Nurses are the largest single group of health care professionals in the United States and the world, the steady hands that keep hospitals, clinics, schools, and communities running. But behind the familiar image of a nurse at a bedside sits a sprawling profession under enormous pressure and in the middle of rapid change: an aging workforce, a persistent shortage, climbing wages, widespread burnout, and a public that trusts nurses more than almost anyone else.
The best way to understand where nursing stands right now is to look at the data. Below is a comprehensive, up-to-date look at nursing statistics — how many nurses there are, what they earn, how fast the field is growing, why the shortage refuses to go away, who nurses are, and how the picture looks around the globe. Wherever possible, the figures come from primary sources: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, Gallup, and the World Health Organization. (A full source list appears at the end.)
How Many Nurses Are There?
Start with the headline number, and you immediately run into a useful complication: there's more than one way to count nurses.
By licenses, the profession is enormous. According to the 2024 National Nursing Workforce Survey — the largest and most comprehensive survey of its kind, conducted every two years by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN) and the National Forum of State Nursing Workforce Centers — there were about 5.64 million active registered nurse (RN) licenses in the United States at the start of 2024, along with roughly 969,000 active licenses for licensed practical and vocational nurses (LPNs/LVNs).
By jobs actually worked, the number is smaller. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) counted about 3.39 million registered nurse jobs in 2024. Why the gap? A single nurse can hold licenses in more than one state, and many people who hold an active RN license aren't currently working in a nursing role — they may be retired, working in another field, or taking time away from the profession. The NCSBN survey found that around 88% of nurses were actively working, most of them full time. Both numbers are "real"; they just measure different things — the total pool of credentialed nurses versus the nurses on the floor.
Either way, nursing dwarfs most other health professions. There are roughly five times as many nurses in the United States as there are physicians, and nursing consistently makes up the single largest share of the country's health care workforce. Hospitals remain the biggest employer, accounting for more than half of all working RNs, while LPNs/LVNs are concentrated more heavily in nursing homes and extended-care facilities.
The advanced-practice tier has grown into a substantial workforce of its own. There are now well over 385,000 licensed nurse practitioners (NPs) in the United States — nurses with graduate degrees who can assess patients, diagnose conditions, and in many states prescribe medication and practice independently.
What Nurses Earn
Nursing pay has risen sharply in recent years, and registered nursing is now solidly a six-figure-adjacent career at the median — and well past six figures on average in some states.
The BLS reported a median annual wage for registered nurses of $93,600 as of May 2024, which works out to about $45.00 an hour. The median is the midpoint: half of RNs earn more, half earn less. The spread around that midpoint is wide. The lowest-paid 10% of RNs earn roughly $66,000 a year, while the highest-paid 10% earn upward of $135,000 — a reflection of how much experience, location, specialty, shift differentials, and overtime can move an individual nurse's paycheck. The 2024 National Nursing Workforce Survey found that nurses with more than a decade of experience could earn as much as $30,000 more per year than those with a year or less on the job.
Geography matters enormously. California stands out as the highest-paying state for registered nurses, with an average RN salary around $148,000 — a figure that remains well above the national average even after the state's high cost of living is factored in. Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and other West Coast and Northeast states also rank near the top, while lower-paying states tend to pair smaller salaries with a more affordable cost of living.
Specialty is the other big lever. Among the highest earners in all of nursing are Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNAs), whose average pay commonly exceeds $200,000 a year, putting them in the same range as many physicians. Nurse practitioners and other advanced-practice registered nurses (APRNs) also earn substantially more than staff RNs, reflecting their graduate education and expanded scope of practice. At the other end of the licensing ladder, LPNs/LVNs earn considerably less — the BLS puts their average pay in the high $60,000s — but they also require less schooling to enter the field.
A Profession Growing Faster Than Most
Even with a large existing workforce, demand for nurses keeps climbing, and the federal government expects the field to keep expanding through the mid-2030s.
The BLS projects that employment of registered nurses will grow about 5% from 2024 to 2034 — faster than the average for all occupations — adding roughly 166,000 jobs over the decade. But the more striking figure is the number of annual openings: about 189,000 openings for registered nurses are projected each year, on average, over that period. Most of those openings aren't from growth at all; they come from the constant need to replace nurses who move into other occupations or leave the workforce entirely, including the large cohort heading toward retirement.
Advanced practice is where the growth really accelerates. The BLS projects that the combined category of nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, and nurse anesthetists will grow about 34% between 2024 and 2034 — one of the fastest growth rates of any occupation in the economy — with roughly 32,700 new nurse practitioner positions opening up each year. Nurse practitioner has repeatedly landed at or near the top of the government's lists of the fastest-growing jobs, and recent BLS analyses have found that several nursing roles rank among the occupations expected to add the most new jobs of any kind over the coming decade. By one count, five of the 20 fastest-growing occupations sit within the nursing field.
The forces behind this are demographic and durable. The U.S. population is aging; by 2030, every Baby Boomer will be 65 or older, and that generation will account for roughly one in five Americans. Older populations use more health care, need more chronic-disease management, and require more long-term support — all of which translates directly into demand for nurses.
The Nursing Shortage That Won't Quit
For all the growth, the United States keeps running short of nurses — and the shortage is less a single national number than a patchwork of local crises.
The consulting firm McKinsey projected in 2022 that the country could be short somewhere between 200,000 and 450,000 registered nurses providing direct patient care by 2025, and subsequent data suggest that projection was roughly on target. Between 2022 and 2025, analyses drawing on federal data found RN supply growing only about 1% while demand rose around 3%, leaving a national shortfall estimated in the ballpark of 295,000 nurses. Federal projections cited in 2025 and 2026 continued to point to shortfalls on the order of 100,000-plus full-time nurses in the near term.
HRSA — the federal agency that models the health workforce — projects a national nursing shortage of roughly 10% in 2027, with the gap persisting for years afterward. But the national figure hides dramatic geographic inequality. HRSA expects non-metropolitan areas to face far steeper shortages than cities: a projected 24% shortfall in rural and non-metro areas in 2027, versus about 7% in metro areas. Rural and underserved communities, in other words, bear the brunt.
State-level projections vary just as widely. Modeling of supply and demand has pointed to some states facing large absolute deficits — California, for example, has been projected to run tens of thousands of RNs short — while other states are projected to have more nurses than they need. Looking further out, HRSA analyses suggest that even by 2037, around 29 states will still be experiencing some level of nursing shortage, though in several of them the gap will be small.
Perhaps the most sobering statistic concerns nurses' own intentions. NCSBN research has found that more than 600,000 registered nurses — nearly one in five — indicated they intend to leave the workforce by 2027, and a significant share of them, roughly 200,000, are under the age of 40. That last detail matters: a shortage driven only by retirements is a manageable, predictable problem. A shortage in which large numbers of early- and mid-career nurses are heading for the exits points to something deeper about working conditions.
The picture for LPNs/LVNs is arguably worse. HRSA has projected that the supply of licensed practical and vocational nurses will meet only about 80% of demand in 2027, falling to roughly 64% by 2037. The supply of nurse practitioners, by contrast, is projected to exceed demand at the national level in the coming years — though, as with RNs, how those NPs are distributed across states and between urban and rural areas will shape whether patients can actually reach one.
Who Nurses Are: A Changing Workforce
The demographic profile of nursing is shifting in ways that will define the profession for the next generation.
The workforce is aging. The 2024 National Nursing Workforce Survey put the median age of both RNs and LPNs/LVNs at 50 years. Nurses aged 65 or older now make up the single largest age bracket of the RN workforce, at about 18.3% — a notable jump from roughly 13.2% just two years earlier. Interestingly, survey analysts read the return to a median age around 50 as a sign that some experienced older nurses who had stepped away during the pandemic came back in the following two years. Still, a workforce with this many nurses near or past traditional retirement age is a workforce with a lot of institutional knowledge poised to walk out the door.
It remains overwhelmingly female — but less so than before. Nursing is still one of the most female-dominated professions in the country, with women making up roughly 88% of registered nurses and men about 12%, according to workforce data. That said, the share of men has been climbing steadily over the decades, and nursing organizations have made active recruitment of men a priority. It's worth remembering that men were among the earliest nurses in history; the strong association between nursing and women is a relatively modern development.
It's slowly becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. Comparing the 2024 NCSBN survey with earlier waves, the share of RNs identifying as White declined from about 80% to 77%, while the share identifying as Black or African American rose from about 6% to 9%, and the share identifying as Hispanic or Latino reached roughly 7%. (Federal data from HRSA, which codes race and ethnicity differently, put the RN workforce at roughly two-thirds White, with smaller shares of Asian, Black, and Hispanic nurses.) Either way, the trend line points toward gradually increasing diversity — though nursing, like much of health care, still does not fully mirror the diversity of the U.S. population it serves.
Nurses are more educated than they used to be. The share of RNs whose initial nursing education was a bachelor's degree (BSN) rather than an associate degree or diploma rose from about 39% in 2015 to about 46% by 2024. That shift reflects a long-running, evidence-backed push within the profession toward higher educational attainment, driven in part by research linking a more highly educated nursing workforce to better patient outcomes.
Burnout, Turnover, and the Cost of Losing Nurses
If you want to understand why the shortage persists despite rising pay and strong demand, the working-conditions statistics tell much of the story.
Burnout remains widespread, even if it has eased slightly from its pandemic-era peak. A 2026 nurse salary and work-life report found that about 53% of nurses said they had experienced burnout in the previous two years — an improvement from roughly 59% in 2024, but still more than half the workforce. A separate 2025 university survey of registered nurses painted a starker picture of day-to-day strain: about 74% of respondents said they felt emotionally drained from work multiple times a week, and among the youngest, Gen Z nurses, the numbers were worse still.
The drivers nurses cite are remarkably consistent: salary dissatisfaction, unresponsive leadership, unmanageable nurse-to-patient ratios, and the sheer weight of documentation all rank near the top of the list. Many nurses also report feeling unheard within their organizations — a factor that surfaces again and again in retention research. And burnout isn't just an emotional toll; nurses frequently report worrying that fatigue could contribute to an error, underscoring how working conditions and patient safety are linked.
Turnover is the expensive downstream result. Industry analyses in 2025 and 2026 found that annual RN turnover ticked back up after a few years of post-pandemic improvement, with turnover rates varying sharply by setting — running highest in areas like behavioral health, emergency care, telemetry, and step-down units, and higher still in long-term-care facilities. The financial stakes are large: replacing a single bedside RN has been estimated to cost roughly $60,000 when recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity are tallied up. For a typical hospital, that can add up to millions of dollars a year — meaning every percentage point of turnover carries a real price tag, and retention is as much a financial issue as a human one.
The Most Trusted Profession in America
Amid all the strain, one statistic has stayed remarkably stable: the public's trust.
In Gallup's annual Honesty and Ethics poll conducted in December 2025, about 75% of U.S. adults rated nurses' honesty and ethical standards as "very high" or "high" — placing nursing first among every profession measured. According to the American Nurses Association, that marked the 24th consecutive year that nurses topped the poll, a streak no other profession comes close to matching.
The context makes the ranking even more striking. Americans have grown broadly more skeptical of institutions and professions; Gallup found ethics ratings at or near record lows across most occupations it tracks, with even long-respected groups like teachers and clergy slipping. Nurses' own rating has come down from its pandemic-era high — it peaked around 85% in 2020, when public gratitude for health workers surged — but nurses still lead the next-closest professions by a wide margin. In a moment when trust is scarce, the public continues to place more of it in nurses than in almost anyone else.
The Global Picture
Zoom out from the United States and the same themes — growth, shortage, and inequality — play out on a global scale.
The World Health Organization's State of the World's Nursing 2025 report, released on International Nurses Day and compiled with the International Council of Nurses using data from all 194 WHO member states, estimated the global nursing workforce at about 29.8 million in 2023, up from roughly 27.9 million in 2018. Nurses make up the largest share of the world's health workforce, and the total is projected to keep climbing — potentially reaching around 36 million by 2030.
Yet a large global shortage remains. The WHO estimated a worldwide shortfall of about 5.8 million nurses in 2023 — an improvement from the 6.2 million gap measured in 2020, and projected to narrow further to around 4.1 million by 2030 if current gains hold. The encouraging trend line, however, masks profound inequity. Roughly 46% of the world's nurses work in high-income countries that are home to only about 17% of the global population. The result is that the shortage falls most heavily on low- and middle-income countries. By the WHO's projections, nearly 70% of the global nursing shortfall will be concentrated in Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean region by 2030, even as wealthier nations grow their workforces and, in many cases, recruit nurses trained abroad.
This global dimension has direct implications for the United States and other high-income countries. Many are increasingly relying on internationally trained nurses to fill gaps, a strategy that eases shortages in wealthy nations while potentially deepening them in the countries those nurses leave — one reason the WHO urges that international recruitment be managed carefully and ethically.
What the Numbers Add Up To
Taken together, the statistics sketch a profession caught between two powerful truths.
On one hand, nursing has rarely been in higher demand or better positioned. Wages have climbed past $90,000 at the median and well beyond that in high-paying states and specialties. Job growth is faster than average for RNs and explosive for nurse practitioners. Advanced-practice roles are expanding nurses' authority and autonomy. And the public trusts nurses more than any other profession, year after year after year.
On the other hand, the workforce is aging, a large slice of it plans to leave within a few years, burnout still touches more than half of all nurses, turnover is costly and creeping back up, and the shortage — while modest as a single national percentage — bites hard in rural areas, in specific states, and in lower- and middle-income countries around the world.
The through-line is that nursing's biggest challenge is no longer really about attracting people to the field; interest in nursing careers remains strong, and nursing schools routinely turn away qualified applicants for lack of capacity. The challenge is keeping the nurses we have — supporting them well enough, staffing units safely enough, and building working conditions humane enough that the profession's newest members don't become part of the "intend to leave" statistic. The numbers make the stakes unmistakable: when a nurse leaves, a hospital loses money, a unit loses experience, and a community loses a little of the care it depends on.
If there's a hopeful note in the data, it's this: nurses remain the most trusted people in American public life, and demand for what they do is only growing. The question the statistics pose isn't whether the world needs nurses. It's whether the systems around them will change fast enough to keep them.
Sources
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Registered Nurses (May 2024 wage and employment data; 2024–34 projections) — bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/registered-nurses.htm
- National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN) & National Forum of State Nursing Workforce Centers, 2024 National Nursing Workforce Survey (published in the Journal of Nursing Regulation, 2025) — ncsbn.org
- Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), National Center for Health Workforce Analysis, nurse workforce projections (2024–2038) — bhw.hrsa.gov
- McKinsey & Company, U.S. nursing shortage projections (2022)
- Gallup, Honesty and Ethics poll (December 2025) — news.gallup.com
- American Nurses Association, statements on the 2025 Gallup poll — nursingworld.org
- World Health Organization & International Council of Nurses, State of the World's Nursing 2025 — who.int
- Nurse salary, burnout, and turnover reporting from Nurse.com, Nurse.org, NurseJournal, and industry workforce analyses (2025–2026)
Figures reflect the most recent data available as of 2025–2026 and are drawn from the sources above. Statistics on wages, workforce size, and shortages are periodically updated by these organizations, so check the primary sources for the latest numbers before citing them.