ICU Nursing Salary, Job Description, Duties

Researching the critical care nursing field? Overview of average critical care nursing salaries and ICU nursing job description. ICU and CCU nurses are highly skilled and have the specific experience to rapidly assess a patient's condition and intervene appropriately.

Just like staff ICU nurses, Critical Care travel nurses, continuously monitor patients who are generally of unstable patient status. For this reason, Critical Care (CC) nurses are normally only responsible for the care of one or two hospitalized patients at any time. A frequent additional role you may have as a CC nurse is providing emotional support to your gravely ill patients and their anxious family members. This nursing specialty is an intense yet extremely rewarding RN specialty that requires astute awareness of patient status changes, along with a rapid response capacity. Not all ICU patients survive (as many are advanced-age adults, due to their higher likelihood of being immunocompromised), so the ability to self-manage your emotional response to progressively-deteriorating health status is vital.

Besides possessing the training and skills to perform critical care nursing care, CC/ICU travel nurses need to be able to learn and adapt extremely quickly to the hospitals and ICU environments in which they work so that they are able to effectively function in the care of their patients – so flexibility is a personality trait necessary in CC/ICU travel nurses, in order to be able to adapt to different hospital (or other) care settings.

The average ICU nurse salary ranges from $54,000–100,000 per year depending on years of critical care nursing experience, according to Indeed as of 2024 the average ICU RN made a base salary of approximately $114,000 annually. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, $41.38 was the median hourly rate (and $86,070 the median annual salary) for all RNs across the US as of 2023.

Similar to all other nursing positions, ICU nurse pay rate varies by location; Salary.com notes that critical care nurse salaries in certain locales (such as New York City and California's large cities) tend to be higher than most other areas. Travel nurses certified and experienced in Critical Care/ICU nursing who work in hospital ICU settings often receive even higher pay than permanently-employed ICU nurses, as well as a wide array of benefits such as mileage reimbursement that are not available to permanent nursing staff. The most common certification pursued by ICU nurses – and the one most required by employers of travel ICU nurses – is the CCRN certification provided by the American Association of Critical Care Nurses (AACCN), which offers 15 sub-certification options applicable to adult, pediatric, and neonatal patients.

Healthcare employers typically want traveling ICU nurses to have at least one- to two-years of clinical experience. You can become a practicing critical care/ICU nurse once you are certified as an RN, which generally takes between 2-5 years. First of all – to achieve RN certification – you will need to complete a two-year Associate of Science in Nursing (ASN) degree, a two year Associate Degree in Nursing (ADN), or a four-year Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) degree. BSN degrees are preferred by some hospitals and other healthcare employers. Following degree receipt, you must pass the NCLEX-RN exam administered by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN). After acquiring two years of experience as a practicing RN, you can pursue a specialization as a Critical Care/ICU nurse by acquiring the AACN’s CCRN credential (as well as additional sub-specialty certifications), as recently described in NurseJournal.

The daily duties of Critical Care nurses depend on the skill-set required in the unit of practice. You may be required to care for at-risk coronary patients in an ICU, or for Neuro-ICU patients recovering from spinal or brain surgery. If you are a PICU RN, you may care for children in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, whereas NICU nurses look after premature newborns in the a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit A critical care/ICU nurse is generally responsible for managing systems critical to life-support, including ventilation, heart-monitoring, and administration of precisely-delivered medications. Since critical care nursing involves life or death situations, it is also important for the critical care travel nurse to have outstanding empathy and communication skills. Whatever the exact role, it normally requires a high degree of precision combined with continuous patient focus and attentiveness while on duty.

Critical Care/ICU nursing is generally considered a high-intensity nursing specialty. While one or two hospitalized patients is far less than the typical patient load for nurses in most medical-surgical units, more hands-on patient care may actually be required over the course of a normal work-day. This is especially applicable to the care of pediatric and newborn patients in PICUs and NICUs, since the overall sudden mortality risk for these patients is often even higher than for adults. Critical care nurses are also utilized in outpatient surgery centers (and especially those specializing in joint replacements), so your critical care/ICU travel nurse placement may no longer be limited to only a hospital setting.

In addition to the AACN’s online courses and articles in its peer-reviewed journal (Critical Care Nurse), other Critical Care nursing journals focused on publishing critical care nursing research findings include the International Journal of Nursing Critical Care, Intensive and Critical Care Nursing, Nursing in Critical Care, and Critical Care Nursing Quarterly. The AACN is the primary critical nurse association in the US (with over 130,000 members). However, there are also other online sources of information aimed at critical care/ICU nurses available, such as Stanford’s LearnPICU website (that contains common ICU medication and equipment reference materials and critical care training videos) and the Neurocritical Care Society’s online podcast series.