Occupation / job
Registered Nurses
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
$97,550 is $3,960 a month above the $50,020 the typical American job pays. Differences of that size in Registered Nurses are held in place by a barrier — a licence, a residency, a clearance — and the barrier is the real subject of this page.
With 3,379,720 employed, this is one of the biggest occupations in the country. Work at this scale is always available and rarely scarce, and the wage on this page is what that combination produces.
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 Registered Nurses — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
The middle half runs $80,330 to $112,350 — $2,668 a month between the quarters, a 1.4x ratio. Spreads this narrow are usually set by a grade or a scale, so the negotiation you are imagining probably is not available.
The 25th percentile is $80,330, $30,310 above the $50,020 typical American job. When even the floor is this high, the thing to investigate is the entry requirement rather than the pay.
Avoid it if the length and cost of the training would be unbearable if you changed your mind halfway.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 3,379,720 figure counts people already working as Registered Nurses, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
Top quarter to bottom quarter is 1.4x. In a band that narrow, $97,550 is a genuinely representative number for Registered Nurses and the main variable left is where you live.
The middle half of this field earns between $80,330 and $112,350. That is $32,020 of range, with $97,550 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Getting to $112,350, the 75th percentile, is worth $14,800 a year more than the $97,550 midpoint and $32,020 more than the $80,330 a quarter of Registered Nurses settle for.
The fall from $97,550 to the $80,330 bottom quarter is $17,220; the climb to the $112,350 top quarter is $14,800. Slightly more of the range lies below the midpoint than above it, so the downside is the bigger movement here.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Registered Nurses is $46.89 an hour. The quarters sit at $38.62 and $54.01, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Registered Nurses. The self-employed are excluded, so $97,550 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $97,550 because we have no verified record of unpaid hours or out-of-pocket costs for this work, and we would rather convert honestly than adjust invented ones.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else