Latest · Hiring & Job Seeking · Workforce & Policy · The Nursing Shortage
Here is a number to sit with: it now takes the average hospital seventy-eight days to hire one experienced registered nurse. Two and a half months, for one hire. And in the same year, the average hospital lost $5.19 million to nurse turnover. Those figures come from the 2026 edition of the NSI Natio...
We have written about this twice before, in 2022 and again a few weeks later when the response from readers made clear how badly it needed saying. A new survey of nurses came out this summer, and the reason to return to it is that the number has not improved. 84.8% of nurses experienced workplace vi...
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Two sets of numbers came out this spring, and they only make sense read together. The first is unambiguously good news. Applications to nursing school are surging. Entry-level bachelor's enrollment rose 7.6%, to 283,303 students. After years of anxious talk about whether anyone still wants this job,...
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The new federal wage figures landed this month, and they contain a milestone and a warning, in that order. The milestone: the average registered nurse now earns $101,420 a year. Nursing has crossed six figures nationally for the first time. That is worth marking, because for most of the last decade...
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Here is a question worth sitting with. If two hospitals in your area quietly agreed not to recruit each other's nurses, how would you ever find out? You would not, mostly. You would just notice that the offers were never quite as good as you expected, that the recruiter from across town never called...
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Six weeks. Two coasts. Forty-six thousand health care workers off the job. The first quarter of 2026 has produced the largest concentration of nursing labour action since the pandemic, and unlike some earlier rounds, it ended in settlements rather than exhaustion. Here is what was won, what it cost...
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On 2 February the federal government formally repealed the minimum staffing rule for nursing homes. It is worth being precise about what that means, because the rule had already been struck down in court and then blocked by Congress. This was the paperwork on a death that happened some time ago. For...
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Three years in a row now. The 2026 Best Jobs rankings are out, and nurse practitioner is number one again. Not just the best health care job, but the best job in America, ahead of every software role, every engineering role, every finance role on the list. It also takes the top spot in health care a...
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Two weeks ago, on 1 October, Connecticut switched on the Nurse Licensure Compact. In July, Pennsylvania did the same. That makes 40 states where one multistate nursing license lets you work, the biggest single year of expansion since the compact was rebuilt in 2018. If you have been waiting for this...
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Three years ago we wrote a post asking whether travel nurses should be worried about contracts being cancelled and rates coming down. The honest answer now is that the rates did come down, a lot, and then they stopped. The market has settled. So this is a good moment to lay out what travel nursing a...
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Every two years, the boards of nursing survey the entire profession. Not a panel, not a customer list, but a stratified sample drawn from the licensure database itself. The 2024 edition landed in April, and it is the best picture anyone has of who is actually doing this job. It contains the single m...
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The new nurse wage numbers are out, and there is one line worth reading twice. The typical registered nurse got a bigger raise last year than the average nurse did. That sounds like nonsense until you look at the two figures side by side. The average RN wage rose 4.2%, to $98,430. The median, meanin...
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