Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions). Our first question comes from Tobey Sommer with Suntrust Robinson Humphrey.
Tobey Sommer - Suntrust Robinson Humphrey
Thank you. Susan, philosophically, how are you approaching the bill rates that you are increasing in the split between company's desire to retain that in the form of gross margin and your clients' needs for additional nurses and therefore, then desiring you to pass it on to the nurses in the form of higher pay rates?
Susan Nowakowski
Sure. Good question, Tobey. We believe we are in a very good place right now to be able to pass on a very reasonable amount of those pricing increases directly to our travelers in wages. As you know, we are held back from that a little bit over the last year and a half because of rising housing costs but as we mentioned, that is subsided a bit. so that gives us a little bit more room to raise pay rates as we get those bill rate increases.
Going forward, we expect our margins to remain relatively stable. by stable, you can have 10, 20 basis point deviation from quarter to quarter and we are certainly strategically out there looking for opportunities to both increase pay rates and where appropriately, decrease pay rates and that can have a little bit of a variance effect. Overall, we expect gross margins to be relatively stable going forward.
Tobey Sommer - Suntrust Robinson Humphrey
I do not know whether you gave this, I apologize if you did. Did you give an organic rate of growth for the travelers in the quarter?
Susan Nowakowski
We did not give just the travel and allied organic growth. One thing that we called out was our travel nurse business in particular which grew a little over 2% both sequentially and on a year-over-year basis. The allied business actually grew more than that on a sequential basis. It was relatively flat year-over-year because of the offset in the imaging professionals. On a sequential basis, we have seen tremendous growth in allied.
Tobey Sommer - Suntrust Robinson Humphrey
Thank you. That seems like a real good performance in light of what we have seen from some others talking about the market. Could you give us a sense for how the expected growth for the locum tenens business now that you have worked past some of the issues, how that may proceed because it does seem like the market is fairly attractive in presenting some opportunities to grow a little bit faster than you have recently.
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