36 and 40 hours per week.

It’s also important to note that neither of the companies includes any other compensation variables in their salary data. So, for example, the value of healthcare benefits or bonuses is not included in the straight salary figures we’ve recorded. Each service records these figures separately.

Salary.com is quick to point out that data provided by individual site users, placement agencies, and job postings are considered unreliable by compensation experts and Human Resources professionals. PayScale counters that by collecting thousands of responses and vetting them for accuracy, they are addressing the concerns that typically lead people to claim this type of data collection is unreliable. We leave it to you to decide which you trust more.

However, our own personal experience indicates that the figures provided by Salary.com seem to be more accurate. Although it is important to note that our background is in dealing with experienced RNs who would certainly be closer to the top of the pay scale.

Where is my specialty?!

Are you wondering why your specialty is not on the list? We are too!!! As former healthcare recruiters, we found some of the job titles perplexing and were completely stumped as to why several common specialties could not be found on either list.

For example, we were unable to find data for Pediatric Intensive Care Unit RNs, Medical/Surgical RNs, Telemetry RNs, or Progressive Care Unit RNs. These specialties are very common and the pay rates vary significantly. We could understand if the job title “Staff Nurse” is intended to cover Medical/Surgical RNs. However, this would be a mistake as those who are reporting salary data could easily get confused as to what they were supposed to be reporting on which would taint the data.

We also don’t like the use of “Obstetrics” as a catchall for the entire field of OB/GYN. It’s true that at many hospital RNs are responsible for all areas of OB, but a very large number of hospitals break these units up into specific areas. It’s very common for RNs to focus on Labor and Delivery, or PostPartum, or Antepartum, or Mother/Baby. And the pay rates between these specialties vary significantly. Providing only one catchall option taints the data for this field.

RN Manager Salary

The focus of this article is on RN salaries. As such, we excluded salary information for Advanced Practice RNs like Nurse Practitioners, Clinical Nurse Specialists, Certified Nurse Midwives and others. However, nursing managers are a crossover group. Advanced Practice Certifications are not a requirement and most nurse managers are experienced RNs without an Advanced Practice Certification. So below is the data we were able to compile from Salary.com and PayScale.com for RN Management Salaries.

All of this data was collected from Salary.com and PayScale.com on May 1, 2014.