Credential
Registered nurse licence (RN)
The licence you cannot work as a registered nurse without. Two routes lead to the same exam and the same licence — a two-year associate degree or a four-year bachelor's — and they cost very different amounts.
What it costs to get. The middle half of the range — a quarter of people pay less, a quarter pay more.
Months of training, full time. Part time takes longer and is how most people actually do it.
Months of the pay premium needed to cover that cost. Not months until you are ahead overall — the training time above comes first.
Source: US Department of Education, College Scorecard, Field of Study data, 2026 · view
What that cost figure is, and what it is not
The low end is the 25th percentile across institutions offering the two-year associate route; the high end is the 75th percentile across institutions offering the four-year bachelor's. That range is median cumulative FEDERAL LOAN DEBT at completion, not a tuition sticker price and not total cost. It is what completers actually borrowed, so it excludes grants, savings, family money, employer funding and living costs — which makes it a FLOOR on what the credential costs, never a ceiling. The low and high figures are the 25th and 75th percentiles across the institutions that report a figure for this programme, so a quarter of institutions sit below the low end. College Scorecard pools two award years into each figure; the release used here is dated 10 June 2026.
Two years full time for the associate route, four for the bachelor's. Both end at the same NCLEX-RN exam and the same licence, and employers increasingly prefer the bachelor's — which is the reason the cheaper route is not automatically the better one.
The licence renews every one to three years depending on the state, with continuing-education requirements attached.
How many people hold this, and how many are working in the field
How many earn this each year
226,946 people who passed the NCLEX-RN licensing exam for US licensure — 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-RN for US licensure during 2025 — first-time and repeat, US-educated and internationally educated. 328,443 people sat it and 226,946 passed, a 69.1% pass rate. A candidate can pass only once, so this is close to a count of nurses becoming licensable in that year. It excludes candidates sitting the exam for Canadian registration, whom NCSBN reports separately, and it is not a count of anyone holding a licence today.
NCSBN also publishes a count of active RN LICENCES — 6,062,790 as at 24 July 2026 — and we deliberately do not use it. That is licences, not nurses: a nurse holding single-state licences in four states appears four times, and NCSBN publishes no de-duplicated figure. Dividing employment into it would produce a share of about 56% that understates how many licensed nurses are working, so we publish the exam flow instead and no percentage at all.
NCSBN, 2025 NCLEX Examination Statistics, Research Brief vol. 96 (June 2026), Table 1 (People newly credentialed during one year) · view
What it lets you do
The pay belongs to the job, not to the credential. These are the occupations this qualifies you for, with what BLS records people already doing them earn.
| Job | Is it required? | Median | Employed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Registered Nurses | Legally required to hold the job | $97,550 | 3,379,720 |
| Nurse Practitioners Requires an active RN licence plus a master's or doctorate. |
A step towards it, not sufficient on its own | $132,300 | 323,040 |
| Nurse Anesthetists Requires an active RN licence, critical-care experience and a doctorate. |
A step towards it, not sufficient on its own | $236,590 | 51,840 |
| Nurse Midwives Requires an active RN licence plus a graduate midwifery programme. |
A step towards it, not sufficient on its own | $134,040 | 7,920 |
Median pay and employment: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025.
Does it pay for itself?
The job this unlocks pays a median of $97,550. The employment-weighted median across every occupation we publish is $50,020, so the premium for holding this is about $47,530 a year before tax. At that premium the cost above is covered in the number of months shown.
Read that as a comparison to an average job, not to your job. We do not know what you earn now, so we do not use it. The baseline is the employment-weighted median across all the occupations on this site — the midpoint American worker. If you already earn more than that, the payback is longer than shown; if you earn less, shorter. The figure also ignores the months of training, during which most people earn less or nothing, and it ignores interest on anything borrowed.
And it assumes you get the job. Every payback figure on this site is conditional on being hired into the work. That is the assumption the credential-holder count above exists to test, and it is the assumption every other pay site makes silently.
What you need before you start
- A place on an accredited nursing programme
- A criminal background check — every state board runs one
Do not do this if
- you cannot pass a criminal background check, which every board requires
- you are not prepared to work nights, weekends and holidays for years
- you cannot physically lift, turn and move adult patients
All credentials, by payback period · How this is calculated · Look up something else