The State of Wellness
The State of Wellness
How Much Do Oregon’s Registered Nurses Earn?
How does Oregon stack up in nurse compensation? The newly published report, How Much Do Oregon’s Registered Nurses Earn? The 2023 Oregon Wage Study, from the Oregon Center for Nursing, helps to address that common question. Tune in for a conversation with OCN Research Director Dr. Richard Allgeyer as we dig into the data and examine Oregon nursing wages at every level—from position type and practice setting to geographic location and cost of living.
The State of Wellness podcast is hosted by the Oregon Center for Nursing, the state's nonprofit nursing workforce center. Learn more at oregoncenterfornursing.org.
Resources Mentioned in the Episode
Welcome to the State of Wellness podcast, because nurses need a trusted place to share, collaborate and talk about what matters most to the Oregon nursing community and profession as a whole, Brought to you by the nonprofit Oregon Center for Nursing. Now here's your host, Jana Bitten, Executive Director for OCN.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the State of Wellness. This is a podcast for Oregon nurses that's brought to you by the Oregon Center for Nursing. My name is Jana Bitten, I'm the executive director for OCN and I'm going to be your host for this podcast. I'm really excited about today's episode. This episode is where we are going to bring in esteemed Dr Richard Allgaier, known as Rick, to the rest of us where he's going to be talking.
Speaker 2:He is the research director at the Oregon Center for Nursing and we have, and he's just completed, a wage study about nurses and what nurses and salaries of what nurses are making in the state of Oregon and I just I'm really interested to hear, I think, that a lot of the things that people talk to me. When they talk about pay in Oregon for nurses, you get it kind of all around the gamut whether they're being paid too much or paid too little. You get a little bit of everything. So I'm excited to talk to Rick a little bit today. So let's welcome you, thanks. Thanks, rick, for joining us today and welcome to the show. Thanks for being here, thanks.
Speaker 3:Jenna, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2:Okay, so the wage study. What did you do and why did we do this in the first place?
Speaker 3:Well, the major reason we did it is, you know, over the years we've heard a lot of anecdotal evidence or information from folks telling us what they're making, and you know there's some general themes Hospitals make more, and it's just. You know, it's one of those issues where you hear it all the time and therefore it takes on a truth of its own. We've also heard that nurses working in or practicing in non-metro areas, the rural parts of the state or non-Portland areas of the state also make less. The biggest issue we have is we really don't know. The data we use from the employment department is very useful. It gives you some geographic variation, but it doesn't give you the ability to break it down by practice setting. So if you want to look at the pay for a hospital versus a nurse that works in a hospital versus a nurse who works in skilled nursing or ambulatory care or something you really have no way of knowing that from those data, when you look at salary surveys, it can actually compare some of those settings. They're usually national and when they break them down by regions, california just wipes us out. They're so big, yeah Um, that they just, they just overpower the rest of the Western state. So you really end up getting a um, a version of what California is doing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, um, so and and so what we wanted to do was actually look to see if we could look at some of the disparities that pay across the state and across different practice settings and even within different kinds of positions or roles that nurses play educators versus a staff, nurse versus administrators and those kinds of things. And so, in order to do that, we looked at the hourly wage, because we didn't want to be confounded by the full-time, part-time, those kinds of issues, because that just muddies that water so much. We're also not looking at their overall earnings. So we're estimating what the annual salaries are, or annual wages are, for a nurse, but we didn't really look at that. So we asked for an annual or an hourly wage, okay, so we could have more of a direct apple to apple comparison on what nurses are actually making.
Speaker 2:And it also didn't include things like benefits or bonuses or anything else that might. It was just what do you make on an hourly basis, just so that we could compare it across different settings. So, basically, you're telling me that this, that this is um, this is compare. You're able to compare, like, a nurse who's working in a hospital setting to a nurse who's working in nursing school as faculty, or a nurse who's working in a long-term care setting or that sort of thing. Right, and we're able to do some of that by geography as well.
Speaker 3:Some of that. We ended up running into some sample size issues and so we weren't able to break it out as granular as we have liked. So we ended up using staff nurses. When we looked at our licensed nurses, you know staff nurses make up about 70% of the workforce, Right? So we figured that it is a good representation of what nurses are making across different practice settings. And how did we get the data.
Speaker 2:How did you get the data for this?
Speaker 3:So we ended up doing a survey. We worked with the state board to get email addresses, okay, and for every registered nurse practicing in the state of Oregon we used questions from the current population survey that the US Census Bureau puts out every month and it's the Fed's way of gathering information about employment, wages, benefits, all those kinds of things. So those questions have been developed and tested for years. The CPS has been done for decades. When we look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, those data usually are coming from the current population survey done by the Census.
Speaker 2:Bureau. Okay, so you surveyed all of the nurses. You asked them to kind of break it down by an hourly wage Right, didn't do bonuses, didn't do benefits, didn't do health insurance and anything like that. Right, what'd you find?
Speaker 3:So we found that some of the anecdotes we hear are somewhat right. Okay, On average, nurses practicing in hospital settings tend to make more about $4 or $5 an hour more than nurses working in other settings. What was kind of surprising was the uniformity that we saw in the other practice settings.
Speaker 2:What does that mean so?
Speaker 3:long-term care, ambulatory care, education all made about the same. They were averaging about $51 to $52 an hour. Nurses working in hospital settings were making about $58 an hour. So the median wage, hourly wage, for a nurse in Oregon was about $54. Okay.
Speaker 1:Which is you?
Speaker 3:know, because there's so many nurses working in hospitals that count for 52 or 53% of the practicing nurses in the state.
Speaker 2:Right, they're just driving that up a little. They drove that average wage up a little bit. Okay, so you're saying that in the state of Oregon we're kind of in the $52 to $58 per hour range for nurses who work here. That seems pretty good. It is good. Okay, it's a pretty good way. How does that compare to other states?
Speaker 3:Well, that kind of depends on how you can, but what kind of comparisons you make? Generally, oregon ranks in the top five. Yeah, if you look at just raw wage, where you're not taking into account the cost of living, we rank three. We're behind California and Hawaii. If you do account for the cost of living, we dropped down a little bit, but I think we're still around five. I think we dropped below Washington, okay, so we're still four or five.
Speaker 2:So we're still in the top five states for nurse pay, so nurse pay is pretty good in the state of Oregon. Yeah, how does that compare by where you live in the state of Oregon, though?
Speaker 3:Well, that we do definitely see. Anecdotally, information has somewhat been confirmed. We do see that nurses that work in the Portland metro area, eugene Salem, tend to make a little bit more than nurses who work in, say, the rural parts of eastern Oregon or in southern Oregon.
Speaker 2:And that's even for doing the same thing. For example, you might be a nurse and you're living in the Portland area and you're working in the Portland area. Then you're a nurse in Hood River and you're living and working in the Hood River area. You can expect to be making less money in Hood River and more money in Portland. Correct, you can expect to be making less money in Hood River and more money in Portland.
Speaker 3:Correct and in the report that's going out we actually looked at staff nurses by region of the state and found that if you live in the Portland or in what they call the Mid-Valley which is around Salem, those nurses tend to make the most the highest hourly wage, which is around Salem, those nurses tend to make the most the highest hourly wage.
Speaker 3:So basically, what we found is so one of the things we did is we do acknowledge that there are different, that the cost of living is different, differs across the state, right, and so we wanted to account for that, and so we looked at a couple of places for information on cost of living by the county or whatever.
Speaker 3:Okay, we ended up using some data from MIT that looked at food, housing, insurance, a whole host of costs that would be incurred by households just on the day-to-day on the cost of living, and what we did is we applied that to each region and then what we found basically is that nurses who practice in the rural parts of the state actually basically everywhere make about three times the living wage. Wow, when you look at nurses practicing in the Portland area, they're only making about 2.6 times the living wage 2.6 times the living wage. So their money actually goes less. They actually have less spending power in the Portland metro area than do nurses in other parts of the state, even though their absolute wage is a little bit lower because of the cost of living is even lower than that their money goes much further.
Speaker 2:So let me restate this so I make sure that I understand this. What you're saying is that, even though in the Portland area, a nurse might be making on average of about $58 an hour and I'm sure that there are probably nurses that are listening to this being like, oh, I'm not making $58 an hour You're probably not. That's very true. However, if even if you're going to be, if you're thinking that you're going to come to the Portland area because you're going to be, if you're thinking that you're going to come to the Portland area because you're going to be making $58 an hour, as opposed to your more rural community where you're only making $52 an hour because of the cost of living and variations, you actually might be seeing your dollar go further, not in the Portland area. If you're living in those places where you're getting, you might be getting less, your paycheck might have a smaller number on it, but you can buy more things at Costco. That's right. Okay, that's right.
Speaker 3:So, for instance, when you look at nurses practicing in Baker City, right, or basically any community on the eastern part of the state, the average wage is about $47 an hour. Okay, because it's a rural community and they pay less. That's also at a hospital, which tends to be also the major employers in those areas. But because of the reduced cost of living their wages are about, they're making about three times what the cost of living would be. They're making about three times what the cost of living would be Okay, so their money will go a heck of a lot further than someone who's working or practicing in the Portland area or in Salem or in general in the big areas yeah, the big metro areas on the west part of the state, just because the cost of living is so high. Okay. Now we have heard also information about, like some parts of Southern Oregon are very expensive. So there are communities within counties where the cost of living is much higher and we're not making any accounts for that because getting that kind of data on the cost of living is really, really difficult to do. So we really don't know. We know like Ashland is pretty expensive. We know like in the Portland area. We know like Lake Oswego is very expensive and so we're not taking in the. We're not, we can't, we don't have the data available to make those community level adjustments in the cost of living. So what we're relying on is county level stuff.
Speaker 3:In our study what we ended up doing is our sample sizes for county-by-county comparisons were so small we weren't able to do that. So what we did is we ended up collapsing counties into regions and we ended up using the employment department regions, ended up using the employment department regions. So Multnomah, clackamas in Washington make up the PDX area. Clatsop and the counties that are in the northwest corner make up an area and basically everything on the east side when you get past the Chutes and Hood River in that area make up a county. So you look at Union and Baker and Mount Ewer and all those counties out there make up a region. So you look at Union and Baker and Mount here and all those counties out there make up a region. And then you have some areas in the southwestern corner of the state and then you have Josephine and Jackson counties around Medford and Klamath and those places.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that you've said a couple of times is that so we know that nurses in Oregon are well paid and well compensated which great. We want that. That is absolutely great. You've also said that you know what is it the living wage? The living wage in some of these areas and in some cases nurse salaries is anywhere. It's like almost three times what the bare minimum living wage is. That's right.
Speaker 2:What I find interesting is there's also we've been, and I don't know that this isn't in the study, I don't believe but you, you and I have had conversations before about the. They're determining the, the. The annual salary that you're going to need in order to live a comfortable life in Port in Multnomah County, for example this is the one story that they have is just, multnomah County was about $161,000 a year. That means that a registered nurse that's not going that won't cover it like that. You, a registered nurse in Multnomah County, even though they're making almost three times what the bare minimum level is to be that comfortable, thriving individual in that community, a nurse couldn't live on that salary alone.
Speaker 3:They couldn't afford a mortgage.
Speaker 2:They couldn't afford a mortgage. Yeah, that's right. Okay, all right. So, yeah, I guess that's what I'm trying to make sure it's like are nurses paid well? Yes, yes, and it's still not enough in some cases.
Speaker 3:Yeah, in some cases. In some cases and keep in mind, when you look at the average wage of $54 an hour for a full-time person, that equates to about $114,000 a year, yeah, which is a decent, which is a decent, which is definitely a decent wage. It's definitely above the median household income within the state, so it is a pretty good wage. There are portions of every community Portland, multnomah, county Now, it's expensive and there's a host of reasons for that that are way beyond the study. But there's a lot of reasons why shortage of housing, all those kinds of issues that just you know, those market forces that come right exactly.
Speaker 2:Have have you ever done a study like this before? Do we have anything to compare this to?
Speaker 3:no it?
Speaker 2:does this data exist anywhere else?
Speaker 3:no, that's why we ended up doing it, because we've been really interested. So one of the reasons we're looking at this is last fall our programs director and I, don Schoenthal and I, worked on a pretty intensive program in Coos County. Yeah, looking at attractors and barriers of being able to augment the nursing workforce, to attraction, recruitment and those kinds of things and retention issues for nurses working across all different practice settings in Coos County. We're trying to understand what do employers think are causing some of the issues, and so we spent a fair amount of time and we talked to a lot of employers down there. We talked to skilled nursing facilities, hospitals, ambulatory care centers, fqhcs. We talked to these school nurses, like the nurses that practice in public school settings. We also talked to nurse educators those are the nurses that teach our future nurses and we talked to a lot of people down there and found that they all said that wages was that pay that they couldn't compete with the pay Right, and so they were looking at other avenues to use to attract nurses to at least apply for jobs in those areas. Yeah, so they were talking about things like the natural beauty of the area and those kinds of things that they could be an attractor, and they're always worried about nurses just packing up and leaving.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so one of the things is so they talk about these disparities and they absolutely.
Speaker 3:Wage disparities do happen, yeah, but when you look at your buying power, this really kind of throws out on its ear a little bit, because it's opposite of what people have been saying. And so what we want to use these data for and this report for is to inform nurses or nurse leaders and employers in non-metro and non-Portland areas of the state hey, you can use this information to say, hey, you know, you can actually your money's worth more out here than it would be if you were in Portland or Salem or Eugene. Yeah, and so that is so. It kind of dispels that idea that nurses get paid more. Yeah, because you have to. It's not nothing's in a vacuum. Their wage isn't in a vacuum. Their wage is being used to support their standard of living and it turns out that you can have a somewhat higher standard of living in parts of the state where they always assumed that they just couldn't compete with the Portland metro area. Right, they just couldn't compete with the Portland metro area.
Speaker 2:Right. So what you're saying is that some of these smaller rural communities have always assumed that people are going to be going to Portland for the pay Right, and the answer is yes. And also you could make the argument that even with a lower pay in the community, that would be more market competitive. In that community the cost of living is such that a nurse might want to come and live in your community Exactly, and I know there's been some studies that have come out lately that is showing that now that the pandemic, the surge of the pandemic, is over and a lot of nurses during the pandemic took travel contracts because they could be making so much more money working in travel, now that we're kind of entering the next, the post, phase, a lot of those nurses are looking for places with a low cost of living, a less hectic lifestyle, basically something where they can get that work life balance and what?
Speaker 2:you're saying is this study kind of shows that that is potentially true, especially for some of our areas in Oregon that might have had trouble recruiting nurses to their communities in the past. Right, that's exactly right.
Speaker 3:So if you go back to the study that Dawn and I did last spring, you know the employers in Coos were just saying we can't compete, so we don't really push that. We push other things. We can't compete pay-wise, so we push the. If you're an outdoorsy nurse, if you like outdoors kinds of things hiking those kinds of kayaking, fishing, hunting those kinds of things these areas are attracted to that and you kind of have to dismiss the lower pay, yeah. Or you just have to accept the lower pay because you have all these other amenities, yeah. And what this study says is no, you don't have to ignore that. You can actually use that, use the buying power of your, the spending power of your wage as another amenity, because in reality they can afford to have somewhat of a higher cost of living in some of the rural parts of the state compared to the Portland area.
Speaker 2:Exactly, there are other ways to compensate people, and not just money.
Speaker 3:That's right, but what we're going to try to do is talk to the employers and let them know what's going on, yeah, so when they are recruiting and when they're trying to retain nurses, they can say, hey, you know you're really making. Yeah, when you're looking at the relative amount of money you're making, you're doing better here than you would be in other parts of the state or in the Portland area Fascinating that was real, we didn't expect it. Yeah. Area Fascinating that was real, we didn't expect it, yeah. And when I found that, you know, I did about three, I did the calculations about three different times, because the first time I saw it I didn't necessarily believe it. Yeah. And so we looked at it a couple different ways and every time it came out exactly that way Interesting. So we're real excited.
Speaker 2:That is a real interesting finding, and that was something we totally did not expect. That's excellent. All right, this has been great.
Speaker 3:Rick, did you have?
Speaker 2:anything else that you want to share?
Speaker 3:The last thing I want to share is, you know, the primary reason we did this is one to look at the disparities, and indeed they do exist Relatively. The disparities kind of disappear when you look relatively. But the main takeaway from this is these data don't exist anywhere else. We've been talking about this for a while. To do these because we hear this a lot and we just never had hard evidence one way or the other to say yes or no, that these things are true or not true. We just had no idea. National studies and things that you see from staffing agencies and stuff just didn't address this. So we thought it was pretty important to actually look and ask nurses and we got a really nice sample.
Speaker 2:So I'm confident that the figures are reasonable, yeah, and represent the nursing community in the state Right.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you, thank you for doing this. Yeah, thank, represent, represent, represent the nursing community in the state, right? Well, thank you, thank you for doing this. Yeah, thank you for having me on. Thank you for thinking about all of these different things. And, uh, the the survey is available on the Oregon center for nursing's website at Oregon center for nursingorg. It's also going. A link to it is going to be included in the show notes, if you wanted to link on that. And you know, if you hear of anything and have any questions, you can reach out to Dr Allgaier himself and we'll put his email into the show notes too. So that's it for today, thank you, thank you for all of this and thank you people who are listening to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thanks for tuning into another episode of the State of Wellness. This is our podcast for Oregon nurses. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts so you don't miss any of our future episodes of the State of Wellness, because we're going to be talking about more research, more data, more innovations really great things that are happening in nursing in the state of Oregon, and you don't want to miss any of that. You can check out the show notes for this episode and all of our other episodes over at oregoncenterfornursingorg, and you can find contact information there. If you have a question, if you have a topic idea or if you have a recommendation for a special guest, I am here for it. I want to hear that, so let us know. Until next time, stay well.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us on the State of Wellness podcast, and if you need more information, show notes, past episodes or resources, go to OregonCenterForNursingorg and subscribe wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts so you never miss a future episode.