Nurse Practitioners
What the pay figures show
- Where are nurse practitioners paid best? California, at $168,520. That answer does not survive a pay stub. Take income tax out and Washington is ahead. Then count what things cost locally, and Alaska wins — the money there behaves like $115,346. Three questions. Three different states.
- The nominal leader for nurse practitioners is California at $168,520, but the ordering does not hold through either adjustment. Applying federal, FICA and state income tax moves the top position to Washington; deflating by regional price parity moves it again, to Alaska at $115,346 in national-average terms. ⚠️ Federal tax is not what does this — it is uniform across states and cannot change a ranking. State income tax reorders first, price level second, and the two act independently.
Compare this career across states
Choose your filing status and local taxes, compare pay, and keep a shortlist.Compare wage and personal-pay outcomes by state, with selected resident local taxes and saved career choices.
Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$132,300
People doing it
323,040
Highest paid
$168,520
CA
Best off, really
$115,346
AK, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$101,340
Highest tenth
$174,420
Lowest, really
$86,241
DC
States with data
51
National average
$137,300
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
101.72%
AK, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Nationally, this job pays within a fairly narrow band. Adjust for tax and for local prices and the band tightens again, to between $86,241 and $115,346. Geography is not the main lever on pay here.
- 323,040 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $132,300. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- Coverage is complete — all 51 jurisdictions publish this, on a middle wage of $132,300. Nothing is missing.
- Wages for nurse practitioners cluster comparatively tightly across states, and the clustering strengthens after tax and price deflation — a real range of $86,241 to $115,346. Occupation-level factors such as specialisation and employer type therefore explain more of an individual's pay here than location does.
- National employment in nurse practitioners is 323,040 — a substantial occupation, though an order of magnitude below the largest. Regional differentials here move real aggregate sums without dominating any single state's wage bill.
- Coverage for nurse practitioners is complete at 51 jurisdictions. No suppression applies, so the highest and lowest figures above are genuinely the national extremes.
Pay band: Nurse Practitioners
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $101,340 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $132,300 |
| Top tenth earn over | $174,420 |
| This salary | $132,300 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Nurse Practitioners
The national median for this job
$132,300around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $101,340 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $132,300 |
| Top tenth | $174,420 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Nurse Practitioners, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Alabama · $105,750 |
|---|---|
| Highest | California · $168,520 |
| Spread | $62,770 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $131,670 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $135,498 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| AK | $155,170 | $117,325 | $115,346 |
| SD | $128,840 | $99,328 | $112,751 |
| WY | $132,200 | $101,625 | $111,862 |
| ND | $130,070 | $98,892 | $111,651 |
| NV | $140,670 | $107,414 | $110,759 |
| NM | $137,520 | $99,853 | $110,474 |
| OK | $133,390 | $96,936 | $109,798 |
| MT | $137,210 | $98,658 | $109,323 |
| WA | $156,100 | $117,960 | $108,657 |
| IA | $130,160 | $95,896 | $108,031 |
| AR | $125,660 | $92,964 | $107,463 |
| NE | $132,130 | $96,268 | $106,520 |
| LA | $125,600 | $93,732 | $106,098 |
| MS | $124,730 | $91,622 | $104,960 |
| ID | $132,540 | $95,686 | $104,660 |
| TX | $131,670 | $101,262 | $104,206 |
| WV | $127,320 | $93,347 | $103,982 |
| IN | $128,830 | $95,550 | $103,652 |
| MO | $129,930 | $94,904 | $103,424 |
| NJ | $159,310 | $112,196 | $103,043 |
| OH | $124,870 | $93,897 | $102,271 |
| WI | $131,980 | $95,094 | $102,145 |
| CA | $168,520 | $114,869 | $102,032 |
| MI | $131,450 | $95,776 | $101,691 |
| KS | $126,650 | $91,053 | $101,209 |
| NC | $128,990 | $94,793 | $100,694 |
| KY | $122,870 | $91,065 | $100,660 |
| NY | $153,510 | $107,652 | $100,024 |
| NH | $137,550 | $105,281 | $99,940 |
| UT | $130,920 | $94,924 | $99,918 |
| VT | $134,740 | $96,504 | $99,865 |
| OR | $155,680 | $104,280 | $99,579 |
| AZ | $134,420 | $100,184 | $99,089 |
| TN | $117,590 | $91,555 | $98,962 |
| PA | $130,140 | $96,221 | $98,689 |
| RI | $135,970 | $99,095 | $97,716 |
| GA | $129,430 | $93,872 | $97,076 |
| SC | $123,290 | $90,077 | $96,673 |
| FL | $129,510 | $99,786 | $96,456 |
| MN | $133,260 | $94,721 | $96,245 |
| CO | $132,930 | $96,983 | $95,661 |
| ME | $130,260 | $92,627 | $95,397 |
| IL | $130,680 | $94,262 | $95,354 |
| CT | $138,470 | $98,852 | $95,335 |
| DE | $131,040 | $93,414 | $94,117 |
| MA | $142,440 | $101,822 | $94,072 |
| VA | $127,810 | $92,036 | $91,351 |
| MD | $131,110 | $94,829 | $91,213 |
| AL | $105,750 | $78,824 | $87,612 |
| HI | $135,570 | $95,049 | $87,515 |
| DC | $135,880 | $95,559 | $86,241 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for nurse practitioners, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $132,300 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- Take-home figures for nurse practitioners assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In Washington, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $117,960.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for nurse practitioners. Inside any state, a big city costs far more than a small town, so this is a fair way to compare states with each other and a poor way to price a specific move. The wage figures and the price figures are also from different years. At the bottom of the range sits the District of Columbia, on $86,241.
- All wage figures for nurse practitioners are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $132,300. Within-state dispersion typically exceeds between-state dispersion in this data, so an individual's expected wage is determined more by experience, sector and employer than by the state comparisons presented here.
- Take-home calculations for nurse practitioners assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $117,960, in Washington. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- Real-terms results for nurse practitioners rest on statewide regional price parities, which average over intra-state variation that is itself larger than much of the interstate variation. They support comparison between states and not the pricing of an individual relocation; the District of Columbia anchors the distribution at $86,241. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.