Two of the travel nursing industry’s longest-running staffing brands have agreed to pay $7 million to end a class and collective action brought by thousands of travel nurses who said the companies shortchanged their overtime pay. Law360 reported the settlement Oct. 26, closing out a case that had been working through federal court in Colorado since December 2022.
The case, Egan et al. v. Fastaff, LLC et al., was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado on Dec. 30, 2022. The nurses who brought it accused Fastaff, LLC and U.S. Nursing Corporation — both part of the Ingenovis Health family of travel-nursing brands, headquartered in the Denver area — of leaving allowances like on-call pay, call-back pay, and housing stipends out of the “regular rate” used to calculate their overtime, which the suit says understated what they were legally owed under federal and state wage law.
A second allegation: contracts that changed after nurses had already moved
The lawsuit also raised a separate, older complaint about how Fastaff does business: that it offers travel nurses an attractive contract rate, only for the pay to be cut after the nurse has already relocated and started the assignment. A federal magistrate judge let fraud claims built on that theory move forward, rejecting the companies’ argument that the claims were barred because the nurses kept working after they say they learned of the alleged bait-and-switch.
If you’ve ever signed a travel contract with a stipend and on-call pay baked into the offer, you’ve probably never checked whether your agency counted those add-ons when it calculated your overtime rate — most nurses don’t, because the math happens inside a payroll system you can’t see. This case is the reminder to actually check: under federal wage law, non-discretionary stipends and incentive pay are supposed to factor into your “regular rate,” which is what your overtime gets calculated from. If your pay stub’s overtime rate looks suspiciously close to your straight hourly rate, that’s worth a second look.
What the settlement does, and doesn’t, say
Law360’s report confirms the dollar figure and the parties but doesn’t detail how the $7 million will be divided among the class, what claims period it covers, or whether a judge has formally approved it — a settlement like this one typically still needs a federal judge’s sign-off before payouts go out. Fastaff and U.S. Nursing have not, in the reporting available, admitted wrongdoing. This is a separate case from a smaller 2019 Fastaff settlement in California, which resolved a similar stipend-related overtime claim for $2.75 million.
Fastaff, founded in 1989, is one of the older brand names in travel nursing and is now part of the Ingenovis Health family of staffing brands, headquartered in the Denver area. U.S. Nursing Corporation, a separate brand under the same corporate umbrella, specializes in supplying replacement nursing staff during hospital strikes — the same kind of short-notice, premium-rate assignments where overtime and stipend math tends to get complicated fastest.
The settlement adds to a string of travel-nursing wage disputes working through federal court this year. The Nursing Directory covered a similar case in October, when a staffing agency agreed to pay $1.85 million to settle claims from 575 Filipino nurses who said “stay-or-pay” contracts penalized them for leaving a job early.