Registered Nurses Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Registered Nurses worker at that point in the distribution, so $107,960 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 3,282,010, or 2.13% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 326,720 jobs; the top three states sum to 24.6% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: South Dakota posts a location quotient of 1.50, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $78,610 at the 25th percentile, $93,600 at the middle, $107,960 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $69,290, a ratio of 2.0 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 Registered Nurses runs from the $140,330 median in California down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (326,720 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Registered Nurses stands number 5 by employment and number 151 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 5% less than its group median, and it supplies 34.2% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 17 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $93,600, 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 195,470 jobs, 6.0% 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, Aguadilla, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $35,210 a year, against $189,880 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $7,800 a month before tax, $3,600 biweekly, $1,800 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($78,610) to the 75th ($107,960) is worth $29,350 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $102,960 would sit between the median ($93,600) and the 75th percentile ($107,960), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $78,610, is $14,990 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: Psychiatrists, Surgeons, All Other, Surgical Assistants, Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Therapists, All Other, Radiation Therapists. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.