The Travel Offer and the Contract: Guaranteed Hours, Cancellation, and What You Are Signing

By CircleRN Team | Published 2026-09-06 | 13 min read

What a travel offer actually commits you to and what the contract decides: the two-document structure, the rate split in writing, how guaranteed hours are really satisfied, the stipend clause that can change your overtime, cancellation symmetry, floating, repayment, and why there is no federal non-compete ban.

An offer is a conversation. A contract is a document. The gap between them is where most of the money in a travel assignment is decided, and it is the part of the process travelers are least prepared for, because almost none of it is governed by a rule you can look up. Your license has a board behind it. Your credentialing file has federal regulations behind it. Your contract has whatever the agency wrote and you signed.

This guide covers what the offer actually commits you to, the terms that have to be in writing before you sign, how guaranteed hours really work, the stipend clause that can quietly change your overtime, and what the law does and does not say about cancellation, floating, and non-competes. Four things the field states backwards:

• Non-competes were never banned. The 2024 federal rule never took effect and was removed from the Code of Federal Regulations in February 2026.
• No federal law requires an employer to guarantee you hours. The regulation that mentions show-up pay describes it as something that exists "under some employment agreements."
• A stipend that shrinks when you miss a shift is not a neutral clause. It is the exact fact pattern that turned per diems into wages in the leading case.
• In several states the pay range is not the recruiter's to withhold. It has to be in the posting, including when a staffing agency does the recruiting.

Getting started in travel healthcare: 1. The roadmap · 2. Choosing an agency · 3. Your submission packet · 4. Credentialing · 5. The offer and the contract · 6. Your first assignment · 7. Extending or moving on

What is the difference between an offer and a contract?

An offer usually arrives by phone. A facility has reviewed your submission packet, sometimes after a brief interview, and tells your recruiter it wants you. Your recruiter calls with a start date, a weekly number, and a request for an answer quickly. Nothing at that point is binding on anyone.

What binds you is paperwork, and in travel healthcare it is almost always two separate documents rather than one:

• An employment agreement with the agency. Signed once, when you onboard, and it governs every assignment you take with that agency afterward. This is where repayment obligations, non-solicitation clauses, arbitration provisions, and the general cancellation framework live.
• An assignment confirmation for this specific contract. Signed each time. Facility, unit, shift, dates, rates, guaranteed hours.

Travelers read the confirmation carefully because it has the pay on it, and skim the employment agreement once, months earlier, when they were not attached to any particular job. The expensive clauses are disproportionately in the document nobody re-reads. Before your first assignment, read the employment agreement again with a real contract in front of you. It will read differently.

This two-document structure is industry practice, not a legal requirement, and it varies. Some agencies fold everything into one per-assignment contract. Ask which structure yours uses and ask for both documents together.

What has to be in writing before you sign?

Nothing, as a matter of federal law. There is no federal statute requiring a staffing agency to put any particular term of a healthcare assignment in writing. That is precisely why the list matters: the only protection you have is what the document says.

The specifics that should never be left vague, and never be accepted as "to be determined," are covered in 10 travel nurse contract red flags. What that guide does not go into, and what matters most for a first contract, is how the pay is written down. Insist that the contract state separately:

• The taxable hourly base rate. A single blended weekly number is not a rate.
• The weekly housing stipend and the weekly meals and incidentals stipend, as separate lines.
• The overtime rate and how it is calculated, which for travelers is computed on the taxable base rather than on the blended total. The mechanics, including the 8 and 80 alternative, are in how travel nurse overtime pay works.
• Call, callback, holiday, and shift differential rates, each as its own number.
• Guaranteed hours, and the period they are measured over. See below. This is the single most misread line in a travel contract.
• What is reimbursed and whether any of it is repayable if you do not complete the assignment.

If a recruiter will not put the split in writing, you cannot compare the offer to any other offer, and you cannot check it against your pay package math. That refusal is information about the agency, and it belongs to the earlier conversation about choosing one.

What are guaranteed hours, and what happens if you are called off?

A guarantee of 36 hours a week means the agency pays you for 36 hours whether or not the facility uses you for 36 hours. Hospitals cancel shifts when census drops, and without a guarantee that risk is entirely yours.

No federal law requires this. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires payment for hours worked, and says nothing about hours promised. The one federal regulation that addresses the subject, 29 CFR 778.220, describes minimum-hours pay as an arrangement that exists "under some employment agreements" when an employee reports to work "and is not provided with the expected amount of work." The federal government treats a guarantee as a contract term, because that is all it is.

State scheduling laws do not fill the gap either. The predictive-scheduling statutes that exist target retail, hospitality, and food service. Oregon's, the broadest statewide example, reaches those industries at employers with 500 or more employees worldwide and does not cover healthcare staffing. No state gives a traveler a right to advance notice of a cancelled shift.

So read how the guarantee is satisfied, not just its number. Three clauses do most of the damage:

• Averaging. A guarantee measured across the whole 13 weeks rather than weekly lets the facility cancel heavily in a slow week and make it up later. Your rent is due weekly. Ask whether the guarantee is weekly or averaged over the contract.
• Allowed call-offs. Many contracts permit the facility a set number of unpaid cancellations per assignment before the guarantee applies at all. That number should be in the document, not in a recruiter's reassurance.
• Make-up shifts. A clause letting the facility satisfy the guarantee by offering you a different shift, sometimes a different unit or a different day, converts a pay protection into a scheduling obligation. Check whether declining a make-up shift forfeits the guarantee.

One technical note in your favor. Under 778.220, the portion of guaranteed-hours pay that exceeds hours actually worked is "not made for hours worked" and may be excluded from the regular rate. Being paid for a cancelled shift therefore does not usually raise or lower your overtime rate.

Can a missed shift reduce your stipend?

Many contracts say it can, prorating the housing and meals stipends against shifts worked. This is the most consequential clause in a travel contract, for two reasons.

The first is obvious once stated: your housing cost does not fall because the hospital cancelled you. Rent is the same in a 24-hour week as in a 36-hour week. A prorated stipend is a pay cut applied to the part of your pay that was supposed to cover a fixed expense.

The second is legal, and it runs the other way. 29 CFR 778.217(a) excludes expense reimbursements from your regular rate only "if the amount of the reimbursement reasonably approximates the expense incurred," and 778.217(c)(1) provides that where a reimbursement is "disproportionately large, the excess amount will be included in the regular rate." A payment that tracks hours worked rather than expenses incurred starts to look like wages.

That is exactly what the Ninth Circuit held in Clarke v. AMN Services, LLC, 987 F.3d 848 (2021), a case brought by traveling clinicians. The court found the per diem functioned as compensation for work rather than reimbursement for expenses, and had to be included in the regular rate for overtime. Among the facts it relied on: the agency reduced per diem for shifts not worked regardless of the reason, operated a "banking hours" system letting extra hours one week prevent a reduction the next, and paid the same per diem to local clinicians who were not traveling at all.

The Supreme Court declined to review the decision in December 2021, so it stands. The practical consequence for you is that a stipend which shrinks with missed shifts may mean your overtime has been calculated on too low a regular rate. Two honest limits. Clarke binds the Ninth Circuit, which covers Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington; elsewhere it is persuasive rather than controlling. And the analysis is fact-specific, so a proration clause is not automatically unlawful. Ask how the stipend is treated when a shift is cancelled, get the answer in writing, and keep your paystubs. The stipend rules themselves are in what the IRS actually says about housing stipends.

What does a fair cancellation clause look like?

Fair means symmetrical. The same notice period and the same consequences apply to both sides. That is a standard worth holding to precisely because no law imposes one. The federal WARN Act governs mass layoffs at large worksites and has nothing to say about one traveler losing one assignment.

Read for four things. How much notice must the facility give, and how much must you give. Whether anything is owed to you if the facility cancels after you have relocated but before you start. Whether reimbursements already paid become repayable on a cancellation that is not your fault. And whether the agency commits to finding you another assignment, or merely says it will try.

A contract in which the facility may cancel at any time for any reason while you owe four weeks notice is not a negotiation you lost. It is a term you can ask to change, and the answer tells you what kind of agency you signed with.

What does the contract say about floating?

Floating is being reassigned to a unit other than the one you were hired for. Travelers float more than staff, because the traveler is often the flexible headcount the facility bought.

No regulator governs the scope of a float clause. Scope of practice is state law and sits separately: it defines what you may legally do, not where you may be sent. So the contract is the whole of it, and the questions are whether floating is limited to comparable units, whether you may decline a float you are not competent for, and what happens if you do.

The trap is the interaction with guaranteed hours. If declining an unsafe float counts as a call-off against your guarantee, then a safety decision has been converted into a self-inflicted pay cut. Ask specifically how a declined float is recorded.

What happens if you do not finish the contract?

Expect the employment agreement, not the confirmation, to make some things repayable: travel reimbursement, licensure and certification costs the agency fronted, a sign-on bonus, and sometimes a portion of housing if the agency provided it. Completion bonuses are structured to be forfeited rather than repaid, which is a different and less painful mechanism.

Two things determine what this costs you in practice, and both are state law rather than federal. Whether the clause is enforceable at all, and whether the agency may simply deduct the amount from your final paycheck, which state wage-deduction rules govern and which varies considerably. Ask, before signing, exactly which amounts become repayable, under what circumstances, and whether the agency will withhold them from final pay. Get the list in writing while you are still an attractive candidate.

Are non-compete clauses in travel contracts enforceable?

This is the question the field currently answers wrongly, because a widely reported 2024 federal rule never actually took effect.

The Federal Trade Commission issued a rule in 2024 that would have banned most non-competes nationwide. It was set aside by a federal court before its effective date. On September 5, 2025 the Commission voted to dismiss its appeals in Ryan, LLC v. FTC, No. 24-10951 (5th Cir.) and Properties of the Villages v. FTC, No. 24-13102 (11th Cir.) and to accede to the vacatur. A Federal Register notice published February 12, 2026 then removed the Non-Compete Rule from the Code of Federal Regulations to conform it to those decisions. There is no federal ban. Absent new rulemaking or an act of Congress, there will not be one.

Non-competes are therefore governed entirely by state law, which differs enormously. A few states including California, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Minnesota void them broadly; many others enforce them only above a wage threshold or only where narrowly drawn.

For travelers, though, the clause that actually bites is usually not a non-compete. It is a non-solicitation or conversion clause: for some period after the assignment, typically a year, you may not take a staff position at that facility unless the facility pays the agency a conversion fee. This rarely stops you from working. It can quietly cost you a permanent job you wanted, because the facility declines to pay the fee. If you can imagine yourself staying somewhere, read that clause before you sign, and ask what the fee is and whether it declines over time.

Does the agency have to tell you the pay range up front?

In some states, yes, and this is the rare piece of leverage that comes from a statute rather than from negotiation.

Washington's RCW 49.58.110 requires an employer with 15 or more employees to disclose in each posting "the wage scale or salary range" along with "a general description of all of the benefits and other compensation to be offered to the hired applicant." The definition of a posting reaches recruitment "done directly by an employer or indirectly through a third party," language that plainly contemplates staffing agencies. California, Colorado, and New York have comparable requirements, each with its own threshold and details. California's Labor Code section 432.3 works the same way and closes the same loophole from the other direction: where a third party posts the job, the employer must give that party the pay scale.

This does not mean a recruiter must reveal the bill rate or the agency's margin. It means that for an assignment in a covered state, a range and a benefits description should already be public before the first conversation about numbers. Read the posting before you take the call. Where the law does not apply, the range is whatever you can get put in writing, which returns you to working with more than one agency so you have something to compare against.

Which parts of a travel contract are law, and which are just terms?

Keeping this straight is most of what protects you, because a recruiter saying "that is standard" is describing a market, not a rule.

Bottom Line

A travel contract is mostly private ordering. The federal rules that do reach it are narrow and, where they exist, they tend to run in your favor: overtime is owed on hours over 40, a reimbursement that stops looking like a reimbursement belongs in the regular rate, and in a growing number of states the pay range has to be published before anyone negotiates. Everything else, the guarantee, the notice period, the float clause, the repayment schedule, is a term someone wrote and you can ask to change.

Before you sign, get the rate split in writing, find out whether the guarantee is weekly or averaged, ask what happens to your stipend when a shift is cancelled, and read the employment agreement you signed months ago rather than only the confirmation in front of you. Then start credentialing the same week, because that clock is not yours. CircleRN keeps the parts that are hardest to research in one place: verified pay data, facility and agency reviews, and furnished housing from verified hosts.

Ready to look? Browse open travel assignments from facilities hiring travelers now.

Sources

Primary and authoritative sources referenced in this guide:

• 29 CFR 778.217, Reimbursement for expenses (excluded from the regular rate only where it reasonably approximates the expense; a disproportionately large excess is included)
• 29 CFR 778.220, Show-up or reporting pay (minimum-hours arrangements exist "under some employment agreements"; the excess over hours worked may be excluded from the regular rate)
• Clarke v. AMN Services, LLC, 987 F.3d 848 (9th Cir. 2021) (per diem reduced for shifts not worked functioned as compensation and belonged in the regular rate)
• 29 U.S.C. 207, Maximum hours (overtime at one and one-half times the regular rate after 40 hours)
• RCW 49.58.110, Washington job posting disclosure (wage scale or salary range plus a general description of benefits, reaching recruitment done indirectly through a third party)
• Federal Trade Commission, Noncompete (the September 5, 2025 dismissal of the appeals and accession to vacatur, and the February 12, 2026 Federal Register notice removing the rule from the CFR)

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