By Pradeep Pandey · Co-Founder · 13 min read · Updated
Nurse Scheduling Software Pricing: 2026 Cost Guide
Most nurse scheduling vendors will not tell you what they charge until you sit through a sales call. We opened ten pricing pages to see which ones show a number at all, and what a small hospital should ask for instead.
Key Takeaways
- We checked every vendor pricing page on September 22, 2026. Six publish no price: M7 Health, In-House Health, OnShift, QGenda, SmartLinx and ShiftWizard
- Four publish one. NurseGrid states “$5 per month, per staff member”. Deputy lists $5, $6.50 and $9 per user per month by tier. ScheduleAnywhere shows from $25 per user per month on Capterra. SimpleScheduleAI charges $1,000 or $1,500 a month, flat
- A published per-user rate is not the cost. Implementation, training and support tiers are billed separately, and for a 25-nurse hospital they routinely add more than the license itself
- The question that decides a purchase is the all-in first-year figure, set against the overtime the tool actually removes. The sticker price rarely settles it
- Two pricing pages, Aladtec and UKG, refused our check rather than showing a missing page. A refusal tells us nothing about whether a price exists, so neither vendor is counted
Table of Contents
- How Is Nurse Scheduling Software Priced?
- Which Vendors Actually Publish a Price?
- What Does It Cost for a 25-Bed Hospital?
- What Are the Hidden Costs Vendors Do Not Advertise?
- How Do You Calculate ROI Before Buying?
- How Is SimpleScheduleAI Priced?
- Frequently Asked Questions
A per-user rate is the easy number to find. The one that decides your budget is the all-in first-year cost, and that is where nurse scheduling software for a Critical Access Hospital stops being a per-unit line item. It becomes implementation fees, integration charges and support tiers nobody mentioned on the call.
Hidden fees are the easy part to describe. The harder part is that most vendors will not tell you the per-unit price either.
How Is Nurse Scheduling Software Priced?
Four models are in use, and vendors frequently mix them.
Per-nurse-per-month. The common SaaS model. Twenty-five nurses at $5 each is $125 a month before add-ons. It looks affordable per unit but scales with headcount, so a hospital carrying a lot of per-diem staff pays more than its core nurse count suggests.
Annual flat fee. A flat license regardless of nurse count. This favors larger hospitals and penalizes small ones, because a 25-bed facility pays what a 100-bed facility pays.
Per-module. Scheduling, time and attendance, overtime tracking, analytics and mobile access billed separately. The base module looks cheap until you add the modules you actually need.
Service pricing. The model we use. The software and the people who run it are one price. Higher per unit than bare SaaS, lower in total because setup and support are not separate invoices.
| Model | Monthly license | What to watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Per nurse per month | $125 at $5 each | Ask whether setup is included, and whether per-diem staff count as seats |
| Annual flat fee | Not published by any vendor we checked | Usually priced for larger hospitals; you pay what a 100-bed facility pays |
| Per module | Not published by any vendor we checked | Get the module list in writing; the base tier rarely covers what you need |
Monthly license column shows published rates only. Where a vendor publishes nothing, we say so rather than estimate.
Which Vendors Actually Publish a Price?
We checked the pricing page of every vendor a small hospital is likely to shortlist on September 22, 2026. Anyone can repeat this in about ten minutes.
| Vendor | Pricing page, September 22 2026 | Published price |
|---|---|---|
| M7 Health | No pricing page | None |
| In-House Health | No pricing page | None |
| OnShift | No pricing page | None |
| QGenda | No pricing page | None |
| SmartLinx | No pricing page | None |
| ShiftWizard | Redirects to a HealthStream product page | None. The page offers “Request demo” |
| NurseGrid | Live | ”$5 per month, per staff member” |
| Deputy | Live | $5, $6.50 and $9 per user per month by tier |
| ScheduleAnywhere | Third-party listing | From $25 per user per month |
| SimpleScheduleAI | Live | $1,000 or $1,500 a month, flat |
Two more, Aladtec and UKG, refused our check rather than showing a missing page. A refusal tells us nothing about whether a price exists, so neither vendor appears in either column.
A missing page does not prove a vendor is hiding anything. Some never had that address. The point is simpler: for six of these platforms, there is no way to learn the price without booking a call.
That matters for a nurse manager with a budget conversation in two weeks, because a sales cycle you cannot shortcut is itself a cost.
What Does It Cost for a 25-Bed Hospital?
For 25 nurses, a published per-user rate puts the license between $125 and $625 a month depending on which vendor and tier you land on. That span is wide because the published rates run from $5 to $25 per user.
The license is not the number that hurts. Implementation is billed separately by most platforms, and for a small hospital it frequently exceeds the first year of licensing. General workforce tools are cheaper per seat and are not built for nursing: they do not track unit competency, charge coverage or FLSA overtime thresholds without manual work.
The cheapest option by list price is rarely the cheapest by total cost. Configuration time has a real cost even when nobody invoices it, which is the same trap that makes moving off a spreadsheet look cheaper than it is.
What Are the Hidden Costs Vendors Do Not Advertise?
Implementation and onboarding. A one-time fee to configure your shift rules, load your roster and train staff. SaaS pricing rarely includes it.
EHR or payroll integration. Connecting to your EHR usually needs your EHR vendor involved, with its own fee and timeline. Smaller systems may make it impossible or not worth it.
Training time. Budget manager hours for internal training regardless of what the vendor includes. Those hours are the same scarce resource as the cost of replacing a nurse who leaves.
Support tiers. Base contracts often mean email support with a 48-hour response. For a manager covering a callout at 2am, that is not support.
Contract exit. Multi-year terms with automatic renewal and early-termination penalties. Read the exit clause before you sign, because a platform that is wrong for your hospital costs far more to leave than to join.
How Do You Calculate ROI Before Buying?
Compare total cost of ownership against the overtime the tool removes. The inputs below are illustrative assumptions for modeling, not measured results, and not a customer outcome.
Take a loaded rate of $60 an hour. A nurse working four hours of unplanned overtime a week, at a $20 premium above base, costs about $80 a week in premium pay. Across five nurses drawing regular overtime that is $400 a week, or roughly $20,800 a year attributable to scheduling gaps rather than patient volume.
Cut that by a fifth and you save about $4,160 a year. We picked a fifth to show the shape of the calculation, not because it is a number we can promise. Run it on your payroll rather than ours. The ROI calculator runs the same math against your figures.
Overtime is only the part you can price easily. Three more lines move with the schedule and are harder to put a number on.
Agency and traveler spend. Every shift you cover from your own roster is a shift you do not buy at agency rates. If your last quarter included agency hours, ask what they cost per hour against your own loaded rate.
Turnover. Nurses who repeatedly carry the bad shifts leave sooner. Replacing one of them costs far more than a year of any tool on this page, and we have walked through that math separately.
Manager hours. Time spent building the schedule and chasing callouts is clinical or leadership time that went somewhere else.
We are not going to pretend we can size those three for your hospital. We cannot. But a comparison built on overtime alone understates what a schedule is worth, so bring them to the conversation even if they stay unpriced.
How Is SimpleScheduleAI Priced?
SimpleScheduleAI is an AI-native nurse scheduling service for Critical Access Hospitals in Texas. Pricing is flat by roster size: $1,000/month for up to 20 nurses, $1,500/month for 21 to 40 nurses. No per-nurse fees, no setup fees. You know the full annual cost on day one.
Onboarding takes 3 to 5 business days from an Excel roster upload, and your first schedule lands inside two weeks. It includes AI nurse scheduling that builds the draft, ranked callout shortlists, and an audit trail. See how it works for the build-and-approve flow.
If you are weighing us against the field, the comparison guide covers the platforms above side by side. We are not the right fit for large health systems, multi-site organizations, hospitals needing EHR integration, or anyone outside Texas. For Critical Access Hospitals of 25 beds or fewer with limited IT, it is built for exactly that.
Our Take
Six of the ten vendors here will not tell you a price without a sales call. That is a legitimate way to sell enterprise software, and it is a bad fit for a hospital where the person evaluating the tool is also covering shifts. The number that decides the purchase is the all-in first-year figure against your real scheduling-driven overtime, and you cannot build that number from a per-seat rate. Ask for it as one figure, in writing, before the demo.
What to Do This Week
- Pull six months of payroll and split the overtime. Your business office can run overtime by nurse by pay period. Sit with the schedule beside it and mark which overtime covered a callout or an open shift, and which came from a heavy census. That first figure is the budget any tool has to beat.
- Ask every vendor one question before the demo. What is the all-in first-year cost including implementation, training and integration? A per-nurse rate alone is not an answer.
- Ask for the exit terms in writing. Auto-renewal and early-termination penalties, before you sit through a pitch.
- Rule out anything that assumes an IT department. Ask the vendor three questions. Does this need a server or an install? Does it need my EHR connected to work? Who configures the shift rules? If the answers are yes, yes, and your IT team, that is a cost you cannot staff at any license price.
- Re-run the pricing-page check yourself. It takes ten minutes and tells you which vendors will make you work for a number.
Running a Critical Access Hospital in Texas?
Flat monthly pricing. No per-nurse fees. AI builds your schedule, our scheduling team checks it, you approve. No IT.
See how it works →Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How much does nurse scheduling software cost?
Among vendors that publish a rate, per-user pricing runs from $5 to $25 per user per month. For 25 nurses that is $125 to $625 a month for the license alone. Most vendors publish nothing, and implementation is billed on top, so the license is not the first-year cost.
Q: Which nurse scheduling vendors publish their pricing?
As of September 22, 2026: NurseGrid, Deputy and SimpleScheduleAI publish rates directly, and ScheduleAnywhere’s rate appears on a third-party listing. M7 Health, In-House Health, OnShift, QGenda, SmartLinx and ShiftWizard publish none.
Q: Is there free nurse scheduling software for hospitals?
No tool built for hospital nursing is free for ongoing use. Our free nurse schedule template is free, and our breakdown of free nurse scheduling software shows which gaps the no-cost options leave. SimpleScheduleAI is paid, at a flat $1,000 to $1,500 a month including setup and support.
Q: Do vendors negotiate pricing?
Enterprise vendors generally expect negotiation, particularly on implementation fees and contract length. The strongest positions for a small hospital are asking for implementation fees to be removed, monthly billing instead of annual prepay, and a 30-day exit clause in year one. Do not sign a multi-year contract without a performance exit.
A Note on Sources
- Vendor pricing pages checked directly on September 22, 2026. The addresses, so you can repeat it:
m7health.com/pricing,inhouse.health/pricing,onshift.com/pricing,qgenda.com/pricing,smartlinx.com/pricing,shiftwizard.com/pricing,nursegrid.com,deputy.com/pricing,aladtec.com/pricing,ukg.com/pricing. We recorded whether a page existed, redirected elsewhere, or refused the request. The six missing pages are left unlinked here on purpose, because linking a page we are reporting as gone would just be a dead link. A refusal is reported separately rather than counted as missing. - NurseGrid published rate, verbatim “$5 per month, per staff member”, and “For teams of 2 to 250”. nursegrid.com.
- Deputy published tiers, $5, $6.50 and $9 per user per month, add-ons priced separately. deputy.com/pricing.
- ScheduleAnywhere rate from its Capterra listing, from $25 per user per month. capterra.com.
- ShiftWizard pricing URL redirects to the HealthStream product page, which offers “Request demo” and no rate. healthstream.com.
- FLSA healthcare overtime thresholds. U.S. Department of Labor, Fact Sheet #54.
Methodology note: Where a vendor publishes no price, we say so. We do not estimate what an unpublished contract costs, and no figure here comes from customer data. The loaded wage rate, nurse headcount, overtime premium and the one-fifth reduction used in the ROI section are illustrative assumptions for modeling, not measured results. Vendor pricing and terms change; re-check before deciding.
Pradeep Pandey is the co-founder of SimpleScheduleAI, an AI-native nurse scheduling service built for Critical Access Hospitals in Texas. He serves as Deputy General Manager of Operations at Apollo Hospitals and holds an MBA from IIM Trichy. LinkedIn →
