Nurse Salary Statistics 2026
Registered nurses in the United States earn a national median wage of $97,550 a year. Pay runs from $68,940 at the 10th percentile to $137,470 at the 90th. The highest-paid nursing occupation is nurse anesthetists, at a median of $236,590.
Wage estimates: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025. Group medians, ratios and counts are PayCrunch calculations from those estimates.
Pay for the 7 nursing occupations that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports under their own SOC codes in the OEWS release of May 2025, from nursing assistants to nurse anesthetists, with national and best-state figures for each.
Key statistics
Each line is one figure with its source. Quote any of them directly; the citation format is at the foot of the page.
- Registered nurses in the United States earn a national median wage of $97,550 a year.Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025.
- Registered nurse pay at the 10th percentile is $68,940 a year.Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025.
- Registered nurse pay at the 90th percentile is $137,470 a year.Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025.
- The best-paying state for registered nurses is California, where the 90th-percentile wage is $213,320 and OEWS reports 338,940 registered nurses employed.Source: PayCrunch calculation from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025.
- Nurse anesthetists are the highest-paid nursing occupation, at a national median of $236,590 a year.Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025.
- Nurse practitioners earn a national median of $132,300 a year.Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025.
- Licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses earn a national median of $64,400 a year.Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025.
- Nursing assistants earn a national median of $42,260 a year, the lowest of the 7 nursing occupations.Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025.
- The nurse anesthetist median is 5.6 times the nursing assistant median.Source: PayCrunch calculation from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025.
- 3 of the 7 nursing occupations have a national median wage of $100,000 or more.Source: PayCrunch calculation from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025.
- The registered nurse median is $36,210 higher than the median of all 824 occupational medians in the release, $61,340.Source: PayCrunch calculation from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025.
Every nursing occupation BLS tracks separately
OEWS reports 7 nursing occupations under their own SOC codes. Registered nurses are by far the largest of them and the figure most often quoted; the others span $42,260 at the bottom to $236,590 at the top. The median of the 7 nursing medians is $97,550, which is also the registered nurse median.
| Occupation▲ | SOC▲ | Entry (10th pct)▲ | Median▲ | Top of range (90th pct)▲ | Best-paying state▲ | 90th pct there▲ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nurse Anesthetists | 29-1151 | $155,250 | $236,590 | $339,500 | Florida | $416,000 |
| Nurse Midwives | 29-1161 | $93,620 | $134,040 | $188,320 | California | $227,590 |
| Nurse Practitioners | 29-1171 | $101,340 | $132,300 | $174,420 | California | $240,830 |
| Registered Nurses | 29-1141 | $68,940 | $97,550 | $137,470 | California | $213,320 |
| Nursing Instructors and Teachers, Postsecondary | 25-1072 | $48,800 | $80,250 | $129,500 | California | $164,450 |
| Licensed Practical and Licensed Vocational Nurses | 29-2061 | $49,740 | $64,400 | $83,440 | Washington | $100,950 |
| Nursing Assistants | 31-1131 | $33,940 | $42,260 | $51,980 | Washington | $62,660 |
National figures, BLS OEWS May 2025. Best-paying state uses the 500-employee floor.
Registered nurses in detail
Registered nurses have a national median of $97,550. The 10th percentile is $68,940 and the 90th percentile is $137,470, a range of $68,530. The best-paying state is California, where the 90th-percentile wage is $213,320 and OEWS reports 338,940 registered nurses employed. The state median there is $140,270.
Set against the whole labour market, the registered nurse median sits above the median of the 824 occupational medians, $61,340, and above 674 of the 824 occupations in the release.
Advanced practice and support roles
The spread inside nursing is wide. Nurse anesthetists have a median of $236,590 — 5.6 times the nursing assistant median of $42,260, and the highest of any occupation in the healthcare group outside physicians and surgeons. Nurse practitioners are at $132,300 and licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses at $64,400. 3 of the 7 nursing occupations have a median of $100,000 or more.
How to cite this page
Ready to paste:
PayCrunch (2026). Nurse Salary Statistics 2026. Aggregated from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025. https://paycrunch.co/stats/nurse-salary-statistics.html (accessed 31 August 2026).
For a single figure, name the occupation and the release — for example: “registered nurses earned a median of $97,550 a year (BLS, OEWS May 2025, via PayCrunch)”. Please credit the Bureau of Labor Statistics as well as PayCrunch: the wage estimates are theirs, and the aggregation is ours. Figures on this page were last recomputed on 31 August 2026 from the May 2025 release.
Method
Source
Every wage figure on this page comes from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release of May 2025, published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. No figure here is a PayCrunch estimate. What PayCrunch contributes is the aggregation: the counts, medians, means and rankings across occupations are computed from that release and are labelled as PayCrunch calculations wherever they appear.
What the three figures mean
Entry is the annual 10th percentile wage for the occupation nationally. Median is the 50th percentile. Top of range is the annual 90th percentile — the wage level below which 90 percent of the estimated wage distribution for that occupation falls. None of the three is a ceiling, a promise, or a statement about any individual.
The state figures
Where a state is named as best-paying, it is the state with the highest annual 90th-percentile wage among states that OEWS reports employing at least 500 people in that occupation. That employment floor is PayCrunch's rule, not the BLS's; it exists because unfiltered state estimates are frequently drawn from very small samples. The best-paying states dataset documents the floor in full and publishes the unfiltered answer alongside the filtered one for every occupation.
Rebuilding these numbers
The script that computes every figure on this page is .github/stats-engine/build_stats.py in the PayCrunch repository. It reads two files, /data/open/best-paying-states.json and the occupation page dataset, and regenerates all eight statistics pages. Nothing on this page is typed by hand.
Limitations
- OEWS is a survey. Every figure carries sampling error, and the error is largest where the occupation is smallest. BLS publishes relative standard errors alongside the estimates.
- These are occupational aggregates, not worker aggregates. Statistics here summarise the 824 occupation-level estimates, giving each occupation equal weight. They are not employment-weighted, so they do not describe the average American worker and should not be quoted as if they did.
- The 90th percentile is not a maximum. It is a point on a wage distribution. Pay above it exists.
- No cost-of-living adjustment. All figures are nominal annual wages.
- Wage and salary employment only. OEWS excludes the self-employed, so occupations with many independent workers are under-covered.
- SOC titles are classification labels, not job titles as employers use them, and one SOC code can cover several distinct jobs.
- One release only. These are May 2025 figures; OEWS releases are not straightforwardly comparable across years.
Frequently asked questions
Pay for individual occupations
PayCrunch pages for nursing roles. Specialty pages such as ICU or emergency room nurse carry the registered nurse SOC figures, which is stated on each page.
The full dataset behind these figures is on the best-paying states page, and every occupation is queryable through the PayCrunch API. All occupation pages →