Like every profession in the healthcare industry, there isn’t a much more important job in the world than nursing.
After having been through many years of education and training, nurses are some of the most skilled and knowledgeable people in the world when it comes to healthcare and saving people’s lives.
Therefore, you’d expect them to earn a pretty decent salary compared to other professions, right? Well, in this article, we’re going to find out whether that’s true or not and see how well nurses in Texas get paid.
Is Texas a great place for nurses to work or could you expect to earn less just by living there?
Read on to find out more…
Average Nurse Salary In Texas
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, in May 2020, the average salary for a registered nurse in Texas was $76,800.
Compared to the national average salary for all jobs in the US, this shapes up pretty nicely with Texan nurses earning around 36% more than the rest of the country.
However, this figure doesn’t tell the whole story. Because of how highly trained nurses have to be, you’d expect them to earn more than the national average for all professions, so do Texas nurses get paid well compared to other nurses?
Unfortunately, the answer is no. Whilst the average for nurses in Texas was $76,800, the national average for nurses was $80,010. That means Texan nurses can expect to earn 4% less than the national average just by working in Texas!
Of course, this doesn’t actually mean that all nurses in Texas will earn this amount of money and some will be paid significantly more or less, depending on a number of factors.
What Benefits Can You Get From Working As A Nurse In Texas?
As with most decent, full-time jobs, a contracted salary isn’t the only thing that you should consider when determining how well a job pays you.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics also released data about how nurses were completely compensated for their work in 2021. In this year, the average salary was $72,890 in Texas- down significantly from the previous year.
However, the value of the benefits that nurses in Texas can accrue totaled $28,070. This includes things like paid leave, insurance, supplemental pay, and retirement funds.
Therefore, the total value a nurse in Texas could expect to be given for a year of their work was around $100,960. That’s a heck of a lot more than the average profession!
How Does Texas Nursing Salary Compare To Other States?
As you might have guessed, there are significantly different average salaries in different parts of the United States but let’s take a look at how Texas compares to the others.
For this comparison, we’ll use the US Bureau of Labor Statistics figures from 2021. As we know already, the average Texas nursing salary is slightly lower than the national average of $80,010 but it actually ranks in roughly 17th place when compared to the averages of other states.
This is because the nursing profession across the US has become a fairly top-heavy salaried career, with those at the higher end of the scale earning way more than those lower down.
For example, the highest paying state in the US is California, which pays its nurses an average salary of an incredible $120,560!
Considering that’s around a 50% increase from the national average, it’s easy to see how the figures can be skewed by a few exceptional states.
For example, at the lower end of the scale, nurses can early an average salary of $59,540 which is way below both Texas and the national average.
In general, nurses in Texas can expect to make a roughly average salary compared to the rest of the country, though there are still other factors that affect how good the pay actually is…
Texas Nursing Salary Compared With The Cost Of Living
To work out how well nurses in Texas are paid, we have to look at the cost of living index for the United States.
This is a figure that considers expenses like groceries, housing, utilities, transportation, and healthcare in each state to get an understanding of how much it costs to live there.
To give you an idea of scale, the cost of living index score for the entire US is 100. Anything lower than this indicates a cheaper palace to live while any higher figure indicates a more expensive state.
The index score for Texas is 91.5, indicating that it’s cheaper to live in Texas than the average of all the other states combined. For this reason, you’d expect average salaries in Texas to also be lower than the US average and this is the case.
Interestingly though, this also indicates that Texas is one of the best states in the US to work in terms of salary compared to the cost of living.
This is because the cost of living in Texas is 8.5% lower than the national average, while the average nursing salary in Texas is only 4% lower. Therefore, even though nurses in Texas might earn less than other states, they should consider themselves lucky!
Which City In Texas Pays Nurses The Most?
Of course, different cities throughout Texas will also pay slightly different salaries to their nurses. According to reports from Indeed.com, the best paying city in Texas is El Paso, where the average salary is around $148,776.
At the other end of the scale, the lowest-paying city in Texas is Corpus Christi, where the average salary is only roughly $67,775.
Unfortunately, this data doesn’t tell a completely accurate story as the figures are based solely on a few thousand reported salaries from Indeed’s users.
Therefore, we can’t say that these averages are 100% accurate but they do still give a good indication of which cities are likely to pay higher salaries.
Conclusion
What we’ve learned from this article is that nurses in Texas earn a very respectable salary compared to other states. Even though they don’t earn as much as the national average for nurses, the low cost of living in Texas means we can still consider it a well-paying job.
Regardless of how well a nursing job pays, it is still one of the most respected and essential roles in the world and anybody should be proud to pursue it as a career.
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