2018 Travel Nursing Interest Trends by State
Travel nursing assignments average 13 weeks and as a result, nurses find themselves searching for their next opportunity every season. There are a few locations that you often think are the most popular — New York, Florida, California — but what does the data say?
To determine where most travel nurses are located and where they’re interested in going, we took a look at the Google Trends results for “travel nursing job” searches by region (where the search term is popular). The results revealed that while there are a few locations that remained popular throughout the year, there was definitely some seasonality to travel location interest.
Overall 2018 Travel Nursing Interest Trends
To establish a baseline for how trends fluctuate throughout the seasons, we first took a look at the overall interest trend from the beginning of the year.
As expected, New York was the clear winner with the rest of the top 10 states focused around the southern half of the country. Travelers seemed to favor staying along the coasts and are drawn toward warmer weather. Who can blame them?
Winter 2018 Travel Nursing Interest Trends
The early months of the year were dominated by interest in travel nursing by nurses located in Mississippi — which held third place overall during the year. New York maintained a strong presence, likely with nurses looking forward to going somewhere warmer during the cold months.
Spring 2018 Travel Nursing Interest Trends
As the winter melted into spring, Alabama inched forward in the rankings, even overtaking frontrunner New York in April. These months also saw an increased interest in travel nursing from states like Ohio and Wisconsin.
Summer 2018 Travel Nursing Interest Trends
The warmest months stayed dominated by Alabama but also saw a few new states appear in the rankings including Colorado, Washington and Pennsylvania. While these states are great for the summer, it makes sense that nurses would be looking to warmer climates for their next assignments in the coming winter.
Fall 2018 Travel Nursing Interest Trends (so far…)
Though we’re only halfway through the fall months, we’re seeing some interesting trends that are flipping the overall rankings on their head. Particularly in November, New York has moved down to the 6th place as nurses have left the Empire State as the weather gets colder. Instead, more southern states have dominated including Louisiana and North Carolina.
*As of November 12, 2018
From these trends, it’s clear that travel nurses overall love to travel according to the weather — favoring colder places in the summer and warmer locations in the winter. But the most important question is, where do you want to travel next?
Click any of these links below to search for jobs in the top 10 most popular states overall:
Happy job hunting!
The Nomad Team
nomadhealth.com
Originally published at blog.nomadhealth.com on November 14, 2018.
