Nurse recruitment is measured more closely than most hiring because the replacement cost is large and the vacancy has to be covered at a premium in the meantime. The figures below come from the annual retention and staffing survey that hospitals benchmark against, whose 2026 edition covers calendar year 2025 across 527 acute care hospitals and 262,405 registered nurses.
Two limits belong with any use of it. Hospitals report their own numbers and choose whether to take part, and the survey is published by a nurse recruitment firm. It is still the closest thing the field has to a scoreboard.
Definitions decide comparability
Before any benchmark is useful, three choices inside the formulas have to match.
Whether transfers count. A nurse moving between units inside one hospital is a separation for the unit and not for the organization, which is why unit-level turnover always looks worse.
Total or voluntary. Total turnover includes retirements and dismissals. Voluntary counts resignations, and it is the figure a retention programme can move.
What the denominator is. First-year turnover divides departures within twelve months by the number of people hired, not by headcount. It is a different measure, not a subset of the headline rate.
A hospital comparing itself against a published benchmark is comparing definitions first and performance second.
The core numbers
Time to fill: 78 days for an experienced registered nurse. By specialty the range runs from 56 to 102 days; telemetry is the hardest at 87 days and emergency the fastest at 70. By region, the West fills in 70 days and the North-Central in 82.
Vacancy rate: 8.6 percent, the lowest of the decade, though the survey changed its calculation method that year so part of the fall is methodological. It still leaves the typical hospital with 43 unfilled registered nurse posts. A third of hospitals sit at 10 percent or higher; 16.5 percent are under 5 percent and 10.1 percent are above 15 percent. The national average describes very few individual buildings.
Turnover: 17.6 percent, up 1.2 points. Over five years the average hospital has turned over 102 percent of its nursing staff.
First-year turnover: 22.7 percent of new hires, accounting for 29 percent of all separations.
Hires against separations: 377,650 registered nurses hired in 2025 against 324,090 lost, a net gain of about 53,500 and an add rate of 2.9 percent. For every ten nurses hired, more than eight replaced someone who left.
Cost per departure: $60,090. Each percentage point of turnover is worth about $295,000 a year to a typical hospital in either direction. Turnover cost the average hospital $5.19 million.
Cost of vacancy is the number that moves decisions
Time to fill is an operations metric. Cost of vacancy is the same fact expressed in money, and it is the version that gets a requisition approved.
The arithmetic is simple. If the post is covered by agency staff, the difference between a travel nurse at $189,758 a year and an employed nurse at $123,676 is $66,081 — about $181 a day the post stays open. If it is covered by overtime, the premium is the differential. If it is covered by nobody, the cost lands as ratio, burnout, and the next resignation, which is real but harder to invoice.
Seventy-eight days of agency cover for one post is roughly $14,000 in avoidable premium. That is the number to put next to a proposal to add a recruiter or shorten an approval step. See travel nursing and nurse overtime.
The metric almost nobody tracks
Time from application to first human contact.
Nurses apply to several employers in the same week, and the offer usually goes to whoever moved first rather than whoever paid most. Most organizations can report time to fill and cannot report this, which means the largest controllable component of their time to fill is invisible to them.
Anything measured in days here is a defect. See where nurse candidates come from.
Two related figures worth holding: offer acceptance rate, which tells you whether the problem is reach or competitiveness, and source of hire, which tells you which channels to stop paying for.
The capacity constraint
Three numbers from the same survey describe the squeeze. Some 71.8 percent of hospitals expect to grow their registered nurse workforce, 26.7 percent expect to increase the recruitment budget, and 6.8 percent expect to add recruitment staff. Hospitals run 0.26 recruitment employees per 100 workers.
Nearly three quarters plan to hire more nurses; fewer than one in fourteen plan to add anyone to do it. Since headcount is not the variable being adjusted, the remaining variables are reach and speed.
Related
- Hiring nurses
- Where nurse candidates come from
- Nurse turnover and retention
- Credentialing and onboarding
Sources
- National Health Care Retention and RN Staffing Report — NSI Nursing Solutions, 2026 edition, covering calendar year 2025, for every figure in this page. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- 78 days to hire one nurse: the 2026 staffing numbers every nurse employer should know — NurseRecruiter, 3 September 2026. Accessed September 9, 2026.