Nonsalary benefits are any form of compensation outside of a nurse’s regular wages or salary. Wellness stipends, childcare support, education assistance, commuter reimbursements, and flexible scheduling all fall under this category. They’re also your strongest recruitment and retention lever — nurses typically leave for reasons a pay bump alone rarely fixes.
What are nonsalary benefits (and what aren’t they)?
Nonsalary benefits include anything that doesn’t fall into the category of salary or wages. They make up the rest of a company’s total compensation package, including employee benefits, perks, and bonuses.
What’s not included in nonsalary benefits?
The following are NOT nonsalary benefits:
- Sign-on bonuses
- Spot awards
- Shift differentials
- Base pay increases
The differentiator is that nonsalary benefits are recurring programs, not one-time payments. All of the above have a place in a competitive total comp package, but they don’t build the ongoing support structure that drives long-term retention.
A nurse who receives a $5,000 sign-on bonus is still going to burn out without childcare support or a manageable schedule. Nonsalary benefits are what remain after the bonus is spent.
Why are nonsalary benefits important for nurses?
A registered nurse can make a great living. The BLS median annual wage for RNs was $93,600 in 2024, and that’s just the floor. Certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs) earn a mean salary of $223,210, more than double the RN median.
The focus goes far beyond that because, despite such high earning potential, the industry has both a hiring and a retention problem.
Two reasons for this:
- Patient care is extremely strenuous. Between working overtime and extra shifts, spending long hours in hospitals, nursing homes, and doctors’ offices, and personal health and safety risks, nurses struggle to find time to decompress and care for themselves.
- Student debt and commuting costs pile on. Many nurses are tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and spend a lot of time (and money) on their daily commute.
Come to realize those two truths, and it becomes clear that supporting work-life balance and well-being for your RNs is, in many ways, more important than another pay raise.
Why you should care: Replacing a single bedside RN runs $61,110 on average, and hospitals collectively spent $1.7 billion on travel nurses in 2024 just to cover structural gaps. At that rate, if your hospital loses 20 RNs this year, that’s $1.2 million in replacement costs.
And it’s not like replacing them is easy. The 2026 NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report estimates the total national registered nurse shortage at 158,600 positions. By 2030, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) projects that figure will reach over 250,000.
Nonsalary benefits to consider for your healthcare professionals
Nursing professionals have greater access to comprehensive benefits packages than most. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2025 Employee Benefits Survey, they outpace the overall U.S. workforce by 12 to 25 percentage points across all six core benefits categories:
- Retirement (92% access vs. 75%)
- Medical care (89% vs. 74%)
- Life insurance (87% vs. 62%)
- Paid sick leave (95% vs. 82%)
- Paid vacation (89% vs. 77%)
- Paid holidays (92% vs. 80%)
And yet hiring and retention are still major problems in the nursing space, which is why the real differentiation opportunity is in the flexible, lifestyle-oriented benefits. And that’s precisely what we’re going to cover below.
1. Mental health services and support
Most importantly, employers need to prioritize their nurses’ mental health. AMN Healthcare’s 2025 Survey of Registered Nurses found that out of 12,000+ respondents, 58% report feeling burned out most days and almost two-thirds say that fatigue has impacted their health.
High levels of burnout and turnover are common in the healthcare industry. Some of that is due to the nature of the field. But a lack of support from employers and hospitals makes the problem worse.
Supporting your nurses’ mental health isn’t a costly endeavor, either. There are plenty of inexpensive ways to do so, including:
- Virtual therapy through companies like TalkSpace and BetterHelp
- Meditation and mental wellness apps
- A general employee stipend with multiple spending categories, including mental health
Improved productivity, higher job satisfaction, and better overall quality of care are all benefits that come from investing in mental health services and support for your nurses.
2. Employee health and wellness programs
Health and wellness goes further than mental health. Your nurses may be passionate about their job, but they also need to invest in themselves when it comes to self-care.
A health and wellness program could include:
- Gym reimbursement
- Employer-sponsored wellness activities
- Fitness classes like yoga, pilates, or guided workouts
- Personal training sessions
- Healthy meal delivery services
- Healthy meals at the doctor’s office or hospital
- Stress management and self-care classes
The most effective way to start a hospital wellness program is by offering a health and wellness stipend. That way, every RN and advanced-practice nurse can take advantage of the benefit regardless of their interests or health and wellness goals.
According to our 2026 benchmarking data, the median allocation for this category is $735 per employee per year. That’s plenty to cover gym memberships and fitness classes, mental health support, nutrition, spa and recovery services.
3. Flexibility where it counts
Nursing isn’t like software development or social media management. Nurses can’t just work from their laptops and get some extra work done at 9 p.m. if they need the day for other responsibilities.
The nursing field is quite literally the opposite of the 9-to-5 grind. As an employer, you can play into these needs by offering flexible schedules. Options include:
- Compressed workweek (working the same number of hours in fewer days per week)
- Staggered shifts and start times each day
- Job sharing and shift splitting with other nurses to make long shifts more manageable
- Splitting RN time between different care areas (e.g., ICU and emergency room) to limit the demands of one single job type
When Cleveland Clinic introduced these scheduling options, retention, satisfaction, and productivity increased significantly.
4. On-site childcare
Childcare benefits are crucial for full-time nurses, particularly single parents and dual-income households who frequently find themselves making a difficult choice between caring for patients and attending to their families.
And while hospital workers outpace the broader workforce — 35% of private hospital workers can access childcare benefits vs. just 13% of all private industry workers, per BLS — that still means two-thirds of hospital employees have no employer-provided childcare support at all.
On-site childcare solutions help bridge the gap and give your nurses time to focus on both aspects of their lives. Larger healthcare facilities are introducing on-site daycare, which eliminates potential problems associated with daycare closures due to staffing shortages and additional commuting time to drop kids off.
And if your space doesn’t have the infrastructure for on-site childcare? You can still offer family stipends that help your nurses pay for their own childcare.
5. Education and career development benefits
As of 2025, around 22% of hospital workers have access to employer-provided student loan repayment assistance. That’s more than 3x the 7% access rate across the civilian workforce overall.
But that doesn’t change the fact that the average student loan debt for an ADN and BSN are $23,302 and $28,917, respectively. Those numbers only increase with higher levels of education; for graduate nursing programs it’s $40,000 and $54,999.
Your nurses worked hard to become a part of your team. They deserve a little help — and some recognition — for their commitment to the nursing practice.
Here are some education and career development benefits you should consider providing:
- Tuition reimbursement
- Student loan repayment
- Continuing education stipends
- Professional certifications and/or licensure assistance
- Leadership conferences or workshops
- Mentorship programs
Tuition reimbursement and student loan repayments are also tax-deductible up to $5,250 per employee per year, so you get a tax break while helping your nurses become the best practitioners they can be.
6. Commuter benefits
Nurses can’t work from home. They work irregular shifts, and parking and fuel costs are real regardless of whether the commute is 22 minutes or 28 minutes or an hour. That makes employer-provided commuter support even more relevant.
Options include:
- Employer-paid or subsidized public transport tickets
- Free shuttle buses from nearby stations (for larger facilities)
- Gas stipends or reimbursement
- Rideshare benefits with companies like Uber and Lyft
- Parking fee reimbursements
8% of our users offer a stipend from this benefit category and out of those that do, the median allocation is $2,400 per employee per year. They’re also a nontaxable benefit up to $340 per month for qualified transit/vanpooling and another $340 per month for qualified parking, per IRS Publication 15-B.
7. Relocation stipends
Nurses and other healthcare professionals will have to relocate from time to time. Especially if you’re taking applicants fresh out of college, they might need to move across the country for their job.
Relocation stipends are a great way to make these transitions easier. You can choose to cover specific expenses like moving truck rentals or the cost of packing materials, or you can simply offer a lump sum your nurses can spend on the costs they deem most important.
For lower-level roles, you could do something as simple as pay for their flight or offer $1,000. For higher-level nurses like CRNAs, competitive recruitment packages regularly include relocation stipends alongside sign-on bonuses and loan repayment assistance.
8. Cross-training programs
As an employer, you can open the door to other career options for your nurses by allowing them to focus on a specialty. Cross-training allows nurses to become skilled in multiple areas, adding flexibility to their nursing careers.
When a nurse can take advantage of additional training inside your healthcare facilities, you’re far likelier to retain them long-term because they won’t have to consider how to get experience elsewhere. The more support you can give them, the more you’ll be a part of their healthy and fulfilling nursing career.
9. Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs)
Every benefit on this list is worth offering. The problem is that nine separate programs mean nine separate budgets, nine separate approval cycles, and nine line items Finance is going to scrutinize individually every quarter.
Consolidating benefits into one program is the answer to that problem, and a Lifestyle Spending Account is how you get there. It’s a flexible, employer-funded stipend that lets each employee spend on whatever categories matter most to them within guardrails you set.
Since each nurse can spend on exactly what’s relevant to them, it’s also a more effective way to offer nonsalary benefits overall. That’s why 64% of Compt customers now offer an all-inclusive LSA, and why they lead every benefit category in both participation (93%) and utilization (89%).
One Compt customer — a not-for-profit health system with 15,000 employees — saw 94% stipend utilization within three months of launch, and 58% of employees surveyed said they were more likely to stay with the organization because of the benefit.
Which lifestyle and wellness benefits tend to attract registered nurses the most?
It depends. And that’s not a cop-out answer.
A 28-year-old ICU nurse with $40k in student loans and a 35-minute commute has completely different priorities than a 44-year-old pediatric nurse who lives nearby, has two kids in daycare, and is eyeing a certification program. The benefit that retains one will mean nothing to the other.
The table below breaks down the most popular nonsalary benefit types, what employees can use them for, and who they generally matter most to.
| Benefit type | What it covers | Best for … |
|---|---|---|
| Wellness stipend | Gym memberships, fitness classes, mental health support, nutrition, spa and recovery | Nurses experiencing burnout, physical strain, or emotional exhaustion (which is most of them) |
| Professional development | Continuing education, certifications, conferences, AI tools, coaching | Nurses pursuing specialty credentials or advancement who feel stuck in their current role |
| Childcare support | On-site daycare, family stipends, emergency care reimbursement | Full-time nurses with young children, particularly single parents and dual-income households |
| Cell and internet stipend | Phone bills, home internet, connectivity costs | Nurses managing telehealth responsibilities, on-call requirements, or remote documentation |
| Commuter stipend | Gas, parking, public transit, rideshare | Nurses commuting to facilities they can’t walk to; irrelevant for those who live nearby |
| Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA) | Any combination of the above categories, in a single flexible program | Hospital HR teams that want to offer multiple benefit categories without running multiple programs, and who want each nurse to self-select what actually matters to them. (Note: LSAs consistently outperform standalone stipends on both participation and utilization across Compt’s customer base.) |
The honest answer for a hospital system hiring at scale is that no single benefit wins across the board. A wellness stipend moves the needle broadly. Childcare support is decisive for a specific but significant subset. Professional development is the retention play for ambitious nurses who would otherwise leave for advancement elsewhere.
The most effective approach (and what our benchmarking data consistently shows) is a flexible program that lets nurses allocate funds toward whatever actually matters to their life. That’s our case for a Lifestyle Spending Account over a menu of standalone stipends.
How can a hospital set up a perk wallet that fits RNs’ odd shifts?
The short answer is to use a reimbursement-based stipend platform rather than a prepaid card or vendor marketplace. Nurses submit receipts for what they spend with no expiring monthly balances, locked vendor lists, or extra admin for HR when shift patterns change.
Here’s how to set it up:
- Define your categories.
Decide which stipend spending categories are eligible: wellness, commuter, childcare, professional development, or an all-inclusive LSA that covers everything. Broader is better for a shift-based workforce with varied needs.
- Set your funding cadence.
Our 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report shows that quarterly funding outperforms monthly for participation and utilization. It gives nurses enough runway to spend meaningfully across irregular schedules without the pressure of a monthly use-it-or-lose-it window.
- Connect to payroll.
Taxable reimbursements need to flow through payroll for proper reporting. A platform that handles this automatically (like Compt) removes the compliance burden from HR and Finance and runs your nonsalary benefits automatically.
- Let nurses submit on their own time.
The whole point of a reimbursement model is that it works around the nurse’s schedule, not a billing cycle. A nurse finishing a night shift at 7 a.m. can submit a receipt from her phone before she goes to sleep.
How HR teams use Compt to manage nonsalary benefits for nurses
Running nine separate benefit programs for a nursing workforce is a second job nobody signed up for. Compt replaces that with a single, flexible Lifestyle Spending Account that takes about 30 minutes a month to manage.
With Compt, offering personalized benefits is easy:
- Set your nonsalary benefits and enter your parameters.
- Allocate your budget and assign set amounts to goals or departments.
- Approve reimbursements through the Compt portal.
You get an easy way to roll out nonsalary benefits. Nurses get the recognition and support they need for a fulfilling career. Finance thanks you for consolidating spending and putting the program on autopilot.
Ready to see for yourself? Request a Compt demo today.
FAQs: Nonsalary benefits for registered nurses and advance-practice clinicians
Compt connects directly to your HRIS and payroll system, so your wellness stipends and other lifestyle benefits for nurses run through the same platform without additional vendor relationships. The goal is a single wallet where a nurse can submit a continuing education receipt the same way she’d submit a gym membership receipt — one approval workflow, one payroll sync. Look for those two integrations as the baseline requirement when evaluating any LSA provider or lifestyle benefits platform.
For travel-heavy RNs, what categories should go into a Lifestyle Spending Account so it actually gets used?
Compt’s 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report shows that for travel-heavy nurses, the highest-utilization categories are commuter, wellness, and professional development. Commuter covers gas, parking, and rideshare regardless of shift time; wellness covers the recovery and mental health support that irregular schedules demand; professional development covers certifications nurses can pursue between assignments. An all-inclusive LSA that lets each nurse allocate across all three consistently outperforms single-category stipends on both participation and utilization.
For midsize healthcare practices, how can we cap wellness spending without discouraging use of mental health or professional development benefits?
Compt gives you the flexibility to set either a program-level budget or category-level caps depending on how your program is structured, so you’re not forced to choose between cost control and employee flexibility. For practices that want to avoid micromanaging the split, an all-inclusive LSA with a single per-employee allocation lets nurses spend across wellness, mental health, professional development, and commuter without hitting arbitrary category limits. Compt’s 2026 Annual Benchmark Report shows that all-inclusive LSAs consistently drive higher participation and utilization than programs with rigid category restrictions.
How do healthcare employers structure gym reimbursement and pet insurance inside an LSA so payroll taxes and reimbursements don’t get messy?
Compt automatically identifies each reimbursement as taxable or nontaxable based on your program policy before it hits payroll, so HR never has to sort receipts by tax treatment manually. Gym reimbursements are generally nontaxable when structured as a qualified benefit; pet insurance is taxable and flows through payroll as imputed income. That classification happens automatically, so there’s nothing to reconcile at year-end.
A not-for-profit health system with 15,000 employees that runs its lifestyle benefit program through Compt saw 94% stipend utilization within three months of launch, and 58% of employees surveyed said they were more likely to stay with the organization because of the benefit.
