Registered Nurse salary by state in 2026

BLS puts the median pay for a registered nurse at $97,550 a year, or $46.90 an hour, in its May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics estimates (OEWS, 29-1141). Almost no nurse is paid that. The state medians underneath it run from $77,080 in Alabama to $140,270 in California — a spread of $63,190 on the same license, often for the same twelve-hour shift.

Below is the median in all fifty states and the District of Columbia from that release, then the three things the ranking does not measure, and the field on a job posting that moves pay half as far as a state border does.

What a registered nurse earns in each state

Median means the middle: half the registered nurses in that state earned more, half earned less. The third column is the distance from the national median of $97,550. All figures are annual, from the OEWS estimates for May 2025.

How to read this: four states — California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington — sit more than $24,000 above the national median. After Alaska at $109,480, the other forty-six jurisdictions all fall between $11,890 above that median (New York) and $20,470 below it (Alabama). The middle is crowded. Nineteen of them, ranks 10 through 28, sit within $6,000 of $97,550; Vermont, at $97,460, is $90 under it, and Colorado ranks fourteenth while Arizona ranks eighteenth on a difference of $760. Alabama and Mississippi are $10 apart. A rank is a worse thing to carry into a negotiation than a dollar figure.

These are medians, not averages, and for this occupation the difference is not decorative. The national mean is $101,420 against a median of $97,550, because a long upper tail of experienced and specialized nurses drags an average upward without moving the middle. Hawaii runs the other way: a median of $136,320 against an annual mean of $124,340. Quote a mean at an employer and you are quoting a figure that a handful of very high or very low earners can set on their own, which is why every number in the table above is a median.

A state row is that state's entire nursing workforce collapsed into one number, and inside a large state it hides a range wider than the whole ranking above it. BLS publishes the same estimate for metropolitan areas. In the San Jose metro the May 2025 median for registered nurses is $216,740; in the El Centro metro, at the other end of the same state, it is $103,450. That is $113,290 apart on one license under one board of nursing — against $63,190 from California to Alabama. If you can name the metro you are applying in, the metro figure is the one to use, and the state row is background.

Why 33 states sit below the national median

The national median is a median of nurses, not of states, and nurses are not spread evenly across the map. California employed 338,940 registered nurses in May 2025 and pays the highest median in the country, so it pulls the national figure up past most of the states underneath it.

Registered nurses employed, by state, May 2025

The five largest state workforces. California and Texas together account for roughly 610,000 of the 3,379,720 registered nurses BLS counted nationally.

California		338,940Median $140,270
Texas		271,380Median $95,970
Florida		229,940Median $84,190
New York		205,810Median $109,440
Pennsylvania		146,520Median $96,430

Only 18 of the 51 jurisdictions in the table clear $97,550. A registered nurse in Ohio measuring an offer against "the national number" is measuring it against a figure California helped set, and will read themselves as $15,040 underpaid when the honest comparison for that job is Ohio's own $82,510.

Size is not the only thing that varies. BLS also reports how many nurses a state employs per 1,000 jobs of any kind, and across the fifty-one rows that measure runs close to backwards against pay. West Virginia is the densest jurisdiction in the country at 33.4 registered nurses per 1,000 jobs, and its $80,130 median ranks 45th. South Dakota is second at 32.2 and ranks 49th. California, first on pay at $140,270, ranks 48th on density at 18.6 per 1,000 — thinner than Mississippi, which employs 29,060 registered nurses at 25.0 per 1,000 and pays the second-lowest median in the country. Delaware is the exception that stops this being a rule: 29.5 per 1,000 and a $99,520 median, seventeenth. Where nursing is a larger share of local employment is mostly not where nursing pays more, so the intuition that a state leaning hard on nurses must be bidding hard for them does not survive its own data. What this measure is not: OEWS counts jobs that are filled, not jobs that are open, so nothing here identifies where the vacancies are.

What the state figure leaves out

This is the part that matters most in nursing, and it lives in the survey's definitions rather than in its tables. OEWS wages are straight-time gross pay, exclusive of premium pay. The exclusion list BLS publishes names overtime pay, shift differentials, weekend premium pay, on-call pay, non-production bonuses and year-end bonuses.

Now set that beside how the work is scheduled. The Occupational Outlook Handbook says registered nurses in hospitals usually work in shifts to provide round-the-clock coverage, and may work nights, weekends and holidays or be on call. Hospitals employ 59 percent of all registered nurses.

So the table above ranks base rates, not paychecks, and for a night-shift hospital nurse every figure in it is low. That is a real objection to the way salary pages, this one included, invite you to read a state ranking. It also explains a pattern nurses notice and the published data denies: a Registered Nurse in Tennessee working three nights a week can clear the state's $81,500 median by a wide margin, while a Monday-to-Friday clinic nurse in the next building lands close to it. What the data does not show is how large those differentials are, or whether they run richer in high-paying states than in low-paying ones. No federal source ranks states on total nursing earnings, because BLS collects the base rate and stops there.

Two smaller mechanics change how the numbers should be read. OEWS covers part-time and full-time workers alike, and its annual wages are calculated on a full-time, year-round schedule of 2,080 hours — so a nurse at 0.6 FTE sits inside the hourly figure but not inside any annual figure they will ever be paid. And every number on this page is in plain dollars. The OEWS FAQ names cost of living among the reasons wages differ from one area to another, which makes it a reason for the spread in the table, not something the estimates have taken out of it.

How much does the industry you work in change registered nurse pay?

State is the comparison everyone makes. Setting is the one that gets skipped, and nationally it is worth about half as much.

Median annual wage for registered nurses by industry, May 2025

National medians across the five industries BLS reports for this occupation. Top to bottom is $32,160 — about half the $63,190 gap between the highest- and lowest-paying states.

Government		$110,780
Hospitals; state, local, private		$100,220
Ambulatory healthcare services		$91,230
Nursing and residential care		$84,300
Educational services		$78,620

Read the two figures together and a posting starts to decode itself. A Registered Nurse in Pennsylvania sees a state median of $96,430, but a county public health role there draws on the $110,780 government line and a school nursing role on the $78,620 educational services line. Same license, same state, a difference bigger than the one between Pennsylvania and Alabama. Ambulatory healthcare services — clinics, surgical centers, dialysis — employs 19 percent of registered nurses at a $91,230 median, and nursing and residential care facilities employ another 6 percent at $84,300.

The range inside one state is wider than the range between states

The bottom tenth of California's nurses earn $101,260, which is more than the national median for the whole occupation. California's 10th-to-90th spread is $112,060 — wider than the $63,190 between the highest- and lowest-paying states. Texas is tighter at $60,830, and even that is nearly the whole California-to-Alabama gap inside one state. Experience, specialty, employer and hours all live in that spread, and this data separates none of them.

Is $97,550 up from two years ago?

Yes, and by more than the usual drift. The May 2023 OEWS estimate for registered nurses was a median of $86,070 against employment of 3,175,390. The May 2025 estimate is $97,550 against employment of 3,379,720. That is $11,480, or 13.3 percent, across two survey years.

It is not a raise anyone received. A moving median is a change in the middle of a changing population — which employers responded, where nurses moved, and what mix of experience the survey caught, all at once.

What the 6 percent projection does and does not promise

The Occupational Outlook Handbook projects employment of registered nurses to grow 6 percent from 2025 to 2035, which BLS labels faster than average, and about 180,800 openings a year over that decade. Most of those openings are not new positions, and the Handbook's own projection table says by how much: 3,465,400 jobs in 2025 to 3,660,100 in 2035 is 194,700 added across ten years, roughly 19,500 a year against 180,800 openings. The other nine-tenths come from nurses moving into different occupations or leaving the labor force — the same mechanism that fills one job twice in five years.

The reason BLS gives for the growth is demographic: demand for healthcare services is projected to rise because of the large number of older people, who typically have more medical problems than younger people. That projection is national. It does not say which states add the jobs, and it says nothing at all about pay — a growing occupation and a rising wage are separate claims, and the Handbook only makes the first.

Is a $63,190 gap worth moving for?

Not on its own, and the data here cannot settle it. California's median runs 82 percent above Alabama's, and the metro figures run further still: the Sacramento metro's May 2025 median is $171,460. Whether $171,460 in Sacramento buys more than $77,080 in Alabama is a question about rent and taxes, and OEWS does not touch it. This post will not pretend to answer it either.

Two frictions are concrete. Every state issues its own registered nurse license through its own board of nursing, so a move is a licensing project before it is a payroll one. And the four states at the top of the table are public information, published free by BLS every year, so expect company on the postings there — though nothing in OEWS measures applicants per opening, and this post is not going to guess at it.

The narrower version of the same move is usually the better trade. Staying put and changing which industry line you are paid from — hospital to government, school to clinic — captures a large share of the same money, and it is a job search rather than a relocation.

If you are applying for this role

Three specifics, in the order they will help.

Search the specialty names BLS uses, not only "registered nurse." The Handbook's own list runs through critical care, cardiovascular, neonatal, nephrology, rehabilitation, addiction and public health nursing. Employers put those words in the title, and a title-only search for one term hides most of the market from you.

Anchor your number to two lines rather than one: the local median — your metro's if BLS publishes one, your state's from the table above if it does not — and then the industry median for the setting you are applying to. A Registered Nurse applying to a county health department in Ohio should be quoting against the $110,780 government median, not against Ohio's $82,510 or the national $97,550.

Then ask one question before you accept anything: what is the shift differential, the weekend rate and the on-call rate? Every figure on this page excludes all three, and in hospital work they are the part of an offer that varies most between two employers advertising the same base rate.

If the same license, certifications and clinical history are going into twenty different hospital application forms, the platform can fill those forms from your resume so your time goes into the three questions above instead of the typing.