Net pay by top-paying California hospital

Sup nurses!

Welp, we’ve gone a bit viral on social media lately.

So, if you’re new here—welcome!

I’m going to reveal how much you could be taking home if you were to work in one of the highest-paying hospitals in California.

But first…

Let me reintroduce ourselves. My name is Jason, and I’ve been a nurse since 2012. Monica has been a nurse since 2013. We worked in NYC until 2017 before we found out what it means to be a nurse in Northern California.

I used to work with a nurse in NYC who left to Roseville California, and would not stop talking about how great the pay and benefits were. That was enough for us to book a few trips to visit California—a state we had never previously visited.

Our first stop? San Diego.

Did we move there first? Nope.

We quickly learned that, although San Diego has perfect weather 365 days a year, nurse salaries there are just as low as they were for us in NYC—considering the high cost of living. It made no sense financially for us to move there.

Our next stop? San Francisco.

Was this the one? Absolutely not!

I remember pulling up Zillow while walking through some of the neighborhoods we were admiring. Oh my gosh, is it expensive or what! There was no way we could buy a home without spending more than half of our combined income.

So, where did we end up? Roseville, California.

This city is the one my former coworker chose to settle down in with his wife (also a nurse) and kids. It often ranks as one of the best to raise a family because of its great schools and low crime rate.

We spent several months trying to find a city and a hospital that would put us in a better financial position than we were in NYC. Ultimately, we settled in Sacramento, where the median home price is $487,136 (it was $303,122 when we first moved here).

Through all of this back and forth we also spent months applying to one of the highest-paying hospital in Northern California—Kaiser Permanente. We spent months applying to this hospital before we got a job offer.

Three months and over 300 applications after making our move, Monica had secured a job with them.

Eight months and four to five applications later, while working at Sutter Roseville, I got a job offer there too.

Ever since, I’ve built what some may consider an unhealthy obsession with extracting statistics and data from nurse union contracts and online information to help other nurses make better financial decisions with fewer hiccups and mistakes along the way.

In 2021, we created a YouTube channel to educate nurses and began creating spreadsheets to back up my research. One of the first spreadsheets that made sense was one that allowed me, and others, to compare wages across all of the high-paying hospitals in Northern California.

As I was making the spreadsheet, I saw that it also made no sense to only include base hourly rates. But there was still something missing. Nurses across the US often work overtime—especially those in California, because of the favorable laws here that allow us to accrue overtime between the 8th and 12th hour of work in one day, or double time between the 12th and 16th hour.

As I was making the spreadsheet, I saw that it also made no sense to only include base hourly rates in the sheet.

But there was still something missing. Nurses across the US often work overtime—especially those in California, because of the favorable laws here that allow us to accrue overtime between the 8th and 12th hour of work in one day, or double time between the 12th and 16th hour.

So, the next iteration came to existence.

Now nurses who use this spreadsheet can see their wages with overtime and double time earnings added to the equation.

It took me months to implement this new feature, but I had my sights in something bigger.

If you’ve ever entered your salary on a paycheck calculator website, you probably didn’t know this but some of those websites are using outdated tax brackets.

With this in mind, I figured I could implement a tax sheet into the salary spreadsheet with updated tax brackets for 2024.

This update really took a toll on me.

I spent months working on it and even had to hired a spreadsheet expert. But let me run you through a scenario to show you how much nurses in Northern California’s highest-paying hospitals are earning:

Let’s say you’re a nurse with five years of experience working nights. You could potentially be grossing $204,896 to $223,921.78 per year in the top 5 highest-paying hospitals. If you hop over to the next tab in the spreadsheet,

you’ll be lead to a sheet that allows you to fine-tune your net income

So, if you’re the nurse from the previous scenario and your filing status is “Single,” you would net between $5,021.82 at Kaiser Permanente and $5,459.49 at El Camino Hospital on a biweekly basis.

But you can change all of the parameters. If you’re interested in seeing the net monthly, a Kaiser nurse would bring in $10,880.63, and an El Camino nurse would bring in $11,828.89.

And that’s just a glimpse of what you can do with the spreadsheet. If you want to purchase the full version, you can find it on our website.

Or, you can join our program/community and we include it as a bonus!

If you appreciate the transparency in this newsletter, we share more of this with our members in the Nurses to Riches accelerator program.

The program was created for nurses who want to move to California and earn $200,000 per year while working fewer than 40 hours per week (you can actually do it while working 32 hours per week if you follow our plan).

It teaches you:

• Whether California is (or isn’t) for you

• How to get licensed in California

• How to plan before you move

• How to find a hospital that makes sense for you

• How to analyze and determine your wage on a hospital-by-hospital basis by using our Top California Hospitals Spreadsheet

• How to determine which city makes the most sense to live in by using our Ultimate Salaries Spreadsheet with Cost of Living data

• How to work smarter, not harder so you can reduce your working hours and make more money

• How to get rid of your debt (we paid off $128k in less than 1 year)

• How to begin to invest your money

If this sounds good to you, you can visit our website and use coupon code “LOYAL5” to get an additional 5% off the already heavily discounted 50% off until we increase our prices as a thank you for being a subscriber of our newsletter.