Registered Nurse
3.4 million people do this job. The pay is real, the demand is real — and so are the night shifts, the staffing ratios, and the things nobody mentions at the school open house. Here's both halves of the story.
A quarter-century of nursing pay
The default view is what the payslip said. Switch it to 2024 dollars and the same line answers a different question — not “what is the number” but “am I better off”. Both are true; only one of them is the one people actually mean.
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View the data as a table
| Year | RN weekly pay |
|---|---|
| 2000 | $781 |
| 2001 | $800 |
| 2002 | $869 |
| 2003 | $899 |
| 2004 | $904 |
| 2005 | $935 |
| 2006 | $978 |
| 2007 | $984 |
| 2008 | $1,022 |
| 2009 | $1,039 |
| 2010 | $1,055 |
| 2011 | $1,039 |
| 2012 | $1,097 |
| 2013 | $1,099 |
| 2014 | $1,090 |
| 2015 | $1,116 |
| 2016 | $1,154 |
| 2017 | $1,150 |
| 2018 | $1,167 |
| 2019 | $1,223 |
| 2020 | $1,262 |
| 2021 | $1,305 |
| 2022 | $1,395 |
| 2023 | $1,442 |
| 2024 | $1,507 |
| 2025 | $1,563 |
Source: BLS Current Population Survey via api.bls.gov public API
Career Field Notes, "RN pay (what the payslip said) — USD / week". Data as of August 22, 2026. https://careerfieldnotes.com/data/snapshots/2026-08-22/
Every percentile from the 10th to the 90th. The five BLS actually publishes are highlighted; the rest are interpolated between them.
The hump is the most common pay. Estimated from the same five BLS percentiles by fitting a log-normal — the shape between the published points is modelled, not measured.
Total U.S. employment, actual vs. projected.
View the data as a table
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Employed | 3,391,000 |
| Projected employed, 2034 | 3,557,100 |
| Change | +4.9% |
Source: BLS Employment Projections National Matrix (Structured Data - Industry Mix)
Career Field Notes, "Registered nurse employment, 2024 and projected 2034". Data as of August 22, 2026. https://careerfieldnotes.com/data/snapshots/2026-08-22/
Source: BLS Employment Projections, National Employment Matrix.
Highest-paying states
- 1 California see this state in depth $148,330
- 2 Hawaii see this state in depth $123,720
- 3 Oregon see this state in depth $120,470
- 4 Washington see this state in depth $115,740
- 5 Massachusetts see this state in depth $112,610
Annual mean wage · BLS OEWS May 2024 state file (oesm24st), SOC 29-1141
Annual mean wage, BLS OEWS. Each outline is scaled to its own box, so shapes show form, not relative size.
The gender pay gap is real here too
The bigger decision is not whether to be a nurse
Across 21 clinical specialties, the share of nurses satisfied with their job runs from 84.9% down to 71.1% — a spread of 13.8 percentage points depending on which kind of nurse you became. That is a federal probability sample of 49,234 responses, not a poll.
Almost every guide to this career is organised around whether to enter it. Very little is organised around which part of it to enter, which is the choice this data says varies most.
27 specialties · 4 have both measures
| Specialty | Satisfied% of nurses in it · bars span 65–90% | Turnover% per year · bars span 0–25% |
|---|---|---|
| Psychiatric or mental health matched | ||
| Occupational health | no data | |
| Geriatrics/gerontology | no data | |
| Home health or hospice | no data | |
| All other specialties | no data | |
| Ambulatory care | no data | |
| Neurological | no data | |
| Renal or dialysis | no data | |
| Oncology | no data | |
| School health service | no data | |
| Obstetrics and gynecology | no data | |
| Chronic care | no data | |
| Gastrointestinal | no data | |
| Labor and delivery or neonatal care | no data | |
| Infectious or communicable disease | no data | |
| Cardiac or cardiovascular care | no data | |
| Critical care or intensive care matched | ||
| Emergency or trauma care matched | ||
| Pulmonary or respiratory | no data | |
| General medical surgical matched | ||
| Orthopedics | no data | |
| Telemetry | no data | |
| Step Down | no data | |
| Burn Center | no data | |
| Women's Health | no data | |
| Surgical Services | no data | |
| Pediatrics | no data |
Satisfied — share answering “extremely” or “moderately satisfied” about the primary nursing position held on 31 December 2021. HRSA Bureau of Health Workforce, NCHWA, 49,234 responses; weighted to all US licensed RNs. A probability sample: it is designed to represent all US registered nurses.
Turnover — annual RN turnover rate for that specialty, reported by 527 participating hospitals. Not a probability sample: it describes the hospitals that took part, not every hospital.
Satisfaction and turnover come from DIFFERENT sources measuring DIFFERENT populations by different methods — a federal probability sample of nurses, and a survey of 527 hospitals. Only 4 specialties are named closely enough by both to share a row; the rest show no data on one side rather than a guess. Do not read a row as one study.
Same licence, different job
The building matters as much as the specialty. Hospital nurses are the least satisfied and the most likely to have considered leaving; outpatient nurses are the most satisfied and the least likely.
Outpatient, ambulatory and other clinical settings
Non-patient-care settings
Other inpatient settings
Hospitals
All three figures: HRSA Bureau of Health Workforce, NCHWA, reference date 31 December 2021, 49,234 responses; weighted to all US licensed RNs.
The risk is front-loaded
22.7% of newly hired registered nurses leave within twelve months. The honest version of the question is not “will I like nursing for thirty years?” but “can I get through the first two, and where?”
Both figures explain why hospitals fund residencies and sign-on bonuses — the first year is expensive for them too.
These are two different measurements and must not be mixed. The 22.7% is a RATE: of nurses newly hired in the year, that share left within twelve months. The rest are SHARES OF EVERYONE WHO LEFT, which sum to 100% — so 29.0% means 29 of every 100 departing nurses had under a year of service, not that 29% of new nurses leave. No source publishes a turnover rate by experience band, so the widely repeated claim that first-year turnover runs about triple the five-to-ten-year rate cannot be checked and is not made here.
What the work actually is
Strip away the recruiting language and the day is concrete: these are the tasks O*NET's occupational analysts record real nurses doing, ranked by how central they are to the job.
Loading the day-to-day…
What keeps people in it
Themes from screened first-person accounts, ranked by how often they come up in this corpus when nurses talk about what's good — that is how often it is said here, not how common it is among nurses. Hover a bar to read a real voice behind the number.
What do the source badges mean?
- Federal rulemaking comments Filed by name on the public record with a federal agency (e.g. the CMS minimum-staffing rule). Submitting false information is a federal offence, so these carry the most weight of anything here.
- Congressional testimony Statements entered into the congressional record. Collected, but none currently appear in the displayed quotes.
- Reddit forum Public posts and comments, anonymized. The largest share of what is shown — candid, but self-selected: people post when something is worth complaining about.
- YouTube comments Public comments on nursing videos. Collected and used in the aggregate analysis, but not quoted verbatim on the site — so you will not see one of these as a quote.
Screened means two independent AI models had to agree the account is genuinely about this career, and every extracted answer must quote a verbatim sentence from the source or it is dropped. We do not verify anyone's identity or employment.
View the data as a table
| Theme | Accounts |
|---|---|
| School, NCLEX & licensure | 57 |
| Pay & money | 49 |
| Patients & meaning | 39 |
| Respect & safety | 29 |
| Flexibility & mobility | 25 |
| Scheduling & hours | 22 |
| Management & admin | 19 |
| Burnout & stress | 16 |
| Staffing & ratios | 13 |
| Physical toll | 3 |
Counts are of screened accounts, not of people. They say what was discussed, never how common it is in the workforce.
Career Field Notes, "Themes by number of screened first-person accounts mentioning them (satisfaction)". Data as of August 22, 2026. https://careerfieldnotes.com/data/snapshots/2026-08-22/
Not enough screened answers yet to say how common this is.
These are self-selected people who chose to post publicly about their work, so how often something is said here is not how common it is in the workforce. How this was screened.
What they wish someone had told them
The most valuable sentences in this whole project. When nurses talk about regrets, warnings, and what they'd do differently, these are the themes — ranked by how often they come up in these screened accounts, not by what makes a tidy story. Frequency here means frequency in this corpus — not prevalence among nurses.
View the data as a table
| Theme | Accounts |
|---|---|
| School, NCLEX & licensure | 63 |
| Patients & meaning | 44 |
| Pay & money | 39 |
| Respect & safety | 38 |
| Scheduling & hours | 30 |
| Flexibility & mobility | 29 |
| Burnout & stress | 27 |
| Management & admin | 23 |
| Staffing & ratios | 20 |
| Physical toll | 6 |
Counts are of screened accounts, not of people. They say what was discussed, never how common it is in the workforce.
Career Field Notes, "Themes by number of screened first-person accounts mentioning them (regret)". Data as of August 22, 2026. https://careerfieldnotes.com/data/snapshots/2026-08-22/
Not enough screened answers yet to say how common this is.
These are self-selected people who chose to post publicly about their work, so how often something is said here is not how common it is in the workforce. How this was screened.
“I'm really quite nervous about the whole thing- I believe that I know exactly what I'm getting in to, how my life will change, how difficult nursing school is, etc., and would like to be the least blind-sighted as possible!” Reddit forum · r/StudentNurse · 2016
“The HCA one cared only about two things: Symptom improvement and keeping patients until their insurance ran out.” Reddit forum · r/PsychNursing · 2026
Not enough screened answers yet to say how common this is.
These are self-selected people who chose to post publicly about their work, so how often something is said here is not how common it is in the workforce. How this was screened.
Is nursing satisfaction getting better or worse?
Average “would you choose it again?” score (1–10) from dated posts, by year written.
View the data as a table
| Year | Accounts scored | Mean score (1–10) | % scoring 7 or higher |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 3 | 10.0 | 100.0% |
| 2018 | 1 | 6.0 | 0.0% |
| 2020 | 1 | 10.0 | 100.0% |
| 2022 | 3 | 6.3 | 66.7% |
| 2023 | 2 | 9.0 | 100.0% |
| 2024 | 1 | 1.0 | 0.0% |
| 2025 | 6 | 5.7 | 66.7% |
| 2026 | 7 | 8.0 | 71.4% |
Years below the minimum of 50 scored accounts are listed here but are not plotted — too few to mean anything.
Source: AI-extracted satisfaction_score_would_choose_again from qualified rows, bucketed by real Reddit post timestamp (updated_at)
Career Field Notes, "Average “would you choose it again?” score by the year the account was written". Data as of August 22, 2026. https://careerfieldnotes.com/data/snapshots/2026-08-22/
Public first-person accounts of nursing run 9.6 points more negative than the federal survey of nurses implies.
The formula, and when this number would mislead you
Reality Gap = (negative share of applicable screened accounts) - (dissatisfied share of a representative survey)
163 / 552 = 29.5% negative, minus 19.9% dissatisfied = +9.6 percentage points
What it is not. Not a quality score and not a ranking. It describes a divergence between two accounts of the same job, not whether the job is good.
- Read as a rating. A bigger gap does not mean a worse career.
- Read as like-for-like. The survey measures how satisfied a PERSON is; the corpus measures how negative a PIECE OF WRITING is.
- Read without the components. A moving gap can mean either side moved.
- Read as prevalence. The corpus is self-selected and always will be.
Online talk vs. representative data
HRSA National Center for Health Workforce Analysis · National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses (NSSRN), 2022 (reference date 2021-12-31). ~125,000 RNs/APRNs sampled; more than 49,000 responded. Brief covers the 3,459,209 nurses employed as RNs on 2021-12-31. Report published March 2024. Source, accessed 2026-08-14.
And it fell hard between 2017 and 2021
- 40.2% → 27.6% extremely satisfied (-12.6 points)
- 11.0% to 19.9% — nearly doubled — the share expressing any dissatisfaction
- 78.7% satisfied at the bedside vs 87.6% away from it — patient-care roles fell 10 points, non-patient-care 2.7
82.3% of nurses in the same post for a year or more said they had felt burned out at some point, and 88.8% of those said it worsened during the pandemic. 55.9% considered leaving their position in the past year.
It depends enormously on where you work
- 71.1%Orthopedics
- 84.9%Psychiatric or mental health (incl. substance use disorders)
Satisfaction fell in 20 of 21 specialties. Steepest: Orthopedics (-16.3pp), Infectious or communicable diseases (-16pp), General medical surgical (-15.7pp). The only specialty that improved was Mental health (+1.2pp) — which is how it went from the least satisfied specialty in 2017 to the most satisfied in 2021: it barely moved while everything around it fell.
What this is for. These are representative surveys of the whole workforce: they answer how common. The accounts elsewhere on this page answer what specifically — what the bad shift looks like, what nobody warns you about. Neither substitutes for the other, and how often something is said in our corpus is never evidence of how common it is. A second representative anchor agrees on direction: 61.1% of nurses in the GSS said they were very satisfied, against 47.4% of all workers (n=42 nurses — suggestive, not precise).
What we could not verify
- MedscapeNot yet researched in this session; Medscape reports typically sit behind a registration wall, which would make primary verification impossible under the no-evasion rule.
- AMN HealthcareNot yet researched in this session.
Notably, "would you choose nursing again" is the figure people most want. We could not verify it from a primary published source, so it is not shown here. The site's own survey is being built to answer it with data we can stand behind.
Are you a nurse? Add your own answers — anonymous, every question optional, and it becomes data anyone considering this career can read.
Read nursing forums for an hour and you'd never become a nurse. Ask a representative sample of actual nurses and say they're very satisfied — more than the average worker. Both are real; they measure different things. People post when something's wrong, vent to strangers what they'd never say at work, and the algorithm feeds the dramatic. This site measures that distortion instead of pretending it away: every source below is sampled and scored, with its real sample size.
Share of AI-scored sampled items expressing a negative take on the career, per source. Dashed line: the share of GSS nurse respondents who were not “very satisfied” — the nearest published benchmark, and a looser bar than “negative”.
View the data as a table
| Source | Sampled | Not applicable | Negative | % negative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Federal testimony | 120 | 11 | 58 | 53.2% |
| SDN forum | 120 | 77 | 24 | 55.8% |
| Stack Exchange | 120 | 43 | 18 | 23.4% |
| YouTube comments | 120 | 40 | 24 | 30.0% |
| Blogs | 100 | 26 | 23 | 31.1% |
| Web pages (Common Crawl) | 100 | 31 | 2 | 2.9% |
| Podcasts | 100 | 20 | 12 | 15.0% |
| Hearings | 63 | 45 | 1 | 5.6% |
Percentages are of APPLICABLE items only — the not-applicable count is excluded from the denominator.
Source: This project's audited samples of public first-person accounts
Career Field Notes, "Share of sampled items scored negative, by source". Data as of August 22, 2026. https://careerfieldnotes.com/data/snapshots/2026-08-22/
The toll is real too
Honesty cuts both ways — the survey says most nurses are satisfied, and the injury numbers are serious:
The shifts
The corpus is full of it — the schedule is the thing people mention most after the work itself:
- 12-hour shifts
- nights
- weekends
- holidays
Read them in their own words: screened accounts filtered to scheduling.
Honest gap We don't hold structured shift statistics — what share of nurses actually work nights. That number isn't in our datasets, so we don't show one.
Every road to the license
The road, month by month
Four ways in, one license out. Pick a path — durations are typical, the pass rates are real medians from state-board data.
The default university route. Highest first-try pass median (92%) and the credential big hospital systems increasingly require.
- month 03–9 mo
Deciding + applying
Prerequisite check, TEAS/HESI entrance exam, applications. Competitive programs fill a year out.
No verified quote for this stage yet — the pipeline adds them weekly.
- month ~648 mo
University nursing program
Prereqs are built into the four years. Clinicals ramp up from year two.
No verified quote for this stage yet — the pipeline adds them weekly.
- month ~541–2 mo
NCLEX-RN
BSN programs' median first-try pass rate in our state-board data: 92%.
No verified quote for this stage yet — the pipeline adds them weekly.
- month ~560–6 mo
First RN job
Most BSN grads report offers within about half a year; residency programs hire in cohorts.
No verified quote for this stage yet — the pipeline adds them weekly.
≈ 4–4½ years from first prerequisite to working RN — same license at the end of every path.
What people said about each stage
Deciding to go
“Fell into nursing and it turned out to be what I spent so many years looking for.”
“I became a nurse because I always wanted to be prepared for the worst and have the money to support my family.”
Nursing school
“i’d skip the lpn and go straight for cc pre-reqs and rn”
“Went to CC for my ADN since I already have a bachelor. Got my ADN was hired as a community mental health case manager. Did that for 8 years. Got my MSN while working full time and studying part time.”
First job
“the way its set up, i can sit for my LPN next year, and get my associates 2 semesters later after that”
Not enough screened answers yet to say how common this is.
These are self-selected people who chose to post publicly about their work, so how often something is said here is not how common it is in the workforce. How this was screened.
Median in-state tuition per year vs. median earnings after graduating, by credential level. U.S. Dept. of Education College Scorecard, nursing programs.
View the data as a table
| Award level | Schools | In-state tuition | Out-of-state tuition | Median earnings after graduating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Undergraduate Certificate or Diploma | 202 | $5,280 | $11,595 | $79,255 |
| Associate's Degree | 1,067 | $4,830 | $9,516 | $79,636 |
| Bachelor's Degree | 1,097 | $16,503 | $25,648 | $85,012 |
| Post-baccalaureate Certificate | 42 | $13,976 | $30,227 | $142,075 |
| Master's Degree | 647 | $17,700 | $29,320 | $120,508 |
| Doctoral Degree | 339 | $17,214 | $33,416 | $135,480 |
| First Professional Degree | 336 | $18,034 | $33,174 | $133,644 |
| Graduate/Professional Certificate | 417 | $17,811 | $31,555 | $132,194 |
Source: US Dept of Education College Scorecard
Career Field Notes, "Nursing programs by award level: cost and post-graduation earnings". Data as of August 22, 2026. https://careerfieldnotes.com/data/snapshots/2026-08-22/
Will it pay off for you?
A transparent calculator — every default is sourced, every assumption is a slider, and the whole formula is printed below it. Adjust it to your reality.
How people actually pay for it
The debt numbers above assume you pay sticker price. Most nurses don't have to — these are the standing programs, with their real terms and official links. None of them are secrets; they're just never in the school brochure.
Work 2 years at a critical-shortage facility and HRSA repays 60% of your nursing loans — a third year adds another 25%. Applications open each winter.
Pays tuition, fees, and a monthly stipend while you're in school, in exchange for working at a shortage facility after you graduate.
120 monthly payments while employed by a nonprofit or government hospital, then the rest of your federal Direct Loans is forgiven. Roughly 3 in 4 hospital beds are at qualifying employers.
Many hospital systems reimburse tuition or repay loans for staff who commit to stay — some fund your BSN outright. Ask HR before enrolling, not after.
Many states run their own repayment programs on top of these — worth searching "[your state] nurse loan repayment". Military routes below carry their own full-ride paths.
The ladder above the license
RN is a floor, not a ceiling. Median pay at each rung — real BLS medians, employment-weighted.
The military routes most guidance counselors never mention
Look up an actual nursing school
Marketing pages won't tell you a program's real first-time NCLEX pass rate, what its graduates actually earn, or whether its accreditation is current. State boards of nursing, the U.S. Dept. of Education, and the two national accreditors publish all of it — just in places nobody looks. It's joined here, per school. Where two sources couldn't be matched with confidence, the profile says so instead of guessing.
The same license pays very differently by state
Sticker salaries lie in both directions: high-pay states are often high-cost states, and the states that will need nurses most in 2038 aren't the ones hiring loudest today. This map layers real (cost-adjusted) pay, the federal 2038 supply projections, and which states actually protect staffing ratios by law.
Also considering…
Real BLS numbers for the careers people weigh against nursing. Want one covered next? The waitlist form asks.
Will AI take this job?
Measured, not speculated: the Anthropic Economic Index tracks how much real AI usage today maps onto each occupation's actual tasks. Nursing sits near the floor of the scale.
View the data as a table
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Task-time overlap with AI use | 5.9% |
Source: Anthropic Economic Index, mapped to O*NET tasks for SOC 29-1141
Career Field Notes, "Share of registered-nurse task time overlapping tasks AI is used for". Data as of August 22, 2026. https://careerfieldnotes.com/data/snapshots/2026-08-22/
The same data, task by task.
View the data as a table
| Task | Measured AI overlap |
|---|---|
| Monitor, record, and report symptoms or changes in patients' conditions. | some |
| Administer local, inhalation, intravenous, or other anesthet… | none measured |
| Administer medications to patients and monitor patients for reactions or side effects. | none measured |
| Assess the needs of individuals, families, or communities, including assessment of individuals' home or work environments, to identify potential health or safety problems. | none measured |
| Conduct specified laboratory tests. | none measured |
| Provide health care, first aid, immunizations, or assistance in convalescence or rehabilitation in locations such as schools, hospitals, or industry. | none measured |
| Provide or arrange for training or instruction of auxiliary… | none measured |
| Record patients' medical information and vital signs. | none measured |
| Refer students or patients to specialized health resources o… | none measured |
| Work with individuals, groups, or families to plan or implement programs designed to improve the overall health of communities. | none measured |
Source: O*NET task statements for SOC 29-1141 × Anthropic Economic Index
Career Field Notes, "O*NET registered-nurse tasks by measured AI overlap". Data as of August 22, 2026. https://careerfieldnotes.com/data/snapshots/2026-08-22/
Sources & methods
Every figure on this site, how it was screened, and what we refuse to do: the full method.