Registered Nurse Salary (2026)

What Registered Nurses Earn

Half of the country's registered nurses earn more than $97,550 and half earn less. The middle half sit between $80,330 and $112,350 — a band $32,020 wide — and the tenth to ninetieth percentile run covers $68,530, or a factor of 2.0 from one end to the other.

The mean, $101,420, sits $3,870 above the median. That gap is the shape of the distribution talking: a long tail of very well-paid nurses drags an average upward and leaves a midpoint where it is. Any time a school or an employer quotes an "average nurse salary", it is worth knowing which of those two numbers you are being shown.

How to Read These Percentiles

A percentile is a slice of the current workforce, not a stage of a career. The $68,940 at the tenth percentile is what the lowest-paid tenth of working nurses earn right now — 71% of the median. It is not "starting pay", because a new graduate in one state can out-earn a nurse with twenty years in another, and the survey has no way to tell them apart.

The same caution applies at the top. $137,470 is where the highest-paid tenth begin, and reaching it is not a matter of accumulating years until you arrive. The nurses in that band are concentrated in a handful of states, in overtime-heavy and premium-shift work, and in specialties and supervisory posts that pay above the floor of the same occupation. It is a description of who is there, not a schedule you advance along.

The practical use of the table is as a check on an offer. Find your state's row on the state salary table, compare the offer against that median rather than the national one, and treat the distance from the 25th to the 75th percentile as the room a negotiation realistically has in it.

Location Moves This Number More than Anything Else Does

California reports a median of $140,270 and Alabama $77,080. Both are the same license doing the same job. The comparison that makes the scale of it obvious: California reports a median above the national ninetieth percentile of $137,470. The typical nurse there earns more than the top-decile threshold for the country.

4 states report a median above the national 75th percentile, and 8 report one below the national 25th. A nurse comparing an offer against the national median without knowing which group their state falls into is reading the wrong benchmark. Cost of living is the standing caveat — these are wages, not what the wages buy, and the states at the top are expensive.

This matters for degree decisions too. If a move of a few hundred miles changes pay by more than any credential in the field can, then the case for the BSN has to rest on something other than an immediate raise. It usually does.

What a BSN Changes About Registered Nurse Pay

Here is the part most salary pages get wrong, and it is worth being blunt about. There is no federal number for what a BSN earns. BLS surveys employers about jobs, not about the transcripts of the people filling them, and registered nurse is one occupation code from the diploma nurse to the MSN. Every median on this site is a mixed figure. Any page presenting one as a BSN salary — or publishing a tidy "BSN premium" — is working from self-reported survey data or from nothing at all.

The claim the data does support is about access rather than rate. Roles that sit above the RN median — charge nurse, case management, public health, informatics, clinical education, quality — are the ones where a bachelor's is commonly the screening requirement, and magnet hospitals frequently prefer or require it for staff posts. The BSN is what gets an application read. It is not a line item added to a pay scale, and a nurse who finishes the degree and stays in the same post on the same unit should expect their employer's differential for it to be modest or absent.

Nurse manager is the cleanest illustration of the difference. In the federal system it is not a better-paid registered nurse — it is a different occupation altogether, SOC 11-9111, surveyed separately with its own wage distribution. None of the figures on this page describe it, and none is estimated for it here, because the wage data behind this page covers SOC 29-1141 and nothing else. That is the real shape of the BSN's effect on pay: it moves nurses into occupations that are counted somewhere else, rather than moving the number attached to this one. The careers section is where those roles are covered.

Which sets the honest test before you enroll. Compare what the degree costs against the specific post you want it for — the charge role on your unit, the case management job at the payer, the MSN two years out — and not against a BSN-versus-ADN gap that no one can show you. The state rankings carry what completing it costs where you live, which is the side of that comparison that can be pinned down.

The One State That Requires a BSN

New York, and only New York. Its 2017 law requires nurses licensed after the effective date to earn a bachelor's within ten years of initial licensure. Nurses already licensed when it passed are grandfathered, the ten-year window is long, and no other state has followed. The 80%-BSN target you may half-remember came from a 2010 Institute of Medicine recommendation — a recommendation, never law anywhere, and never met.

New York RNs earn a median of $109,440, 6th of 51 states, across 205,810 nurses, with the distribution running from $79,760 to $157,090. None of that is caused by the law and none of it should be read as evidence for one: it is a licensing rule, the wage survey does not track credentials, and New York paid above the national median before 2017. If you are in New York the requirement is a deadline to plan around. Everywhere else, the BSN is a choice, and the case for it is the access argument above rather than a rule you are about to fall foul of.

Sources

• All pay and employment figures: BLS OEWS, May 2025 release, SOC 29-1141 (Registered Nurses) — national and state medians, percentiles, hourly medians and employment counts.
• The survey reports registered nurses as a single occupation and publishes no breakdown by degree, which is why this page carries no BSN-specific wage.
• OEWS is a wage survey and carries no employment projections, so no growth or outlook figure appears here.
• Nurse manager sits in SOC 11-9111, a separate occupation with a separate wage row that is not part of this dataset and is not estimated on this page.

Median pay in every state, with the ranking and the gap to the national figure, is on the state salary table.