Salary & Compensation Index
Authoritative BLS median wages by nurse role — Registered Nurse, Nurse Practitioner, Nurse Midwife, and CRNA — national, 2025.
Included with every plan · source: BLS OEWS
Authoritative workforce data for nurse recruiting — BLS salary benchmarks for all 50 states and 60 metropolitan hiring markets, plus national vacancy and turnover rates. So CNOs and talent leaders decide with evidence, not guesswork.
Three different measures, three different populations. Read them together and they disagree; read them separately and each is right. The two BLS JOLTS figures above are monthly rates for all of health care & social assistance — every occupation in the sector, not registered nurses specifically. The CMS turnover benchmark below is annual, RN-only, and covers certified nursing homes. Hospital RN turnover is a fourth measure again, published annually by industry survey. A 1.9% monthly quits rate compounds to roughly 20.6% over twelve months. Hospital RN vacancy and turnover are reported annually and on an RN-only basis, so they are a different measure over a different population and will not match these tiles — they are in the Time to Fill & Hospital RN Benchmarks module below, with their own population stated. JOLTS publishes monthly; these tiles move with each release.
Every figure on this page is labelled with what it measures, the population it covers, and when it was published. Federal statistical sources for pay, staffing, cost and supply. The annual NSI hospital survey for time to fill, vacancy and turnover. Salary from BLS OEWS — national, all 50 states + DC, and 60 metropolitan markets. Job-openings and quits from BLS JOLTS — monthly, all-sector, not RN-specific. Every module below is included — there is one plan, and it unlocks all of them.
Authoritative BLS median wages by nurse role — Registered Nurse, Nurse Practitioner, Nurse Midwife, and CRNA — national, 2025.
National job-openings and quits rates for health care & social assistance, 12-month trend. Monthly rates, all occupations in the sector — not RN-specific. Source: BLS JOLTS.
Annual registered nurse turnover measured from payroll records, not surveys. CMS requires every certified nursing home to submit payroll-verified staffing through the Payroll-Based Journal, which makes this the only nurse turnover figure in the country calculated from actual payroll.
Contract and agency staffing as a share of hospital direct-care labor cost, from Medicare cost reports every hospital files. This is the travel-nurse exposure figure, taken from audited filings rather than a survey.
How many registered nurses the country actually produces each year, against the shortage federal projections expect. Every accredited program reports completions to the Department of Education; this is the count, not an estimate.
Authoritative BLS RN wages for all 50 states + DC, with employment base for vacancy context.
BLS RN median, quartile pay and employment base for 60 metropolitan hiring markets — the market-level read behind a staffing plan.
CMS-measured registered nurse turnover for every state, from Payroll-Based Journal payroll records. Certified nursing homes — the only population with mandatory payroll-verified turnover reporting.
The largest hospital employers in each state by payroll size, with ownership, hospital type and how much of their direct-care labor is contract staff. Built from Medicare enrollment and filed cost reports — not from who happened to post a job this week.
RN median pay less twelve months of HUD Fair Market Rent, by metro. The number a candidate weighing two offers in different cities is actually comparing.
What share of each state’s hospital direct-care labor budget goes to contract and agency staff, from filed Medicare cost reports. The travel-nurse exposure number, by state, in dollars.
HRSA projected RN supply adequacy for 2028, tightest markets first, set against how many nurses each state actually graduates. Where you recruit is a different question from where you post.
Official BLS 10-year projections for the RN workforce — growth, new jobs, and the annual openings driven by growth plus replacement.
The new-nurse pipeline from NCSBN NCLEX results — how many RNs entered the workforce and at what first-time pass rate.
How long it takes to recruit an experienced RN — nationally, by region, and by specialty — with the hospital vacancy and turnover rates that go with it.
No tiers to compare and nothing held back — the whole Center, month to month.
Billed monthly · cancel any time from your Stripe receipt. One prevented nurse departure (avg. $60,090) covers a year of membership many times over. Questions? info@rnnet.org
| Source | What it covers | Published | Loaded |
|---|---|---|---|
| BLS OEWS | Wages - national, 51 states, 60 metros | Annual | 2025 |
| BLS JOLTS | Job openings and quits rates | Monthly | Jun 2026 |
| CMS Payroll-Based Journal | Nursing-home staffing and RN turnover | Monthly | Aug 2026 |
| CMS Hospital Cost Report | Hospital payroll and contract labor | Annual filings, monthly refresh | Sep 2024 |
| CMS Hospital Enrollments | Hospital ownership, brand and type | Monthly | Sep 2026 |
| HUD Fair Market Rents | Metro housing cost | Annual | 2026 |
| HRSA Health Workforce | RN supply and demand projections | Annual | Dec 2025 |
| NCES IPEDS | Nursing program completions | Annual | 2024 |
| BLS Employment Projections / NCSBN | Growth outlook and NCLEX pipeline | Annual | 2024–2034 |
| NSI Nursing Solutions | RN time to fill, vacancy and turnover (hospital survey) | Annual | 2026 report (CY2025) |
Wage figures come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics OEWS program — authoritative median and percentile pay for Registered Nurses, Nurse Practitioners, CRNAs, and Nurse Midwives, national and for all 50 states, refreshed as BLS publishes.
Job-openings (vacancy) and quits (turnover) rates come from BLS JOLTS, updated monthly with full trend history. Two things to note when you compare them with hospital figures. They are monthly rates, not annual — a 1.9% monthly quits rate compounds to roughly 20% a year. They cover all of health care & social assistance, which includes home health, nursing homes, dentistry, billing, and social services, so the sector rate is not a nursing rate. Hospital RN vacancy and turnover are published annually on an RN-only basis and sit at different levels by design.
No. Specialty demand, geographic hiring, velocity and employer activity were previously computed from RN Network postings. That source was retired in September 2026 and those modules came off the page with it — a chart drawn from a handful of postings is not worth what this subscription costs. Everything here is BLS OEWS, BLS JOLTS, BLS Employment Projections, or NCSBN, each shown with its own vintage.
Because they count different employers. The figure on this page comes from CMS Payroll-Based Journal submissions and covers certified nursing homes, where turnover has always run far higher than in acute care. Hospital RN turnover, published annually by industry survey, sits closer to the high teens. Neither number is wrong; they describe different populations, and we label every benchmark with the population it measures so the two are never mistaken for each other. Post-acute is also where CMS mandates payroll-verified reporting, which is why this figure is measured rather than self-reported.
It depends on the agency, and the table above shows the truth for each one rather than a single marketing claim. JOLTS and the CMS staffing, cost-report and enrollment files publish monthly. BLS OEWS wages, HUD Fair Market Rents, HRSA projections and IPEDS completions publish annually — no product can refresh those weekly, ours included. We re-check every source monthly and stamp each figure with its own vintage, so you always know how old a number is.
BLS median RN pay for the metro, less twelve months of HUD’s two-bedroom Fair Market Rent for that area. It reorders the map: San Jose has the highest rent on this list and still leaves an RN more money than anywhere else, while Boston carries the heaviest rent burden at a third of median pay. HUD sub-divides several large metros, so each row names the exact HUD area its rent covers. Cleveland is the one metro HUD and BLS define differently enough that we show pay without a rent figure rather than pair mismatched areas.
Medicare cost reports. Every participating hospital files one annually, and the direct-patient-care contract labor line is part of that filing — audited, not surveyed. We use full fiscal years only, so a hospital that changed its fiscal calendar or closed mid-year cannot distort a rate. About four in five qualifying hospitals break out contract labor; a blank means the hospital did not separate it, not that it spent nothing, so blanks are excluded from the median and each state carries its own reporting rate.
Not exactly, and it matters. Bachelor’s completions in nursing include RN-to-BSN degrees — nurses already working who returned for a further credential. Counting them as new entrants overstates the pipeline, so treat the completions figure as an upper bound. The tighter measure of genuinely new nurses is first-time NCLEX candidates, which we publish alongside it in the Licensure & Pipeline module. We would rather show you both numbers and explain the gap than pick the flattering one.
You can benchmark it against the market on every measure here — pay by metro and state, time to fill for an experienced RN, hospital vacancy and turnover, nursing-home RN turnover, hospital contract-labor dependency, pay after housing cost, and projected supply. What the Center does not hold is your internal data: it is built entirely on the federal statistical record, so nothing you file with us is required and nothing about your facility is inferred. Data last refreshed Sep 1, 2026.
One plan, every module — the benchmarks, heatmaps and projections your team plans around, for your own state rather than a national average.