Mississippi has about 3.0 million residents. Registered nurses average $78,950 a year, 49th among the fifty states and the District of Columbia.
Licensure
The Mississippi Board of Nursing licenses registered nurses, licensed practical nurses and advanced practice registered nurses. Its office is on Pear Orchard Road in Ridgeland, telephone (601) 957-6300. Rules and applications are at msbn.ms.gov.
Mississippi implemented the Nurse Licensure Compact in 2001. A nurse living in Mississippi holds one multistate license good in every other compact state, including all four of its neighbors: Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana and Arkansas.
Nurse practitioner practice
Mississippi is in the reduced practice group. A nurse practitioner must keep a collaborative agreement with a physician, filed with the board, which covers consultation and quality review as well as prescribing. See nurse practitioner practice authority.
Nursing education
The University of Mississippi Medical Center School of Nursing in Jackson is the state's academic nursing school. The University of Southern Mississippi, Mississippi University for Women, whose nursing college is one of the older public programs in the region, and Alcorn State University's School of Nursing, a historically Black program, carry further baccalaureate capacity, with the community colleges supplying most associate degree and practical nurse graduates.
Pay and workforce
The University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson is the state's only academic medical center and its largest hospital employer, and it holds the only children's hospital and level one trauma center in Mississippi.
Elsewhere, care runs through small community hospitals and critical access hospitals in the Delta, the Pine Belt and along the Gulf Coast, several of which have closed or suspended inpatient services in recent years. Mississippi has some of the highest rates of infant mortality, diabetes and cardiovascular disease in the country, and a large share of its counties have no obstetric service, which puts weight on nurse midwifery and on the rural hospitals that remain.
Pay near the bottom of the national range, next to compact states that pay more, makes retention the state's central workforce problem. Leaving requires no new license. See nurse turnover and retention.
Travel and flexible work
Mississippi is the clearest example in the country of a state that exports nurses rather than importing them.
On the demand side it is last. Across NurseRecruiter's full archive of job listings, 2009 to 2026, Mississippi ranks fifty-first of fifty-one for travel assignments advertised per employed registered nurse, roughly a twelfth of the rate in Idaho at the top. Its hospitals do not, on the evidence of the listings, buy in contract nurses at anything like the national rate, which in a low-paying market is as likely to be a budget constraint as a sign of comfortable staffing.
On the supply side it is nearly first. Of the Mississippi registered nurses with a profile on this site, 50 percent say they will consider travel assignments, second only to Montana and eleven points above the national figure, and 48 percent will take per diem shifts. Compact membership means every one of those nurses can work in Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana or Arkansas tomorrow on the licence they already hold. See where the assignments are and travel nursing.
For employers here, that is the retention problem stated as a number. See nurse turnover and retention and building a per diem roster.
Related
- Nurse Licensure Compact
- Where the assignments are
- Collaborative practice agreements
- Critical access hospitals
- Rural and frontier nursing
- 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.
- Mississippi 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.
- NurseRecruiter job listings, 2009 to September 2026, and nurse profiles. Method and limits are set out in where the assignments are.