Registered Nurse Salary: What to Expect by Experience and Location

What This Job Pays

The median annual wage for registered nurses was $97,550 in May 2025 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). Median means half of RNs earned more than that and half earned less — it is not an average, and it is not a starting rate.

The published range around that median is wide. The lowest-paid 10 percent of registered nurses earned less than $68,940 a year, and the highest-paid 10 percent earned more than $137,470 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). ONET OnLine publishes the same occupation's wage distribution with the 25th and 75th percentiles alongside those figures, which is useful if you want to see where the middle half of the occupation sits rather than just the extremes (ONET OnLine, U.S. Department of Labor). Third-party wage sites also republish the 25th and 75th percentile annual wages from the same release (TrueNursePay, 2025).

Two things to be careful about when you read these numbers.

First, they cover a specific occupation code. BLS wage statistics for registered nurses use code 29-1141, which includes registered nurses and clinical nurse specialists but excludes nurse anesthetists, nurse midwives and nurse practitioners — those are counted separately and paid differently (TrueNursePay, 2025). If you are comparing an advanced-practice role, you are looking at a different table.

Second, these are annual wage figures for the occupation as a whole. They are not broken out into base hourly rate, shift differential, weekend and holiday premiums, on-call pay, overtime or sign-on bonuses. Most bedside nursing jobs are paid hourly, and those add-ons can be a meaningful share of what lands in your account. When you are handed an offer, ask three things: the base hourly rate, the differentials attached to nights, weekends and holidays, and how overtime is calculated. Annual totals quoted by employers and job boards often blend all of that together.

For current figures, the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook and the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) tables are the free, checkable starting point, and they publish wages by state and metro area as well as nationally. BLS also publishes a median hourly wage for the occupation, which third-party wage sites republish from the OEWS May 2025 release (WageDex, 2025) — worth checking directly if your pay will be quoted per hour rather than per year.

Salary by Experience and Location

One caveat before the table. BLS wage percentiles describe how pay is distributed across everyone in the occupation; they are explicitly not entry-level, mid-career and senior bands (TrueNursePay, 2025). New nurses do cluster toward the bottom of the range and long-tenured nurses toward the top, so the percentiles are a reasonable rough proxy — but a night-shift new grad in a high-paying state can out-earn an experienced nurse in a low-paying one.

California had the highest published RN wages among states in the May 2025 release, with an annual mean of $150,280 and a median of $140,270 (ProspyrMed, 2025). Texas sits closer to the national picture, with a median of $95,970 and a mean of $95,380 (RenewRN, 2025) against the national median of $97,550 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). New York's average and median RN salaries are also published in the BLS OEWS state tables and reported by third-party wage trackers (Rippling, 2025) — pull the current OEWS state file for the figure rather than relying on a summary.

For your own state or metro area, use the OEWS state and metropolitan tables for occupation code 29-1141. Many state labor departments publish the same data with local breakdowns, which is usually the closest thing to a regional going rate.

What Affects Pay in This Field

• State and metro area. This is the single largest factor in the published data. California's RN median was $140,270 and its mean $150,280 in the May 2025 release (ProspyrMed, 2025), while Texas reported a median of $95,970 and a mean of $95,380 from the same release (RenewRN, 2025) — the same license, similar work, very different published wages. Cost of living absorbs part of that, but not all of it.
• Where you sit in the occupation's distribution. The bottom tenth of registered nurses earned under $68,940 a year and the top tenth over $137,470 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). Tenure, specialty, charge or preceptor responsibility, and overtime volume all push you along that line.
• Employer type and industry. BLS publishes separate RN medians for hospitals (state, local and private), ambulatory healthcare services, nursing and residential care facilities, government excluding state and local education and hospitals, and educational services (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). The ranking and the gaps between them change with each release, so read the industry table in the current Occupational Outlook Handbook entry before assuming hospital work pays most.
• Advancing to an advanced-practice credential. Moving into a nurse practitioner role shifts you to a different occupation code, with a median of $132,300 in May 2025 against the RN median of $97,550 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). That is a graduate-degree decision, not a promotion.
• Shift, overtime and differentials. Nights, weekends, holidays, on-call and picked-up extra shifts are typically paid as a premium on top of base hourly rate. Employers set these percentages or flat hourly add-ons individually, and they are often listed in the job posting or the union contract. Ask for the differential schedule in writing — two offers with the same base rate can produce very different annual totals.
• Union representation and step scales. Where nurses are covered by a collective agreement, base rates are usually fixed by a published step scale tied to years of service, with scheduled increases rather than individually negotiated raises. Where they are not, your starting rate is more open to negotiation and more dependent on how you present prior experience. Union contracts are often public — read the wage appendix.
• Certification and specialty credentials. Many employers pay a certification differential or a one-off bonus for specialty certification. The amount is set employer by employer; check the pay policy or scale rather than assuming a national figure exists.
• Travel and contract work. Short-term contract assignments are usually quoted as a weekly package that blends taxable hourly pay with stipends, so it is not directly comparable to a staff annual salary. Compare the taxable hourly rate separately.

How This Job's Pay Compares

All figures below are medians from May 2025 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025).

Registered nurse — $97,550. Covers code 29-1141, which includes registered nurses and clinical nurse specialists (TrueNursePay, 2025).

Licensed practical and licensed vocational nurse — $64,400. The 10th percentile for LPNs and LVNs was under $49,740 and the 90th percentile over $83,440 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). Note that the LPN 90th percentile of $83,440 still sits below the RN median of $97,550 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). That contrast is the main financial argument for LPN-to-RN bridge programs, though it comes with more schooling and licensing.

Nurse practitioner — $132,300. Nurse anesthetists, nurse midwives and nurse practitioners are counted as a separate group with a combined median of $134,920; within it, nurse midwives had a median of $134,040 and nurse practitioners $132,300 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). The spread in that group is wider than for RNs: the lowest 10 percent earned under $102,190 and the highest 10 percent over $224,490 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). The bottom of that advanced-practice range, $102,190, still sits above the RN median of $97,550.

The practical read: the RN license puts you above the LPN median of $64,400 and below the nurse practitioner median of $132,300 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025), and the largest single-step increase available to you comes from a graduate credential rather than from more years at the bedside. If pay is the priority, the two levers with the clearest published evidence behind them are working in a higher-wage state and moving to advanced practice.