The Best Travel Nurse Blogs, Podcasts & Communities (No Agency Spin)

What makes a travel nurse blog worth reading?

The best travel nurse blogs are the independent ones - written by working travelers or unbiased sources with no 1 agency behind them. You need an objective overview over lots of agencies at once. That's the whole filter for this list.

Here's the problem with most "best travel nurse blogs" roundups you'll find: they're published by staffing agencies. And an agency's resource list subtly routes you right back to that agency.

I'm not selling travel nursing or any agency.

I'm a travel nurse and these are the actual resources that have helped me.

These are the blogs, podcasts, and communities I use and send to people when they're trying to figure out travel nursing before a recruiter gets to them.

If you're still researching or prepping for your first contract, these are the places to learn what travel nursing is really like - the unbiased version, not the sales pitch.

When you're ready for the step-by-step, that's what how to become a travel nurse is for.

Don't let an agency be your only teacher

Travel nurse companies can and do get information wrong, and not always on purpose. An agency's job is to get you into a contract fast, so that's what its guidance is built around.

Recruiters turn over constantly too, and plenty of them are still learning this industry themselves. That's the staffing model, not the individual recruiter - but it means the person explaining your contract may know less about it than you'd assume.

So research travel nursing on your own before you start talking to agencies. It's a lot easier to spot a wrong or misleading answer when you already know what the right one sounds like:

• what the job actually involves
• what you're responsible for
• what you're signing up for

Then verify it anyway - what an agency tells you, and what a fellow traveler tells you - especially before you sign. Our travel nurse contract checklist is what I'd run any offer through.

How to tell an unbiased resource from an agency sales funnel

The fastest way to judge a "resource": check who publishes it and what they want from you.

If the article ends in "create your profile" or "talk to one of our recruiters" without showing you jobs, it's pure marketing disguised as a blog.

A few quick signs your source is biased:

• Agency-owned domain - the resource lives on a staffing company's site and only ever recommends that company.
• No named author - no real nurse behind it, or a generic "staff writer."
• All upside, no honesty - travel nursing has genuine downsides. Anything sugar-coating them is selling, not informing.

Those funnels are after your phone number and email, and once they have it the calls/texts/emails will bombard you from multiple sources. If that's already happened, here's how to stop the spam calls and emails.

Here's what a good, objective resource has:

• a named working nurse
• candid community talk (including the complaints)
• lists that point you toward sources the publisher doesn't own

A couple of the sites below are agency-affiliated - I've flagged which - but they earn their spot because the content is genuinely useful, not because they paid to be here.

Travel nurse blogs worth following

These are my favorites. A mix of independent, nurse or traveler-founded, plus a couple of resource hubs.

I noted the agency-affiliated blogs, but they're very popular, and have helped me and other nurses along the way. I recommend cross-checking all info with other sources, especially the agency-run blogs.

Blogs that will actually teach you something:

• Passports & Preemies - Nurse-founded, started in 2017 by Kylee Nelson, a former NICU travel nurse. Strong on the practical money-and-logistics side: finances, housing, interview prep, licensing, and recruiter negotiation, with destination guides mixed in. One of the most useful independent voices out there.
• BluePipes - Founded by a former travel nurse recruiter, Kyle Schmidt. Begun in 2013, their blog has an in-depth pay-and-salary section: blended-rate math, pay-package breakdowns, and compliance/credentialing walkthroughs that go way further than most.
• Nomadicare - Traveler-founded, started in 2014 by former travel therapist Laura Latimer. Thorough guides, tax-planning tools, and salary calculators built to help travelers negotiate fair pay. The job board is for travel therapy only now, but the guides apply to travel nursing.
• Scrub Society - formerly The Gypsy Nurse. Agency-owned (TNAA). One of the largest travel nurse communities on the internet, with a huge back-catalog of articles covering nearly every topic a new traveler asks about.
• TravelNursing.org - Agency-owned (AMN). Their blog is a genuinely thorough guide library and worth having open in a tab.
• StellarNurse guides - and yes, mine: guides I wrote cover objective takes on the travel nursing market, with evidence-based takes on money and the industry plus my own travel nursing misadventures.

Travel nurse podcasts

Yes, there are travel-nurse podcasts worth a listen - great for learning on the drive to a new assignment. The only "top travel nurse podcast" lists ranking right now are agency listicles.

Here's my own set instead, with the agency ties flagged where there are any:

• The Truth About Travel Nursing - from BluePipes co-founder Kyle Schmidt. I listened to this one when I first started & there are still new useful episodes.
• Nurses Investing for Wealth - Angel is a nurse & APRN with 20+ years experience. She's a money strategist with sensible advice to help us nurses turn our nursing salary into work optional freedom. Her podcasts will get you fired up!
• Clocked Out: Life Beyond the Bedside - from Kylee Nelson of Passports & Preemies. Now pivoted to leaving the bedside, but still has useful content about her time travel nursing.
• Travel Insiders - agency-affiliated (Meridian Medical Staffing), but genuinely useful. Run by Mark Holloway, the agency's CEO, it's straightforward and gives a bunch of insider insight that helps a nurse advocate for herself.

Forums & communities

The most honest travel nursing talk happens in communities, not blogs - this is where you hear the stuff agencies won't tell you.

• Reddit - r/TravelNursing - start here. It's the most candid day-to-day discussion anywhere: real pay numbers, facility warnings, contract horror stories, and honest answers to "is this normal?" questions.
• Pan Travelers - Professional Association of Nurse Travelers - a professional association (not an agency) with a genuine article library and a more structured, advocacy-minded take on the field. Their history of travel nursing is a good read.

Facebook groups

Groups move faster than forums and are where a lot of real-time intel lives:

• Travel Healthcare Network - Scrub Society - the big one; huge, active, and generally well-moderated.
• The Travel Nurse's Guide - a solid general discussion and support group for questions as they come up.
• Facilities Cancellation Database - a crowd-sourced group where travelers log facilities that cancel or cut contracts. Worth searching before you sign somewhere new.

One caveat on communities: they're opinionated, and sometimes negative. Read for patterns - a facility 10 people warn about is a signal; one bad day someone vented about isn't.

Travel nurse influencers & social media follows

A handful of travel nurses share genuinely useful content on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube - but plenty of travel nurse influencers are really just agency affiliates in scrubs. Your clue is the same as everywhere else: do they ever say anything an agency wouldn't want said?

Some of these creators partner with agencies, but I still stand by the unbiased advice they share.

Here are my favorite follows:

• Sarah Gaines, @sarah_gaines - Instagram - Sarah's the Six Figure Travel Nurse and has hilarious, straightforward and highly useful reels and carousels for travel nurses. She's pivoted to helping nurses transition into remote nursing, but you can still find her travel nursing info!
• Lindsay + Chase, @wereoutnabout - Instagram - an upbeat full-time RV travel nurse family with upfront advice on travel nurse income & negotiating pay. Great videos, and beautiful drone footage from their travels. 🤩
• Lindsey, @lindseys_leisures - TikTok & Instagram - long-time travel nurse and former travel nurse recruiter. Speaks candidly and entertainingly, with clarity about both sides of our experience.
• Lindsey Shelton, @scrubhacks - Instagram & TikTok - "helping you laugh so you don't cry." Laugh-out-loud videos on travel nursing, mental health & life on the road with her travel nurse husband & adorable doggos.
• Angel Mathis, @nursesinvestingforwealth - Instagram & YouTube - the money side, from the podcast above.
• Nurse Reva, @revamoments - Instagram & TikTok - fun videos from her life on the road, plus insider takes.
• Emily, @bucketlist_rn - Instagram - great advice for new travel nurses & making the most of your days off.
• Nurse SueBee, @itssuebee - Instagram - Jamaican-born and RN-trained before working in the US, which gives her a perspective nobody else on this list has. Posts stories constantly, with tips and advice from her own experience.

How to actually use these while you're researching

Read a couple of the blogs for the how-to, lurk a community for the real talk, and cross-check anything an agency tells you against what independent nurses say.

That triangulation - guide, community, and your own math - is how you avoid the rookie mistakes.

For the math half of it, how much travel nurses make gives you current numbers to hold any offer up against.

Once you've got the lay of the land, the next step is the actual process. Here's how to become a travel nurse, start to finish. And when you're ready to see what's out there, find travel nursing jobs on StellarNurse.

Read the people with nothing to sell you

That's the whole filter. Independent, working-nurse blogs and candid communities like r/TravelNursing will tell you what an agency's "best blogs" roundup never will: the real pay numbers, the facilities that cancel contracts, the parts of this job that genuinely suck.

Before you trust a resource, check who publishes it and what they want from you at the bottom of the page. Read communities for patterns, not for one bad shift someone vented about. Then run the math yourself anyway.

Bookmark 2 or 3 of these, lurk for a week, then go do the thing.

How to become a travel nurse walks the whole process, and travel nursing jobs on StellarNurse shows you what's live right now. Our full guide library covers everything in between. Still deciding whether to jump at all? Is travel nursing worth it gives you the honest verdict.

Thank you for reading, and for being the kind of nurse who goes looking for the unsponsored version of the story. That instinct will serve you well out there.

If there's a blog, podcast, or group you swear by that I left off this list, or you just want to talk any of this through with someone who's actually done it, reach out anytime. My inbox is open.

Frequently asked questions