Aya Healthcare Lawsuit: Travel Nurse Pay, Arbitration, and Antitrust

Aya Healthcare, the San Diego-based travel-staffing company, has faced a string of legal disputes over the past several years. The most prominent Aya Healthcare lawsuit is a class and collective action by travel nurses alleging mid-contract pay cuts, but the company has also litigated an antitrust case against rival AMN Healthcare, a pandemic-era billing fight with Steward Health Care, a dismissed false-advertising suit, a withdrawn labor charge, and a scrapped acquisition that drew federal antitrust scrutiny.

O’Dell v. Aya Healthcare: The Travel Nurse Pay-Cut Class Action

On August 4, 2022, three travel nurses sued Aya in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. The case, O’Dell et al. v. Aya Healthcare, Inc. (Case No. 3:22-cv-01151), alleges Aya recruited nurses with attractive pay packages and then imposed steep, unilateral pay reductions after the nurses had already relocated and begun their assignments.¹

What the Nurses Allege

The complaint describes a business model built on underbidding competitors to win exclusive staffing contracts with hospitals, then passing the cost onto nurses through mid-assignment pay cuts presented on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Nurses who had already arranged housing and moved for the job had little practical choice but to accept, and those who refused risked being sent home or effectively blacklisted from other facilities in areas where Aya held exclusive contracts.¹

The plaintiffs described concrete losses. One nurse reported a base hourly rate cut of more than 50%, totaling over $5,000 in lost pay. Another said her rate was reduced by more than 60% on two separate occasions during a single three-month assignment, costing her more than $10,000. A third refused the reduction and was forced to return home, claiming a loss of at least $15,000 compared to her original contract.¹ The complaint alleges “hundreds or potentially thousands” of nurses experienced similar reductions.²

The Legal Claims

The suit brings claims for breach of contract, fraudulent inducement, and violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the California Labor Code, and the California Business and Professions Code.² A separate strand targets how Aya calculates overtime. The plaintiffs allege the company excluded holiday pay, charge pay, on-call and call-back pay, meal stipends, and housing stipends from the “regular rate of pay” used to compute time-and-a-half, underpaying nurses for every overtime hour worked.¹

Arbitration Fight and Where the Case Stands

The central procedural question has been whether the nurses’ claims must go to individual arbitration rather than proceed as a collective action. In April 2023, the district court partially granted Aya’s motion to compel arbitration.³ Four individual cases went to arbitrators and the results split: two arbitrators found the arbitration agreements valid, and two found them unconscionable. The district court then used those two invalidating awards to block enforcement of arbitration agreements for the remaining 255 opt-in plaintiffs, a move that would have kept the broader case in court.⁴

On April 1, 2026, the Ninth Circuit reversed. The panel held that the Federal Arbitration Act does not permit courts to use a preclusion doctrine to invalidate arbitration agreements en masse or to convert individualized proceedings into class-wide litigation without the parties’ consent. The case was remanded, meaning many opt-in plaintiffs may now face individual arbitration rather than participating in a single collective action.⁴ The litigation remains ongoing.⁵

Recino v. Aya: False Advertising Suit Sent to Arbitration

A separate 2023 case, Recino v. Aya Healthcare, Inc. (Case No. 3:23-cv-00750, S.D. Cal.), accused Aya of a deceptive marketing scheme aimed at nursing job applicants. The plaintiff alleged the company posted job listings with inflated salaries and fabricated vacancies hospitals had never authorized, using irrelevant robocall questionnaires and sham application processes to harvest nurses’ personal information for recruiter commissions.⁶

U.S. District Judge Michael M. Anello dismissed the case without prejudice on October 2, 2023, granting Aya’s motion to compel arbitration and sending the plaintiff’s claims to private arbitration.⁶

Steward Health Care Billing Dispute

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Aya and Steward Health Care System signed a “Crisis Staffing Solution Agreement” in March 2020 under which Aya deployed more than 2,000 medical staff to Steward hospitals nationwide.⁷

Steward sued in March 2021, alleging Aya had engaged in price gouging and claiming hourly nursing rates jumped from roughly $75 to more than $160. A court issued an injunction requiring Aya to continue providing clinical staff through April 6, 2021, and ordered Steward to post a $10 million bond. Steward also referred Aya to the Massachusetts Attorney General for investigation.⁸

Aya filed a counterclaim on April 6, 2021, asserting Steward owed more than $40 million in unpaid invoices. The company said Steward had agreed to the rates, paid over $39 million in earlier invoices without objection, and then manufactured a bad-faith billing dispute to pressure Aya into accepting roughly half of what it was owed. Aya also alleged Steward had received more than $400 million in CARES Act subsidies during the period it refused to pay.⁷⁸

Antitrust Suit Against AMN Healthcare

In February 2017, Aya filed an antitrust suit against AMN Healthcare, its larger competitor, in the Southern District of California. Starting in 2010, Aya had served as an “associate vendor” handling overflow assignments AMN could not fill, and their contract included a non-solicitation clause barring Aya from recruiting AMN’s employees. After Aya began recruiting AMN’s travel nurse staff in 2015, AMN terminated the relationship. Aya then sued, arguing AMN’s non-solicitation agreements and the termination amounted to illegal restraints of trade under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, California’s Cartwright Act, and the state’s Unfair Competition Law.⁹

In 2020, the district court granted summary judgment to AMN on all federal claims, finding no evidence of a staffing-agency cartel or that AMN held sufficient market power to harm competition.¹⁰ On August 19, 2021, the Ninth Circuit affirmed. The appellate court held that the non-solicitation clause was an “ancillary restraint” attached to a legitimate business collaboration rather than a naked anti-competitive agreement, and therefore had to be evaluated under a full rule-of-reason analysis. Under that standard, Aya failed to prove the restraint harmed consumers or competition.¹¹

Aya did secure a narrower win earlier in the dispute. A San Diego judge ruled that AMN’s confidential nondisclosure agreement was unenforceable under California law and awarded Aya $168,967 in attorneys’ fees after finding the “bad faith standard” was met.¹²

Cross Country Healthcare Acquisition and FTC Review

In December 2024, Aya announced a proposed $615 million acquisition of Cross Country Healthcare, another major travel nursing firm.¹³ The Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation and identified what it called “significant competitive concerns.” Bureau of Competition Director Daniel Guarnera said the merger would have “eliminated head-to-head competition between two of the largest firms providing the software and services that hospitals use to find, hire, and manage their pools of traveling nurses and other temporary healthcare workers,” with risks of reduced options for workers, higher hospital expenses, and increased costs for patients.¹⁴

The review dragged through multiple extensions of the Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period. A 43-day government shutdown that began in October 2025 pushed the timeline past the companies’ agreed termination date of December 3, 2025. Aya said continuing the process would be “excessively burdensome and create prolonged uncertainty,” while Cross Country said its efforts to negotiate a shortened review were unsuccessful. No formal complaint was ever filed; the deal collapsed under the weight of the review, and Aya paid Cross Country a $20 million termination fee.¹³

NLRB Charge Withdrawn

On June 18, 2024, an unfair labor practice charge was filed against Aya with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging retaliation, discharge, or discipline against an employee for engaging in protected concerted activity under Section 8(a)(1) of the National Labor Relations Act. The case was closed on October 15, 2024, after the charging party withdrew the complaint and the NLRB General Counsel approved the withdrawal.¹⁵

1
ClassAction.org. Bait-and-Switch Lawsuit Claims Aya Healthcare Reduced Travel Nurses Pay Mid-Contract
2
Stueve Siegel Hanson LLP. Aya Healthcare Class Action Lawsuit
3
vLex. O’Dell v. Aya Healthcare, Inc.
4
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. O’Dell v. Aya Healthcare Services, Inc., No. 25-1528
5
Stueve Siegel Hanson LLP. Aya Travel Nursing Litigation
6
ClassAction.org. Aya Healthcare Falsely Advertises Itself as a Genuine Staffing Agency, Class Action Claims
7
PR Newswire. Aya Healthcare’s Statement Regarding Lawsuit Against Steward Health Care System LLC
8
MedCity News. Steward Health Care v. Aya Healthcare: 4 Things to Know
9
vLex. Aya Healthcare Servs., Inc. v. AMN Healthcare, Inc.
10
AMN Healthcare Investor Relations. Court Rules in Favor of AMN Healthcare, Dismissing All Federal Antitrust Claims by a Competitor
11
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Aya Healthcare Servs., Inc. v. AMN Healthcare, Inc., No. 20-55679
12
Staffing Industry Analysts. Judge Addresses Attorneys Fees in Aya and AMN Court Battle
13
Healthcare Dive. Aya Healthcare, Cross Country Terminate Staffing Acquisition Following FTC
14
Federal Trade Commission. FTC Bureau of Competition Statement on Termination of Healthcare Managed Services Merger
15
National Labor Relations Board. Case 21-CA-344638