Nurse Practitioners Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Nurse Practitioners ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $109,940. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

With 307,390 jobs nationally, Nurse Practitioners make up 0.20% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Florida alone holds 24,690 of those jobs, the top three states hold 21.9%, and the deepest concentration sits in Tennessee (location quotient 2.19, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $109,940 at the 25th percentile, $129,210 at the middle, $149,570 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $71,990, a ratio of 1.7 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

The state spread for Nurse Practitioners runs from the $166,610 median in California down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in Florida (24,690 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Nurse Practitioners stands number 118 by employment and number 55 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations, the group median wage is $98,340 across 71 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 31% more than its group median, and it supplies 3.2% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 19 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $129,210, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 19,850 jobs, 6.5% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Johnson City, TN posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $90,850 a year, against $223,530 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $129,210 a year is $10,768 a month gross, $4,970 every two weeks, $2,485 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($109,940) to the 75th ($149,570) is worth $39,630 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $10,768 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $142,131 would sit between the median ($129,210) and the 75th percentile ($149,570), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $109,940, is $19,270 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons, Orthodontists, Medical Dosimetrists, Genetic Counselors, Pediatric Surgeons, Prosthodontists. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.