Nurse Pay Transparency Finally Done Right

You're a nurse. You show up for shifts that break you. You hold patients' lives in your hands. And somewhere in the back of your mind, there's a quiet question you never quite get to: Am I actually getting paid what I'm worth?

You don't know what the nurse next to you makes. You've never negotiated a raise, because you assume they'll say "it's just not in the budget" — or you don't know how to demonstrate your own value. The years blur together. All those moments, the memories, the good and the bad, all that growth, and there's no record of it anywhere except the exhaustion. And underneath all of it, debt that feels like it will never go away. So why even look?

If any one of those just hit, stay with me. Jemma was built exactly for this.

Why I Built Jemma

I'm Tom Polifka, the founder of Jemma and the husband of a nurse for over 18 years. I met my wife at a party hosted by nurses. Some of my closest friends are nurses, and my wife has been a nurse for over 25 years.

Over her career, she's done travel assignments, agency, PRN, and staff positions at hospitals from the East Coast to the West Coast. She's worked night shift, day shift, twelves, twenty-fours, and probably a few more I'm forgetting. I'm not a nurse myself, but I feel like I'm in a unique position to advocate for nurses like my wife and like you. We understand nurses. That's why we built Jemma.

What Jemma Is

At its core, Jemma is 100% anonymous nurse salary submissions. Everything else is built on that foundation.

I wanted something where nurses could see what other nurses actually make, not numbers scraped from job postings, but real pay reported by real nurses, based on their years of experience, their certifications, and the metropolitan area where they work. All of those things shape what a nurse earns, and I wanted to make that visible.

Celebrating the Career, Not Just the Paycheck

I also wanted to celebrate nursing careers. Watching my wife's career over the last 20 years, I noticed there were moments she should have celebrated or documented and she just didn't, because there was no easy way to do it.

So we built Career Chapters: a place to capture those moments. The nerves before your first position. A tough situation with a coworker you wanted to get on the record. The travel assignment that changed everything. You capture the moment and the emotion as it happens, so later you can look back and actually see the arc of an amazing career.

Is It Really Anonymous?

I know what you're thinking. It's great to see what other nurses make — but how do I know my information stays anonymous, and that my manager or coworkers won't find out what I submitted?

That's a valid concern, and it's exactly why I spent so much time on privacy and security.

• Your identity is separated from your pay. We never attach your name or contact information to your salary submission. It simply shows up as a data point: a nurse with this specialty, in this area, making $50 an hour.
• You control how specific your location is. In a major metro like Los Angeles, there are so many nurses that no single person can be pinned down. In a small town in a smaller state, that's harder — so you choose how you're listed: just the state of California, the Los Angeles metro area, or down to the city. It's up to you.

I wanted you to feel comfortable submitting your information, period.

How We Verify Nurses

We rely on you to submit honest pay information and to make sure everyone submitting is actually a nurse, we collect your license number and state and validate it against the state board it's registered to. That keeps the data legitimate: nurses, and only nurses, contributing to it.

How Jemma Makes Money

Here's a fair question: how does Jemma make money?

A lot of platforms give you free access to a database or tools at no cost because they're monetizing you — through advertising, or by selling your information to recruiters and headhunters. I didn't want that on Jemma.

Instead, the verified Salary Explorer and the free tools stay free. We make money through subscriptions to additional services like Career Chapters, the AI-enabled tools that help you negotiate better, and more. That's what keeps the site running and lets us market and grow, without ever advertising to you or selling your data to people you'd rather not hear from.

Giving Back Through Referrals

I also wanted to give back to the nursing community. As a small company, we can focus on the people growing the platform; nurses, instead of investors, shareholders, or board members.

The most powerful way we do that is the referral program. When you join Jemma, you get a referral code to share with other nurses. Anyone who joins can have a free account and submit their anonymous pay to help grow the platform and pay it forward.

But if someone you refer purchases a paid subscription:

• They get a discount on their first year, and
• You earn a commission - not just once, but every year they renew.

For a lot of nurses, referring a handful of friends can mean your own subscription is covered. Refer more, and the bonuses can become quite substantial. Every time someone joins with your code you get credit for them; when they become a paid member, that's when you earn the commission.

Just Getting Started

That's Jemma. We're just getting started, and I hope you'll join us on this ride, share it with other nurses and help make it something genuinely useful, memorable, and worth being proud of. Because what you've done as a nurse is truly special, and for students, what you're about to become and do over the next 20 or 30 years is too.

One last thing: hit the feedback button on the right-hand side of the website. I'm the one who reads those, whether it's a feature you wish we had, something that isn't working right, or a different perspective entirely. I'd love to hear from you.