Travel Nurse Salary in South Carolina 2026,
$82,360 Median | BLS Data by City

BLS publishes no separate travel nurse wage — travel nursing is a staffing arrangement inside SOC 29-1141, Registered Nurses. The published South Carolina figure for that occupation is $82,360 a year, or $39.60 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $66,860 at the 10th percentile to $106,520 at the 90th, and it is 15.6% below the national median of $97,550. Agency contract rates and stipends are not separated out in this data.

Charleston-North Charleston at $92,800, then Sumter $86,260, Spartanburg $82,360, Columbia $81,920 and Greenville-Anderson-Greer $81,400. Charleston leading by about 14% over Greenville reflects the coastal market's academic and tertiary hospital capacity, and it is also where seasonal population swings generate the most contract demand.

Yes, and for travel nursing that is the central fact. South Carolina is a Nurse Licensure Compact state, so a registered nurse whose primary residence is here can hold a multistate licence valid across every other compact state without applying separately in each — and a nurse resident in another compact state can take a South Carolina assignment on their own multistate licence. Licensure itself runs through the South Carolina Board of Nursing on an accredited programme and the NCLEX-RN, with the multistate privilege depending on the compact's uniform requirements.

Because travel nursing is not an occupation in the survey's terms — it is a way of being employed within the registered nurse occupation. OEWS classifies by the work performed, and a travel nurse on a critical-care contract is doing critical-care nursing. The consequence for this page is important: the $82,360 median describes South Carolina registered nursing generally, and the agency rates, housing stipends and completion bonuses that define a travel contract's economics are structured outside it.

Because the contract rate is not the state wage. South Carolina's RN median of $82,360 sits 15.6% below the national figure precisely because local staff pay is low — and that gap is what creates the vacancies agencies are engaged to fill. Contract compensation is built differently, combining an hourly rate with housing and per-diem components. What the state figure genuinely tells a traveller is where the underlying market sits, which is useful context for judging whether an offered package is competitive.

As a floor, not a forecast. The $82,360 South Carolina median and the $66,860-to-$106,520 band describe what the state's hospitals pay their own staff nurses, and that is the baseline a travel contract is priced against — a below-national baseline is the reason contracts exist. The metro figures are equally useful in that sense: Charleston-North Charleston at $92,800 against Greenville-Anderson-Greer at $81,400 tells you which markets already pay well and which are more likely to be filling gaps with agency staff.

Two, and both matter. First, SOC 29-1141 covers all registered nurses, so this is a staff-nursing median rather than a travel figure, and BLS isolates nothing about agency arrangements. Second, travel compensation packages combine taxable hourly rates with housing and per-diem components whose treatment depends on maintaining a genuine tax home — an individual determination that no wage table can settle. Comparing a contract's blended weekly package with an annual staff median is not a like-for-like comparison.

Specialty and acuity, then the compact. Critical care, emergency, theatre and labour and delivery are the specialties agencies recruit hardest for and are most of the distance from the $82,360 median to the $97,230 seventy-fifth percentile. Charge responsibility and sustained high-acuity practice reach the $106,520 top decile. Underneath all of it, South Carolina's Nurse Licensure Compact membership is what makes movement possible at all — without a multistate licence, the arbitrage between a low-paying state and a well-paid contract cannot be executed.