Emergency Room Nurse Salary in Texas 2026,
$95,970 Median | BLS Data by City

BLS publishes no emergency-nursing wage. The row that covers the work is Registered Nurses, SOC 29-1141, and it publishes a Texas median of $95,970 a year, or $46.14 an hour, per OEWS May 2025 — 1.6% below the national median of $97,550, with a band from $67,120 at the 10th percentile to $127,950 at the 90th. Emergency nurses working differential-heavy schedules generally sit above the median, but the data does not separate them.

In practice, generally yes, but not because of the base rate. Emergency departments operate continuously, so the specialty carries night, weekend, holiday and on-call differentials and more overtime than most nursing roles, and certified emergency nurses are eligible for certification differentials at many Texas hospitals. Since Texas levies no state income tax, those premium hours are unusually valuable here. BLS does not publish the split, so this is a structural observation rather than a figure.

No. The Texas Board of Nursing issues one registered nurse licence and no emergency-specific credential, and because Texas is a Nurse Licensure Compact state, an RN holding a multistate licence from another compact state may practise here without a Texas application. What emergency departments require on top is private and institutional: CEN or TCRN certification from the Board of Certification for Emergency Nursing, plus ACLS, PALS, TNCC and departmental competencies.

Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington at $101,420, then Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands $99,830, Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos $97,890, San Antonio-New Braunfels $94,370 and Killeen-Temple $93,440. The two largest metros lead, and both have dense hospital markets with competing systems. The spread across the state is smaller than the gap between a day-shift and a night-shift package at the same hospital.

Three levers, and none of them is time alone. Shift pattern is the first — nights, weekends and holidays carry differentials, and in a no-income-tax state those hours are unusually efficient. Certification is the second: CEN and TCRN are what many Texas hospitals pay a differential for and what qualifies a nurse for trauma and charge roles. The third is contract and travel work, which is a persistent feature of Texas emergency staffing and sits at the top of this band around the $127,950 ninetieth percentile.

It means the number on this page is an average of a profession, not a measurement of a specialty, and it should be used accordingly. SOC 29-1141 covers all 271,380 registered nurses in Texas across every setting and acuity level — a school nurse and a trauma centre resuscitation nurse appear on the same row. That is why the band is so wide, from $67,120 to $127,950. For an emergency nurse the practical approach is to treat the median as a floor reference rather than a target, and to negotiate on the specific components the specialty actually earns: base rate for the unit, night and weekend differentials, certification pay, charge pay, and overtime availability. Any source claiming a precise national or state 'ER nurse salary' from BLS data is constructing it, because the underlying row does not exist.

Because population growth has outrun capacity for a sustained period. Texas's metros have been among the fastest growing in the country, hospital systems have expanded, and emergency department volumes have risen faster than the pipeline of experienced emergency nurses. Add a large uninsured population that uses emergency departments as a first point of access, and urban departments in Texas run chronic boarding and staffing pressure. The result is that travel and contract assignments are not a temporary post-pandemic feature here but a structural part of how emergency departments are staffed — and they are a large part of what the $127,950 ninetieth percentile on this row consists of. For an individual nurse that means genuine optionality, and for a hospital it means persistent competition for the same people.

Net, and with the differentials included. Texas's RN median of $95,970 sits 1.6% below the national figure, which looks unremarkable — until the absence of a state income tax is applied. In a state taxing income at 6% or more, a nominally higher gross can produce a lower net, and the gap widens with overtime because premium hours are taxed at the margin elsewhere and not at all by Texas. Against that, Texas funds itself through property and sales taxes, and property taxes in Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington and Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands are high, so a nurse buying a large house recovers less of the advantage than one renting. The honest comparison is annual net income minus housing cost, with a realistic overtime assumption written down before either offer is accepted.