Occupation / job
Nurse Practitioners
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
$132,300 puts Nurse Practitioners among the highest medians BLS publishes, roughly 164% above the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint. Pay at this level always has a gate in front of it: a residency, a bar exam, a clearance, or a decade.
323,040 people work as Nurse Practitioners — large enough that the occupation is always hiring somewhere and always losing people somewhere else. Constant demand is security; it is rarely leverage.
Clinical practice suits people who can decide under uncertainty with a patient in front of them, and who are steady about the documentation, the shifts and the liability that come attached.
We carry no verified training length for Nurse Practitioners — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
The quarters sit at $117,990 and $156,700, $3,225 a month apart at a ratio of 1.3x. Narrow enough that what you can expect is close to what everyone else gets.
The bottom quarter of this field earns $117,990 — $56.72 an hour, $67,970 above the $50,020 national midpoint. When even the worst-paid quarter of Nurse Practitioners is this far ahead, the barrier to entry is doing the work of keeping it there.
Avoid it if you could not carry clinical responsibility for an outcome that goes badly through nobody’s fault.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 323,040 is a headcount of the employed, which is a numerator without a denominator — everyone who qualified and never got hired is missing from it, and we will not estimate them to complete a percentage.
What the spread tells you
At 1.3x between $117,990 and $156,700, this is a narrow distribution. $132,300 is a reliable number to plan around, which is worth something — but so is knowing that outperforming the field will not be paid for.
Put in money rather than ratios: $117,990 at the 25th percentile, $132,300 at the midpoint, $156,700 at the 75th. $38,710 separates the quarter of Nurse Practitioners at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Getting to $156,700, the 75th percentile, is worth $24,400 a year more than the $132,300 midpoint and $38,710 more than the $117,990 a quarter of Nurse Practitioners settle for.
It is $14,310 from $132,300 down to $117,990 but $24,400 up to $156,700. When a range leans this far upward, the interesting question is what puts someone in the top half, because the money is disproportionately there.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $56.72 at the bottom quarter, $63.60 at the midpoint, $75.33 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
This is payroll data: it comes from employers, about people they employ. Anyone doing the work of Nurse Practitioners for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $132,300 describes them.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Nurse Practitioners, the hourly figure is $132,300 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else