subject: Employment And Earnings For Registered Nurses [print this page] If you are a nurse considering a career change, or just getting into the profession, you might want to know what the current employment situation is for nurses and what their earnings are.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics with the U.S. .Department of Labor compiles such information for a range of jobs. According to the Bureau, the area where jobs will grow the most from 2008 to 2018 is the Registered Nursing field. The Bureau projects that 582,000 new jobs for nurses will be created during that time period. That is a 22 percent increase from the number in 2008.
In 2009, a survey by the Bureau showed that there were more than 2.58 million jobs in the nursing field. Most of those jobs -- more than 85 percent -- were connected to healthcare or social assistance. Several hundred thousand nurses also work in government, education and insurance industries.
But, as you would expect, the main place of employment for nurses is in hospitals, which employs almost 60 percent of nurses. After that, the top employers for nurses are physicians' offices, home health services, nursing care facilities, and outpatient care facilities. These five areas together employ 80 percent of all nurses. Federal, state and local governments employ almost 150,000 nurses. Some 80,000 nurses work in education.
In 2009, the average annual wage for RNs across all employment areas was $66,530. The median annual wage was $63,750, which means that half of the nurses were paid more, and half less than that amount.
Among the top 20 areas where nurses are employed, the federal government paid the highest average annual wages -- $77,830 a year. Almost 80 percent of the nurses who are employed by the federal government work in the Veterans Administration. Many also work in the Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services, doing policy analysis and research. The lowest average annual salary among the top 20 employers was in elementary and secondary schools, which paid an average annual salary of $52,400.
Among the other major industries that employ nurses, the average salary for hospital-based nurses is $67,740; for nurses who work in health practitioner offices, $67,820; for nurses who work in physicians' offices, $67,290; for nurses who work in outpatient care centers, $65,690; and for nurses who work in home health care, $63,300.
Within each area, there are naturally a wide range of salary levels, which depend on training and experience of the nurse, as well the location of the job.
