Side Hustles for Nurses: What Real Nurses Earn Outside the Hospital

Nursing schedules are hard on side hustles — 12-hour shifts, rotating days, nights — but they also leave whole days off. The nurses below used those days to build something, and each one shared real numbers.

Content: a cooking blog

NICU nurse Helena Faustin earns $105,000 a year at the hospital. Her blog, That Nurse Can Cook, brought in $117,000 in a single year — $71,333 of it from e-cookbooks — and let her cut from 13 shifts a month to eight.

Making and selling: Etsy

Building a company on one day a week

Nurse anesthetist Mike O'Dell works four 10-hour shifts a week and spends one day on Legit Kits, the quilting-kit company he started in 2020. It sold $1.25 million online in 2024.

The common thread: each picked something that fit around shifts rather than competing with them. Every story links to its original source.