Psych NP

[Dochopeful13]

Can someone tell me a realistic salary for psych np’s starting and mid career?

Thanks!

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[pamac]

It’s more straightforward to suggest a floor for wages as a PMHNP vs a ceiling. $125k-$150k for a new grad is a pretty typical. Mid career, you can edge up a bit. There are folks among the outliers that make quite a bit more. I’m my small cohort from school, most folks fanned out across the western US to start around $140k-$160k. My friend makes $230k gross, and doesn’t seem to have to work their guts out. I’m not very ambitious, so I work and go home, and make around $150 ish.

 

[Dochopeful13]

It’s more straightforward to suggest a floor for wages as a PMHNP vs a ceiling. $125k-$150k for a new grad is a pretty typical. Mid career, you can edge up a bit. There are folks among the outliers that make quite a bit more. I’m my small cohort from school, most folks fanned out across the western US to start around $140k-$160k. My friend makes $230k gross, and doesn’t seem to have to work their guts out. I’m not very ambitious, so I work and go home, and make around $150 ish.

Thank you. Do you think saturation will hit this field? Is it fairly hard to make 200k with only one regular job? I imagine to make 200k plus one would need to work a part time job as well?

 

[psychnurse]

I'm graduating in less than a month and have talked to a couple recruiters. I ask for $120k-150k range, and one told me that $150 is a real stretch. I live in a high-cost area and right now nobody is hiring due to Covid.

 

[pamac]

I'm graduating in less than a month and have talked to a couple recruiters. I ask for $120k-150k range, and one told me that $150 is a real stretch. I live in a high-cost area and right now nobody is hiring due to Covid.

You mentioned the elephant in the room, and yes, right now is going to be a really tough (or even impossible) time to find a job for literally everyone. And the market in the future is going to be in flux. The numbers I provided are pre COVID, and they were pretty accurate in a general sense outside of this crisis. I didn’t put them out there with the intention that someone about to enter the workforce would be able to look toward them as reference for a current job search. Nobody knows how this all plays out, and because of that, there really isn’t a lot that anyone can say about the new reality yet. So we wait.

The best advice I can give to someone looking to find work right now is take anything that you can get your hands on so you can get trained. If you do that, you’ll be ready to pounce on a new opportunity when things get better. So settle as much as you feel comfortable. You simply don’t have the options you would have had even a few months ago. And if you have something in hand, be ready in case you get let go. The fact is that at this point, there will be pain waiting for everyone even after things move towards a conclusion. It doesn’t matter your specialty. I know ED providers getting laid off. Mental health is doing OK, but things have slowed. Who knows if they will bounce back, or wane in the face of a recession where there is less service being sought out due to cost concerns.

Here are some pro tips: Recruiters aren’t going to be your best gauge of your earning potential anyway. This is true whether they are independent recruiters, or recruiters for the company you want to apply to. And if you are using a recruiter to find a job, you are already playing the game poorly. You want to network, and find jobs that way. That seems to yield the best jobs and the best results. You get a leg up on the folks who just throw an application into the mix.

 

[pamac]

Thank you. Do you think saturation will hit this field? Is it fairly hard to make 200k with only one regular job? I imagine to make 200k plus one would need to work a part time job as well?

Keep in mind that all of my input is based on what things were like pre COVID, but I think it’s still helpful to share.

$200k and above has been typically a hard threshold to reach without some significant effort. The PMHNP role is really best suited to easily providing an income between $120k and $160k. When you get into the upper $100’s and the low $200’s, you start to face some limitations due to things like time and billing. You can make above $200k, and I know NPs that do, but I don’t like to suggest that it’s easy, nor is it the norm. I’ve most frequently seen that kind of income in really high or really low cost of living areas (in high COL areas because the market demands it, and in low COL areas because access to psyche care is rare and therefore of more value. Another issue is that when working for an employer, if you end up making too much, you put yourself near what a physician would make, and you would price yourself out of a job where there bosses would ask themselves why they wouldn’t just hire a psychiatrist if you are almost as expensive as one. That starts to be a factor once you breach $200k.

As far as saturation right now... of course things are totally strange. A few months ago, I stated to see that a lot of people were looking at fleeing to the “good life” that they thought psyche providers lived. I’m really not too worried about a mass exodus to psyche over the long term because at the core of what you do as a PMHNP is deal with patients that traditionally are seen as difficult, and many of them certainly can be.

 

[psychnurse]

You mentioned the elephant in the room, and yes, right now is going to be a really tough (or even impossible) time to find a job for literally everyone. And the market in the future is going to be in flux. The numbers I provided are pre COVID, and they were pretty accurate in a general sense outside of this crisis. I didn’t put them out there with the intention that someone about to enter the workforce would be able to look toward them as reference for a current job search. Nobody knows how this all plays out, and because of that, there really isn’t a lot that anyone can say about the new reality yet. So we wait.

The best advice I can give to someone looking to find work right now is take anything that you can get your hands on so you can get trained. If you do that, you’ll be ready to pounce on a new opportunity when things get better. So settle as much as you feel comfortable. You simply don’t have the options you would have had even a few months ago. And if you have something in hand, be ready in case you get let go. The fact is that at this point, there will be pain waiting for everyone even after things move towards a conclusion. It doesn’t matter your specialty. I know ED providers getting laid off. Mental health is doing OK, but things have slowed. Who knows if they will bounce back, or wane in the face of a recession where there is less service being sought out due to cost concerns.

Here are some pro tips: Recruiters aren’t going to be your best gauge of your earning potential anyway. This is true whether they are independent recruiters, or recruiters for the company you want to apply to. And if you are using a recruiter to find a job, you are already playing the game poorly. You want to network, and find jobs that way. That seems to yield the best jobs and the best results. You get a leg up on the folks who just throw an application into the mix.

Appreciate the advice. Recruiters are only part of the search strategy and only using that because I'm a soon-to-be new grad. Networking has never done much for me nor is it my preferred method. I've worked in a field that's much more competitive than PMHNP for over a decade and always had jobs at top-tier firms without networking; and I've always had jobs in psych without ever networking. My personal view is that it's overrated.

 

[roastedcapers]

Am practicing psych NP in Oregon in private practice, worked in community mental health 2 yrs first, I agree with pa mac's post. Happy to talk to you OP if you are considering it, PM me and we can exchange contact info.

 

[pamac]

Appreciate the advice. Recruiters are only part of the search strategy and only using that because I'm a soon-to-be new grad. Networking has never done much for me nor is it my preferred method. I've worked in a field that's much more competitive than PMHNP for over a decade and always had jobs at top-tier firms without networking; and I've always had jobs in psych without ever networking. My personal view is that it's overrated.

To each their own. Recruiters probably have a place for certain candidates and conditions, especially in an environment where you don’t have those relationships built up... like with a planned cross country move, or a situation where someone is not as picky about what they are walking into. I don’t mean that as a slight. Some folks are good at being very adaptive to most work conditions, and worry less about overall fit. I’m more choosy about my surroundings so I want more control over the process rather than a broad impersonal search. For instance, what others see as minor issues are sticking points for me. Money is important to me (and I obtained it with my job contract), but so are things like commute, coworkers, benefits workflow, etc.

Obviously there are different kinds of recruiters (when you deal with a company that has in house recruiters, they are the ones that reach out to you and usher you through the hiring process....If those folks are telling you what wages to expect, it’s at the bidding of the company, and its in their interest to tamp down your expectation on the salary front). A candidate pitched by a middle man is often not going to appeal to a company as much as someone the company knows personally. If I’ve been vetted as “normal” and a good person to work with, there can be an edge there, especially right now when we are about to go into a buyers market for staff.

As desperate as things might end up being for at least the near term, I’d be utilizing whatever resources I could, because it’s different than what I dealt with over the last couple years during the hiring process. I’d be using recruiters AND networking, and applying to tons of places.

Based on what I’ve heard, I obtained some of the better new grad offers in my region, and found it helped immensely to be dialed into the PMHNP community. I applied cold to one place as an experiment to see if I’d get called back (I didn’t), but apart from that I never applied to any jobs.....I was always approached. All of my clinical sites gave me job offers. My facility I worked at as an RN tried to recruit me. A physician who knew me as a nurse asked me to come work for them. A physician that worked at a clinical site I rotated at sent my name to a relative of theirs. Friends approached me and asked me to come onboard with them. One faculty member at my program asked me if they could forward my name on to a local colleague for an open position (and they offered me a position). Another faculty member asked me if I wanted to come onboard with their practice. I was eating with a group of physicians as a student, and at the end of the meal, one of the psychiatrists took me aside and invited me to come work at their practice. A drug rep sent my name on to a place they knew was hiring. I’ve had people/recruiters check back with me after I took my job and see if I had changed my mind. Part of all that is/was the market at the time and reflected the need for providers that existed.

I’m just a normal person who people know very quickly that they would feel comfortable working with, so I don’t claim to have an epic magnetic personality. And another part of all that interest toward me is simply networking and being dialed in. Some of the best places to work don’t advertise, and instead keep their ears open and wait for the right person to be sent their way. Other places are on the cusp of deciding if they want to go ahead and take on a new provider. In those situations there isn’t anything compelling them to expand except for finding a good fit, because there isn’t necessarily a vacant hole to fill. They can bide their time and wait. Many recruiters won’t be privy to those kids of places.

As far as salary advice from recruiters, understand that recruiters often have a sweet spot they seek as far as wages so that the process simply ends up happening for the sake of both parties. It’s better for them to place you quickly at a lower salary than play princess and the pea while you scrutinize offers, and maybe even back out of them.

In this environment, use every resource you can, and that includes recruiters. I had a different experience because people were coming to me, which at the time heavily reflected the fact that PMHNPs were in large demand. I started at a high wage for my lower cost of living region. Things are slower now, but I’m still working. Nobody is asking me to reduce my wages like some providers are experiencing. I have friends who aren’t working and have very large house, car, and expense payments that aren’t being covered by their formerly rockin cash flow.... it’s dried up. It may not come back as more than a trickle. When they do get back to practice, they will have to backfill the money they didn’t make, and then prep their savings for a future downturn. Employers will embrace a new emphasis on using a microscope to examine the feasibility of hiring in this environment. Its starting to look like we are in a situation that will demand a rebuild rather than a rebound when the virus fears have quelled. The market might might see practices deciding to get by without hiring, providers deciding not to retire yet because their nest egg was subject to the new stock market lows, and patients tightening the belt and not coming in to get help as quickly as they otherwise would. You’ll see competition from retirees coming back and taking part time work and practices being fine with that.longer term, you’ll see RNs that are underemployed or overworked by cheap employers decide to go back to school and seek out safety in psyche because they see it as stable. NPs in other disciplines will retool to get away from a role that they were furloughed from. PAs who see themselves as excellent generalists will decide to flee to psyche as well due to perceptions that it is a safe haven with a steady stream of work.