Licensed practical nurse licence (LPN/LVN)

How many earn this each year

53,362 people who passed the NCLEX-PN licensing exam — 2025, calendar year 2025.

We are not turning that into a percentage. This is an annual flow — the people who earned the credential in one year. Employment figures are a standing stock, everyone working in the occupation at one time. Dividing a flow into a stock produces a number that reads like a hiring rate and is not one. Where we hold a standing count of credential holders we publish the share employed; here we do not have one, so we publish the flow and stop.

What that count includes: Everyone who passed the NCLEX-PN during 2025 — first-time and repeat, US-educated and internationally educated. 68,996 sat it and 53,362 passed, a 77.3% pass rate. It is a count of exam passes in one year, not of people holding a practical-nurse licence today.

NCSBN, 2025 NCLEX Examination Statistics, Research Brief vol. 96 (June 2026), Table 12 (People newly credentialed during one year) · view

Four years after completing — a figure for the programme code, not for this job alone

Of 47,882 people who completed Practical nursing and nursing assistant training, undergraduate certificate or diploma and were no longer studying four years later, 2,047 had no earnings on record at all — 4.3%. The ones who were working earned a median of $56,073, with the middle half between $37,200 and $76,301.

“No earnings on record” is not “unemployed”. The measure is the absence of any wage record and any positive self-employment income for the whole year. Nobody was asked whether they wanted work, so the count holds people who left the workforce by choice — raising children, caring, travelling, living on someone else's income, moving abroad — alongside everyone who wanted a job and had none. Nobody publishes the split and we will not guess it. What it does establish is how many people finished this training and were earning nothing from it or from anything else four years on, which is exactly what the pay figure above cannot tell you.

And this figure is not specific to this job. The federal government publishes programme outcomes at four-digit granularity and no finer, and this credential's programmes share their code with others. So the figure describes everyone who completed anything under that code at this level, not only the people who went on to do this work.

What that programme code covers: CIP 51.39 puts practical and vocational nursing — the LPN/LVN route — in the same code as nursing-assistant and orderly training, and at certificate level the two cannot be separated. Those are very different qualifications: one is a licensed clinical role reached after about a year, the other is a few weeks of training for work that pays far less. This figure is both of them together, and the mix is not published, so it may not be read as the LPN figure.

The same code that blocks a clean cost figure blocks a clean outcome figure: practical nursing and nursing-assistant training share it, and the mix is not published. Read the rate as covering both.

Who is in the cohort: completers who received federal student aid — roughly half of US undergraduates, and the other half are not measured here. People who went on to further study are in neither column. The Department suppresses institutions with cohorts too small to publish and adds statistical noise to the rest, so this is a sum over the institutions large enough to report: 643 of them, recovering 84.2% of the Department's own national count for this programme. Dropping the smallest reporting programmes moves the rate by 0.0 percentage points.

Source: US Department of Education, College Scorecard, Field of Study data, 2026 — release of 10 June 2026; measured four years after completion · view · the same figure for every programme we can publish