Montana has about 1.1 million residents spread over the fourth largest land area of any state. Registered nurses average $91,510 a year, 30th among the fifty states and the District of Columbia.
Licensure
The Montana Board of Nursing licenses registered nurses, licensed practical nurses and advanced practice registered nurses through the Department of Labor and Industry. Its office is on South Park Avenue in Helena, telephone (406) 841-2300. Rules and applications are at boards.bsd.dli.mt.gov/nursing.
Montana implemented the Nurse Licensure Compact in 2015. A nurse living in Montana holds one multistate license good in every other compact state, Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota among them.
Nurse practitioner practice
Montana has been a full practice state since long before most of the country. Nurse practitioners evaluate patients, order and interpret tests, and prescribe under the nursing board's authority. In much of Montana this is not an abstraction. Several counties have no resident physician, and a nurse practitioner may be the only clinician for a hundred miles. See nurse practitioner practice authority.
Nursing education
The Montana State University College of Nursing is the state's main program and teaches at campuses in Billings, Great Falls, Missoula and Kalispell as well as Bozeman, which is the only practical way to train nurses for towns spread this far apart. Carroll College in Helena runs a private baccalaureate program, and Salish Kootenai College on the Flathead Reservation runs a nursing program at a tribal college, one of a small number nationally. See Indian Health Service and tribal nursing.
Pay and workforce
Billings, Missoula, Great Falls, Bozeman and Helena hold the larger hospitals, with Billings Clinic, Providence St. Patrick and Logan Health among the main employers. Most of the rest of the state runs on critical access hospitals with a handful of beds each, along with Indian Health Service and tribal health facilities on Montana's seven reservations.
Distance sets the terms of the work. Air ambulance transfers are routine, and a rural nurse may cover emergency, obstetric and inpatient duties in the same shift. Housing costs in Bozeman, Missoula and the Flathead valley have risen far faster than hospital pay, which has turned recruitment in the state's most desirable towns into a problem it did not used to have. See rural and frontier nursing.
Travel and flexible work
Montana sits at both extremes of the contract market. Across NurseRecruiter's full archive of job listings, 2009 to 2026, it ranks seventh of the fifty states and the District of Columbia for travel assignments advertised per employed registered nurse, on a base of 10,540 registered nurses statewide. See where the assignments are.
Its nurses are also the most willing in the country to travel. Of the Montana registered nurses with a profile here, 50 percent say they will consider travel assignments, the highest share of any state and eleven points above the national figure; 45 percent will take per diem shifts. Compact membership since 2015 means those nurses can work across most of the mountain west on the licence they already hold. See travel nursing and per diem nursing.
Related
- Rural and frontier nursing
- Critical access hospitals
- Where the assignments are
- Indian Health Service and tribal nursing
- Nurse practitioner practice authority
- 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.
- Montana 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.