Licensure
NCLEX-RN: The License, and Why the Degree Behind It Does Not Change It
This is the one credential on this site you are legally required to hold, and it is the only page here filed under certifications that is not about a certification. The NCLEX-RN is a licensure examination. You sit it once, with whichever approved program got you to the door, and the license that follows does not record which one that was.
Who Sets the NCLEX-RN Exam Requirements
Two organizations, two different jobs, and almost every confusion about this exam comes from merging them.
NCSBN — the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, whose members are the boards themselves — develops and maintains the NCLEX-RN. It is the issuing body for the examination. NCSBN does not license anyone and you do not work for its approval.
Your state board of nursing licenses you. It decides whether your program is approved, whether your application is in order, whether you are eligible to sit, and it is the body that issues the license once you have passed. Everything with a number attached — what it costs, what the sequence is, what happens on a retake, what renewal asks of you — belongs to that board, and it is not the same board in every state.
So the exam is national and the license is not. That is worth carrying with you through the rest of this page, because it is also the reason the degree question resolves the way it does.
The Same Exam, Whichever Program You Sat
Three approved routes lead to the NCLEX-RN: an associate degree, a hospital diploma where one is still offered, and a pre-licensure bachelor's. All three end at the same examination. There is no BSN version of the NCLEX-RN, no separate associate-degree version, and no advanced pass sitting above the ordinary one. The license that comes out the other side carries no mark of which program produced it.
That single fact is the most useful thing on this site, because it is the fact that a decade of program marketing has worked hardest to leave vague. A nurse reading copy that implies the associate degree left something unfinished at the licensing level is being sold to. Nothing was left unfinished. The board issued the same license it issues to everyone else, and your scope of practice comes from your state's nurse practice act and your employer's policies, neither of which is written in terms of degrees.
The federal data agrees with the license, which is a useful check. BLS files 3,379,720 registered nurse jobs as a single occupation, SOC 29-1141, and its file contains no degree field at all. It is not a gap in the survey. It reflects the thing the survey is counting: one license, held by nurses who arrived at it three different ways.
Source: BLS OEWS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 release, SOC 29-1141 (Registered Nurses). Reported as one occupation with no breakdown by degree.
A License and a Certification Are Not the Same Object
The two words get used interchangeably by nearly everyone selling a nurse a degree, and keeping them apart is what tells you which questions are even answerable and who can answer them.
| The RN license (NCLEX-RN) | A specialty certification | |
|---|---|---|
| Who grants it | A state board of nursing. | A professional certifying body, independent of any state. |
| Is it optional | No. Practicing as a registered nurse without it is illegal. | Yes. You can hold the job, and the license, without one. |
| Where it applies | The jurisdiction that issued it. Moving states runs through your new board — endorsement, or a multistate license where that applies — not back through the exam. | Wherever the employer recognizes it. It does not depend on which state you live in. |
| What it establishes | That you may practice as a registered nurse at all. | That you have met one body's standard in a specialty. |
| Where a degree can enter | Not in who may sit the exam. New York’s 2017 law is the one place a degree attaches to a license anywhere in the country, and it applies after licensure. | Wherever the issuing body writes one into its own eligibility routes. Some do, some do not, and the body is the only place that answer exists. |
| Who answers your question about it | Your board of nursing. | The body that issues it. |
Read down the last row and you have the shape of this whole site. The license is degree-blind at the point of entry. The places where a bachelor's genuinely functions as a gate are all downstream of it: a certifying body's eligibility routes, an employer's hiring policy, a graduate school's admissions page. Each of those is a specific organization with a specific published rule, and each of them can be read before you enroll anywhere.
Which is a better position than it sounds. A law would be non-negotiable. A hiring policy is a document you can ask your manager for, and a certification's eligibility page is a document you can read tonight. The certifications section covers the credentials nurses stack on top of the license, and charge nurse covers the first rung where employer policy usually bites.
What Finishing an RN-to-BSN Does to Your License
At the board: nothing. You do not re-sit the NCLEX-RN, you do not apply for a different license, your license number does not change, and there is no BSN-level license that exists to be upgraded to. A completion program adds a degree to your education, not a credential to your practice.
The relationship runs the other way round, in fact. The license is the entry requirement for the degree. Every one of the 362 completion tracks confirmed on this site is built for nurses who are already licensed — that separation is the whole point of our methodology, because the federal data files completion tracks and pre-licensure BSN degrees under one code and most ranked lists never split them. The 290 ranked programs across 24 state pages are the ones you can actually enroll in.
The one exception in the country, stated exactly. New York passed a law in 2017 requiring nurses licensed in the state after it took effect to earn a bachelor's or higher in nursing within ten years of initial licensure. Nurses already licensed when it took effect are grandfathered. Note what it does not do: it does not change who may sit the NCLEX-RN, and it does not add a degree requirement to getting licensed. It is a condition of keeping a license, for one defined group, in one state. The New York rankings carry it alongside the programs there.
The other number readers arrive holding is the 80% target, which came from the Institute of Medicine's 2010 Future of Nursing report and recommended that share of the workforce hold a bachelor's by 2020. It was a recommendation. It was not met, it was never enacted anywhere, and it has never had any bearing on a license. What it did do was give hospital systems a figure to write into their own hiring policies, which is where most of the pressure a working nurse feels actually comes from.
Where to Check RN Licensing Requirements
Everything specific about sitting this exam is jurisdictional and it moves. Fees change, applications get restructured, boards revise their rules, and a third-party page reprinting last year's version looks exactly like one reprinting this year's. There are two places worth reading, and both publish their own current answers.
The exam — NCSBN, which develops the NCLEX-RN and publishes what candidates need to know about it.
Your license — the board of nursing in the state you intend to be licensed in. It is the only body that can answer a question about your application, and its answer is the one that counts.
Take these to the board rather than to a search engine:
- Whether your nursing program is approved for licensure in that state.
- What the application asks for, what it costs, and in what order the steps happen.
- How a retake is handled, and what has to happen between attempts.
- What renewal requires of you, and on what cycle.
- How a license from another state is recognized, and whether a multistate license is available to you.
- What an internationally educated nurse has to file before sitting the exam.
If you are already licensed, none of that list is your problem any more, and the question that replaces it is a different one: what does the employer or the graduate program you are aiming at ask for, in writing. That is the question the rest of this site is built to answer.
If You Have Not Sat It Yet
Most people reading this site passed the NCLEX-RN years ago. Two groups have not, and the sequence matters differently for each.
Nursing students planning ahead. The license comes first, and it is not a formality you can skip past to the bachelor's. RN-to-BSN completion programs are post-licensure by construction — they assume the nursing content your approved program already covered and build the upper-level coursework on top of it. Sit the exam, get licensed, then choose a completion program with the leverage of being someone hospitals want to keep, which is also when tuition benefits usually become available to you.
LPNs and LVNs. Your license came from a different examination, the NCLEX-PN, and it is not a shorter version of this one. Becoming an RN means an approved RN program and then the NCLEX-RN, and the LPN-to-RN and LPN-to-BSN bridges are longer routes than the RN-to-BSN completion programs ranked here. Your board is the place to confirm which programs it approves and what your existing license counts for on the way in.
Licensed already and moving states. You do not sit the exam again. A license held in one state is recognized in another through your new board — by endorsement, or through a multistate license where that applies — and that board sets the terms. It is paperwork, not a re-examination.
Questions About Taking the NCLEX-RN
Do you need a BSN to take the NCLEX-RN?
Is the NCLEX-RN a certification?
Do you retake the NCLEX-RN after finishing an RN-to-BSN?
How much does the NCLEX-RN cost, and what does registration involve?
Nursing Careers and Degree Options
- Registered nurse — what the license permits day to day, and what the bachelor's adds on top of it.
- RN-to-BSN rankings — 290 completion programs across 24 states, scored on tuition and graduation rate.
- Methodology — how post-licensure completion tracks are separated from pre-licensure BSN degrees, and why that separation exists.
- Certifications — the voluntary credentials that sit on top of the license, each with its own issuing body and its own rules.