What This Data Covers, and the Question It Cannot Answer
You came here to find out what the BSN is worth in dollars. The honest answer is that the federal wage survey cannot tell you, and it is better to hear that in the first screen than after four hundred words of throat-clearing.
The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program surveys employers and reports pay by occupation. Registered nurses are a single occupation in that system — SOC 29-1141 — and the survey asks employers what the job pays, not what credential the person holding it earned. So the $97,550 median is one number covering the hospital diploma nurse of thirty years, the ADN who qualified last spring, and the BSN and MSN nurses working beside them. Splitting it by degree would require data BLS does not collect.
Sites that publish a "BSN salary" and an "ADN salary" as separate figures are not reading this survey. They are usually reading self-reported salary aggregators, where nurses who chose to fill in a form describe their own pay, and where a BSN gap can appear for reasons that have nothing to do with the degree — BSN nurses are concentrated in magnet hospitals, in cities, and in states that pay more to begin with.
What the data below can do is answer the two questions that actually move a nurse's pay by five figures: which state you work in, and where you sit in a distribution that runs almost 2.0 to one from bottom to top. Both are larger effects than anything a transcript changes.
The National Picture
Half of the 3,379,720 registered nurses BLS counts earn more than $97,550 and half earn less. The middle half — everyone between the 25th and 75th percentiles — falls between $80,330 and $112,350, a band $32,020 wide.
| Percentile | Annual pay | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 10th percentile | $68,940 | The lowest-paid tenth earn under this |
| 25th percentile | $80,330 | A quarter earn under this |
| Median | $97,550 | The midpoint: $46.90 an hour |
| 75th percentile | $112,350 | A quarter earn over this |
| 90th percentile | $137,470 | The highest-paid tenth earn over this |
| Mean (average) | $101,420 | $3,870 above the median |
The mean sitting $3,870 above the median is the signature of a long tail at the top rather than a symmetrical spread. That tail is mostly geography and overtime: California, travel contracts, and per-diem differentials do more to build it than any credential does.
Why the Spread Between States Is So Wide
California pays a median of $140,270. Alabama pays $77,080. The gap is $63,190, which is 1.8 times the pay for the same job, the same license and the same NCLEX. Put the distributions side by side and it gets starker: the tenth percentile in California, $101,260, sits $2,350 above the ninetieth percentile in Alabama, $98,910. A nurse near the bottom of the pay scale in one state out-earns a nurse near the top of it in the other.
California is the only state where even the tenth percentile, $101,260, clears the national median. It also employs 338,940 of the country's 3,379,720 registered nurses, which is why it moves the national figure on its own.
That weighting explains something that looks wrong at first glance: 33 of the 51 states report a median below the national one, and only 18 sit above it. The national median is weighted by how many nurses each state employs, not by how many states there are, so the large, high-paying states pull it up past most of the map. The middle state on the table above is Virginia at $93,600, which is $3,950 under the national figure. If you want to know whether a wage is normal, compare it against your state's row rather than against the national number.
The obvious caveat is cost of living, and it is a real one. None of these figures is adjusted for it. The states clustered at the top of the table are expensive places to live, and BLS publishes the wage without publishing the adjustment, so this page shows what is paid rather than what it buys. Run the comparison against rent, state income tax and childcare where you would actually be working — a $63,190 gap on paper closes a long way once housing is in it, though rarely all the way.
Pay and Price Are Not the Same Map
The useful thing about holding wage data next to program cost is that the two do not track each other. Across the 290 ranked RN-to-BSN programs on this site, median in-state tuition is $9,237 a year — about 9% of the national median RN salary. That is the national picture. The state picture is much less tidy.
Florida has the cheapest ranked cohort in the country, a median of $2,393 a year, and pays 34th of 51 at $84,190. Pennsylvania has the most expensive, $32,055 — 13 times as much — and pays 20th at $96,430, only $12,240 more. Nothing about a state's wage level tells you what a degree costs there, and nothing about the price of its programs tells you what its nurses take home.
Which is the practical reason to read the two together rather than separately. A nurse in Florida is looking at one of the lowest costs to finish in the country against below-median pay; a nurse in Pennsylvania is looking at the reverse. The state ranking pages carry the wage row and the program cohort side by side for each of the 24 states with enough ranked programs to compare fairly.
Questions About What RNs Earn
What is the average registered nurse salary?
Which state pays registered nurses the most?
Do nurses with a BSN earn more than nurses with an ADN?
Is the national median a starting salary for a new nurse?
Sources
- Pay and employment: BLS OEWS, May 2025 release, SOC 29-1141 (Registered Nurses). National and state medians, percentiles, hourly medians and employment counts.
- Tuition: IPEDS published in-state tuition for the 290 ranked RN-to-BSN completion programs described on the methodology page.
- OEWS is a wage survey. It carries no employment projections, so no growth or outlook figure appears on this page. It also reports registered nurses as a single occupation and publishes no breakdown by degree, which is why no BSN-specific wage appears either.
The registered nurse occupation page goes further into what the percentiles mean and what a BSN does and does not change about where you land in them.