StellarNurse Help: How Everything Works

Welcome to StellarNurse! Thanks for being here. 🤗

This page covers how the site works and how to use it -

• the market-wide view you get
• how we verify a contract is still open while you're looking at it
• how to make first contact with an agency without handing over your personal email
• 2 tools that keep recruiters off your phone

Read it. A few minutes here changes how you run every job search after this one, because the nurse who can see the whole market negotiates from a completely different position than the nurse working off 1 recruiter's list.

I'm Veronica, and I'm a travel nurse - I built this site because the job hunt made me miserable. I was calling recruiter after recruiter, getting a slice of the market from each one, never seeing the whole thing, and drowning in phone calls for months afterward.

Every piece of what's below exists because it's something I wanted fixed for nurses like you and me.

If you can't find what you need here, skip to the bottom and message me. I answer.

What StellarNurse actually does

Here's the problem the site solves.

Any 1 recruiter can only show you their own agency's contracts. That's not them being cagey - it's the only inventory they have. So you call 5 agencies to see 5 slices of the market, and you still never see the market itself. Meanwhile the person on the other side of the table knows exactly what a contract is worth and you're guessing.

StellarNurse pulls contracts from hundreds of agencies into 1 place so you can see them next to each other. We gather open jobs from across the internet - Google Jobs and agency sites, mostly - so what you're looking at isn't 1 company's inventory.

That's the zoom-out: the god-mode view of what your specialty is paying right now, and which agencies are holding the jobs you want. Then you zoom in on the ones worth your time.

Pulling from that many sources is also exactly why we verify each contract while you're searching. A job posted on an agency's own site can stay up long after it's filled, and we'd rather tell you it's gone than let you spend a phone call finding out.

You still work with agencies. You have to - the application always runs through one, and they're the ones who credential you and submit you to the facility.

The difference is you walk in already knowing what's out there, which is the whole ballgame when it's time to talk money.

The full method, including how to play agencies against each other honestly, is in the agencies vs. platforms section of my travel nursing guide.

One thing to know up front: right now StellarNurse is RNs and travel contracts. Not per diem, not local, not permanent staff jobs, and not yet the other disciplines. If that's what you're looking for, I'd rather tell you here than have you dig through a search to find out.

There's also nothing to download. It's a website, built to work on a phone, because that's where this actually happens - on a break, in the car before you drive home, at 3am when you can't sleep and you're wondering what Colorado pays.

How the job search works

Search your specialty and location and we show you the best jobs for that search by default. You don't sort anything or dig for the good ones.

Your search results come in 2 groups:

• Best jobs - pay in the 75th percentile or higher for your search, posted in the past 48 hours.
• Other jobs - everything else: paying below the 75th percentile, or posted more than 48 hours ago.

Nothing is hidden. The older and lower-paying contracts are still there in the second group if you want to see them. The split just means the ones worth your time are already at the top when the page loads.

That 75th percentile is measured against the search you just ran, not against nursing generally. We take what your specialty in your locations has actually paid over the past 6 months, and a contract makes the top group only if it's paying more than 3 out of 4 of them.

So a rate isn't called good because it beats some national number - it's in the top quarter of the market you're shopping in right now. That's the comparison a recruiter is making on their side of the table, and now you're making it too.

Which means you'll sometimes see a contract labeled "above average" sitting down in "Other jobs", and that's not a glitch. Above average and top quarter aren't the same bar - a rate can beat the middle of the market and still fall short of the top 25%. A great rate posted 3 days ago lands there too. Neither one is a bad contract, so if the top group is thin for your search, keep reading down.

The 48-hour line comes from the agencies themselves. I've talked with hundreds of them building this site, and the answer is consistent: the best-paying contracts in the busiest specialties are usually spoken for within about 2 days of going up. So a post that's been sitting for a week is a different proposition than one that went up this morning, and the split reflects that.

One more thing about the numbers: every pay stat on the site is adjusted to a standard 36-hour week before anything gets compared.

Contracts aren't all 36 hours - plenty are 48. And a 48-hour contract advertises a much bigger weekly figure for 12 more hours of your life. Lined up against a 36-hour contract, that looks like a raise when it can be the same hourly rate or less.

Putting everything on the same 36-hour footing is the only way the comparison means anything. Whether you want the extra shifts is a separate question, and it's yours - if you want the longer weeks, filter for them.

You don't need an account to see any of this. Full job details, pay included, without logging in.

Most in this industry make you hand over your name, number, and email before they tell you what a contract pays - because your contact info is the product.

You should get to see the money first and decide for yourself whether it's worth a conversation.

Making a profile adds 2 things: you can search several states or several specialties at once, and it remembers those preferences for every search after that. Set it once, change it whenever you want.

The pay map

Any time you're looking at more than 1 location - nationwide, the compact states, or your own set of states - your results come with a pay map comparing every state you picked and what it's paying. Ranges side by side, in 1 picture, instead of a list you have to hold in your head. When a state stands out, click straight into that state's contracts.

This is the god-mode view doing its actual job. Knowing your specialty pays well is one thing; seeing where it pays well this month is what tells you which license to pick up next and which recruiter is lowballing you. If you want the longer view of how rates move, the travel nurse salary breakdown goes deeper.

Searching a single state

Narrow to 1 state and the top of your results changes: you get that state's current pay median measured against its own medians over the past 6 months. High, normal, or soft - for that market, right now.

That's timing, and timing is money. A rate can look perfectly reasonable on its own and still sit below what that same state paid all spring. Seeing it means you can push harder on the number, hold out a few weeks, or take another look at the map and go where the money went.

It's the context the recruiter on the other end of the phone already has, and now you have it before you pick up. When you get to that conversation, how to negotiate travel nurse pay walks through using it.

Narrowing it down

Once you've got results, you can filter them by:

• Shift and hours per week - day or night, 36 or 48
• Contract length, in "weeks"
• Agency, and agency benefits - 401k, medical, and the rest
• Metro area - not just cities but whole regions, so the LA area, the Seattle area, the Kansas City area
• Climate - warm, cold, temperate
• Cost of living - low, moderate, high
• Rural or urban
• Location highlights - critical access hospitals, and whether you'd be within a 1-2 hour drive of a national park, a snow resort, a beach, surfing, swimming

The first several are the ones you'd expect. The last few exist because a contract is 13 weeks of your life, not just a weekly rate, and where you spend those weeks is a decision you're allowed to make on purpose.

Cost of living deserves a mention of its own. Your stipend is meant to cover housing, and it doesn't stretch the same everywhere - a big number in an expensive metro can leave you with less at the end of the month than a moderate one somewhere your rent isn't eating the whole stipend. Filtering on it lets you see that before you fall for a headline rate.

I chose a local travel nursing contract in Kansas City, MO. My tax home is within driving distance but in a smaller city outside KCMO. Since I wasn't duplicating expenses all my income was taxed. But I was still able to take home more pay working in the higher-cost-of-living big city hospital before driving home to my lower cost-of-living home. No packing and more money - winning! 🤑

What's on a listing

Open any contract and here's what's on it:

• The agency holding it, plus a short rundown of who they are
• The specialty, shift, hours per week, and contract length
• The start date, and when it was posted - "posted today," "posted 19 hours ago"
• The city, and where it sits on a map
• The gross weekly pay
• The agency's benefits - health insurance, guaranteed hours, referral bonus, that kind of thing

You also get the location highlights for that specific job, not just as a filter: whether it's a critical access hospital, what the climate is like, and what's near enough to reach on a day off - a national park, the coast, a mountain. So you're not opening a second tab to work out what living there for 13 weeks would actually be like.

The agency being named up front matters more than it sounds. You can look them up, check what other nurses say, and read my guide to choosing an agency before you ever speak to them. Plenty of the industry keeps that hidden until you've handed over your number.

And the pay never sits there as a bare number.

Each listing tells you where that rate lands against the average for that search:

• 99th percentile
• Above average
• Average
• Below average

Then it tells you how far, in dollars per week. Not just "this one's good," but exactly how much better than normal it is. Ie. 👍 $1,074.00/week higher than average

A rate you'd have had no way to judge becomes a rate you can size up in about 2 seconds.

Here's what a listing can't tell you: how that weekly number splits between your taxable hourly base and your tax-free stipends.

Postings quote gross weekly, everywhere, not just here. And 2 contracts advertising the same $2,400 can leave you with noticeably different take-home depending on how they divide it. So that split is question 1 when you make contact - before the unit, before the schedule.

My travel nurse pay breakdown shows how a package divides up and what a blended rate really works out to, and the taxes guide covers what has to be true for the tax-free half to stay tax-free.

The same contract, from other agencies

Here's the one I'd read twice. Every listing also shows you which other agencies are offering that same job, and how their pay compares.

A hospital doesn't hand a contract to 1 agency. It goes out to several, and each of them decides what to keep and what to pass on to you. Same unit, same shifts, same 13 weeks - different weekly rate depending on whose name is on your paperwork. That spread has always existed.

What's new is you being able to see it. So before you talk to anybody, you know whether the rate in front of you is the best version of that job or the worst one. You know which agency to call. And if you're already working with a recruiter you like, you have a number to point at when you ask them to match when negotiating.

And you don't have to pick just one. There's a start multiple convos button: tick the agencies you want, send the message to all of them at once, and let them come back to you. That's the move I'd tell any nurse to make - several agencies working the same contract for you at the same time is how you end up with offers to compare instead of 1 number to accept or refuse.

That's not agency-bashing - somebody has to do the credentialing and billing, and that costs money. It's that the size of the cut was never something you got to see, and the entire negotiation was built on you not seeing it. Now it's on the screen.

If you want the tactics for the conversation itself, I wrote them up in how to negotiate travel nurse pay.

Why a listing thinks for a minute

Every listing starts out showing 3 dots. That's us checking that contract's pay and availability with the source, right then, while you're looking at it. It can take a couple of minutes.

• 3 dots - we're verifying it right now.
• Green checkmark ✅ - this job was updated in the past few minutes.
• Double green checkmark ✅✅ - updated in the past few minutes, and the pay changed.

If you see a double checkmark, re-read the listing before you do anything else. The rate on your screen isn't the rate that was there earlier - it may be up, it may be down, but it moved, and that's the number you'd be negotiating against.

That check is the difference between a live market and a wall of old posts. A listing that filled last week can sit up for months somewhere else, collecting calls from nurses who never had a shot at it.

There's also a ticker at the top of every search telling you when the last contract came in - something like "last job found 4 hours ago."

It's a small line of text doing an honest job: proving the feed is live while you're standing in it. And when it tells you the last job in your search turned up days ago, that's worth knowing too.

A quiet market is information. It might mean widening your states, or checking back before you turn down something decent.

When you're ready: find open travel nursing contracts.

Starting a conversation with an agency

Every listing has a start convo button. Once you've made a profile, it sends a message to the agency holding that contract, you can edit the message before it goes, and it goes out from your @SNurseMail.com address - so the agency gets a way to reach you and still doesn't have your personal email.

That message is first contact, not an application. It's how you ask the questions that decide whether the contract is worth pursuing - the pay breakdown, the shift, the unit, what happens if they cancel - and how you get a read on the agency before you've handed over anything. You're vetting them at least as much as they're vetting you.

If they check out, you keep going with that agency. They'll take the rest of your information, credential you, and submit you to the facility. That part always runs through an agency; there's no version of travel nursing where it doesn't.

What's different is the order of operations: you saw the whole market first, picked the contract yourself, and made contact on your terms instead of theirs.

Exactly what the agency gets

No mystery here, and no more than this:

• Your first name and last initial
• What job you're asking about
• Your specialties
• Your years of experience
• Your state licenses
• Your @SNurseMail.com address
• Your phone number

The same list sits on your dashboard, so you can always see what you've handed over and to whom.

Your phone number is on that list, and I'd rather be blunt about it than let you find out later: an agency you've chosen to talk to needs a way to call you.

That's why I push the burner number so hard. Set one up before your first convo and the number they get is one you control and can switch off - here's how to do that in about 2 minutes.

What doesn't happen: your information going anywhere else. We never sell it, and agencies you didn't message never receive it. The only companies that get anything about you are the ones you picked. That's not just a promise on a help page - it's written into our privacy policy, and you should hold us to it.

When they write back, the reply lands in your normal email inbox - the one you signed up with. You're not logging in somewhere to check for messages. The agency still only ever sees your @SNurseMail.com address.

When an agency doesn't write back

Some won't. Move on - and count the silence as information you just collected for free. An agency that can't answer a straightforward question about a job it posted is not going to move faster when your housing falls through 2 days before a start date, or when your first check is short. You found that out before you signed anything instead of after.

Message 5-10 agencies a week while you're looking. That isn't desperation, it's vetting: you're learning who responds, who answers a direct question with a direct answer, and who's worth handing your license and your next 13 weeks to. Choosing a travel nurse agency covers what else to watch for once they do reply.

Your dashboard keeps a record of every convo you've started, so you can look back at which jobs you messaged which agencies about. When you're working several agencies at once - and you should be - that's how you keep it straight.

Your profile and dashboard

Your profile and your account are the same thing, and it's free. Your dashboard is where you see it all - your profile information, plus the record of which agency you messaged about which job.

Signing up is just your email address - we send you a login link, you click it, you're in. There's no password to invent, remember, or reset at 6am after a night shift.

That email is also where agency replies land, which is why it's the one thing we ask for.

What it holds about you:

• Your first and last name
• Your specialty, and your years of experience
• Whether you've travel nursed before
• Your state licenses, and whether you hold a compact license
• Your assigned @SNurseMail.com address
• Your phone number

Worth repeating, since it's your actual phone number sitting there: get a burner before you start messaging agencies. It's free and takes about 2 minutes.

Note the difference between what your profile holds and what an agency receives. Your profile has your full name; an agency only ever gets your first name and last initial.

It also keeps:

• Your search preferences - the states and specialties you picked, applied to every search, editable any time.
• Your convo history - every agency you've contacted, and which job it was about.
• Your @SNurseMail.com address - which you can switch on and off whenever you like.

What it costs you, and how we make money

Nothing. All of it - the search, the pay map, the comparisons, the private email, your convo history - is free, there's no paid tier, and there isn't one planned.

Here's how the money works, because you should never have to guess at that. If you sign a contract with an agency, that agency pays a referral bonus - the same one any nurse can collect for sending a friend to a job. It does not come out of your pay. Not a dollar of it, not indirectly. And if you never sign, we never get paid.

That's the whole business.

Which is worth sitting with for a second, given what the rest of this page is about. We aren't selling your name to agencies, because that isn't how we get paid. There's no version of this where handing your phone number around is good for us - the opposite, since the whole reason to use the site is that it doesn't happen to you here.

Your free private email

Every StellarNurse account comes with a free @SNurseMail.com address. It's assigned to you when you sign up - nothing to choose, nothing to configure, it's just there.

Use it anywhere an agency asks for your email - and it's already what every start convo message goes out from. Messages forward to your normal inbox, so you're not checking a second account, and when you hit reply it goes out from the private address - the recruiter never sees your personal email. You can switch it off whenever you want from your dashboard.

Your personal email is never revealed to recruiters on StellarNurse.

It's free and it takes no setup beyond signing up. Here's exactly how the private email works.

Boy, do I regret ever giving out my personal email and phone number to travel nursing companies. 🙈

I made that mistake in 2016 when I was still young, wide-eyed and didn't know how the spam machine worked. I was floored with the spam bombardment I received in the months afterwards. My little fingers clicking "spam" could hardly keep up with how fast it all came in.

I still receive random job spam in my main personal email, years after I moved all my travel nursing job searches off. But it's so much easier to manage now.

And I only check my travel nursing email inbox when I'm ready to dip my toe into the cesspool of spam emails to hunt for the agency replies I'm actually looking for.

Keeping your phone number off the list

Your phone needs the same protection, and this one I feel strongly about.

Because the story I told in the section above about my agency spam bombardment from days of yore? (Aka 2016) Goes 10-fold for spam via text, calls and voicemails. Barf! 🤮

The moment your personal number lands in 1 agency's database, it does not stay in that 1 agency's database. It gets passed around and dialed by people you never contacted. That's not a mistake in the system, that's the system - your contact info is worth something to them.

We can't hand you a phone number the way we hand you an email address, for regulatory reasons I explain on the page. But there are free apps that do it, and setting one up before you talk to a single recruiter only takes about 2 minutes. Here's how to get a burner number for free.

If your phone is already going off constantly, that's fixable too - my guide to stopping agency spam calls and emails walks through digging out.

Where to go from here

That's the whole site in a nutshell:

• See the best jobs on the entire market instead of 1 recruiter's slice of it
• Know the jobs you're looking at are still open and still paying what they say
• Make contact on your terms without handing your personal number and email to an industry that trades in them

Those things together are most of the difference between a job hunt that runs you and one you run.

Wherever you are right now:

• Ready to look at contracts? Find travel nursing jobs here - we'll surface the best ones for your specialty automatically.
• Still deciding whether this career is for you? Start with the honest travel nursing guide.
• Want to know how pay rates look today vs all the way back to 2019? The salary breakdown is here.

Thank you for putting the time in. Nurses are never handed this - the industry has no reason to explain how the market works to the person on the other side of the table - so learning it yourself is the single highest-paid thing you can do on a day off.

You'll walk into your next contract talk with the whole board in front of you. That's worth a lot more than the few minutes it took to read this, and I'm glad you're doing it here with us.

If something isn't working, or you can't find what you need, or you just want to talk travel nursing with someone who's been through it - reach out to me anytime. I read every message myself, and there's no such thing as a question that's too small.

Frequently asked questions