Florida has about 23.5 million residents, the third largest population in the country and one of the oldest. Registered nurses average $90,650 a year, 32nd among the fifty states and the District of Columbia.
Licensure
The Florida Board of Nursing licenses registered nurses, licensed practical nurses and advanced practice registered nurses through the Department of Health. Its office is on Bald Cypress Way in Tallahassee, telephone (850) 488-0595. Rules, applications and license verification are at floridasnursing.gov.
Florida joined the Nurse Licensure Compact in 2018. A nurse living in Florida holds one multistate license good in every other compact state, and nurses from those states can take assignments in Florida without applying to the Florida board. That helps a great deal in hurricane season, when the state repeatedly pulls in staff from elsewhere.
Nurse practitioner practice
Florida is classified as a restricted practice state. A 2020 law carved out a limited exception: nurse practitioners who meet an experience requirement and register as autonomous practitioners may practice primary care on their own, covering family medicine, general pediatrics and general internal medicine. Outside that registration and those specialties, physician supervision or a supervisory protocol still applies. The classification describes the default rule rather than the exception. See nurse practitioner practice authority.
Nursing education
The University of Florida College of Nursing in Gainesville, Florida State University in Tallahassee, the University of Miami School of Nursing and Health Studies, the University of Central Florida in Orlando and the University of South Florida in Tampa carry the largest university programs, with Florida A&M University in Tallahassee among the historically Black programs. The Florida College System supplies a very large share of the state's associate degree graduates, and Florida also has one of the biggest concentrations of private, for profit nursing programs in the country, whose licensing examination pass rates the board publishes and monitors. See the NCLEX.
Pay and workforce
Age drives demand here. Florida has one of the highest shares of residents over 65 of any state, which makes long term care, home health, hospice and cardiology bigger parts of the market than they are elsewhere.
Hospital work gathers in the corridor from Miami to Fort Lauderdale, in Tampa Bay, Orlando and Jacksonville, with Baptist Health South Florida, AdventHealth, HCA Florida and UF Health among the large systems. Seasonal population swings and hurricane response add to turnover. See nurse turnover and retention.
Inland and panhandle counties are rural by comparison and served by smaller hospitals. See rural and frontier nursing.
Travel and flexible work
Florida is where travel nurses want to go, and it is not where the assignments are concentrated.
The state ranks third in the country for the sheer number of travel postings in NurseRecruiter's full archive, 2009 to 2026, behind California and Texas. Set against its 218,100 employed registered nurses, though, it ranks forty-second of fifty-one for assignments advertised per nurse. Florida is a large market rather than a short-staffed one, and the difference matters to a nurse deciding where the leverage is.
On the other side of the ledger, Florida is the single most requested destination among nurses who name states they would work in, and more registered nurses hold a profile here than in any other state. Demand from nurses is high; demand for nurses, relative to the supply already in place, is not. That combination is why Florida contracts are competitive to win and rarely at the top of the pay range. See where the assignments are.
Of the Florida registered nurses with a profile on this site, 43 percent say they will consider travel assignments and 49 percent per diem shifts, both above the national figures. Compact membership since 2018 means none of them needs a new licence to work in most of the south-east. See travel nursing and per diem nursing.
Notable nurses
Nellie Wade, first licensed in Florida in 1952, was still working at a family medicine office in Wewahitchka past the age of 90, the oldest licensed practicing nurse in the state. She had trained during the Second World War in the Cadet Nurse Corps.
Related
- Nurse Licensure Compact
- Where the assignments are
- Nurse practitioner practice authority
- Travel nursing
- The NCLEX
- Nursing by state
Sources
- U.S. Census Bureau, state population estimates for July 1, 2025. Accessed September 8, 2026.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, registered nurses (29-1141), May 2025. Accessed September 8, 2026.
- Florida Board of Nursing, contact details and licensing information. Accessed September 8, 2026.
- Nurse Licensure Compact, member states. Accessed September 8, 2026.
- American Association of Nurse Practitioners, State Practice Environment. Accessed September 8, 2026.
- Florida House Bill 607 (2020), autonomous practice registration for advanced practice registered nurses. Accessed September 8, 2026.
- NurseRecruiter job listings, 2009 to September 2026, and nurse profiles. Method and limits are set out in where the assignments are.