To address the lack of staff in health and care, many care providers choose to hire staff to cover for vacancies. Deficiencies in the collaboration between regular employees and hired staff can lead to a deteriorating work environment such as a high workload for regular staff, increased risk of endangering patient safety, poorer loyalty to the employer and increased costs for caregivers. The purpose of this qualitative study is to describe the perceptions of regular employed nurses about the collaboration with hired staff. The study was conducted with semi-structured interviews and analysed with a phenomenographic approach. The number of informants in the study is nine distributed in four different regions, seven different hospitals and six different wards. The results showed that the coveted collaboration between regular employees and hired staff is described both as burdensome and as a resource for the regular staff, but the collaboration can work better under certain conditions. Longer placement of hired staff in the same department, including areas of responsibility in the hired contract, and improved remuneration terms for regular employees are proposed as premises that could facilitate cooperation, create more continuity in the care chain and reduce redundancies. The study can be used as a knowledge base for those responsible for care operations in, for example, intervention work to improve the work environment and the nurses' occupational health. More research on the collaboration between hired and regular, for example, quantitative studies or studies with mixed informants, both regular and hired, are proposed.