Registered Nurses
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for registered nurses is California, at $140,270. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and Washington comes out ahead, worth $88,573. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for registered nurses: California leads at $140,270 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting Washington to $88,573 in real terms. Price level, not tax, is the operative variable for this occupation — and it is the one absent from essentially every published wage comparison.
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
$97,550
People doing it
3,379,720
Highest paid
$140,270
CA
Best off, really
$88,573
WA, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$68,940
Highest tenth
$137,470
Lowest, really
$65,787
FL
States with data
51
National average
$101,420
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
108.56%
WA, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- The state you work in changes what this job pays, but less than you would expect. Level out tax and prices and the whole country sits between $65,787 and $88,573. That is a real difference. It is not usually a moving-house difference.
- Set the geography aside for a moment. The striking thing about this job is how many people do it: 3,379,720. When the numbers on this page move, they move for a great many households at once.
- Coverage is complete — all 51 jurisdictions publish this, on a middle wage of $97,550. Nothing is missing.
- Interstate variation for registered nurses is contained relative to other occupations, and narrows further under adjustment: the real range is $65,787 to $88,573. A differential of this magnitude is real but rarely decisive on its own, which is worth stating plainly against wage tables that present nominal gaps without either adjustment.
- National employment in registered nurses is 3,379,720, placing it among the largest occupations by headcount. Policy changes touching this occupation's effective tax or its regional wage structure therefore have unusually broad incidence.
- Coverage for registered nurses is complete at 51 jurisdictions. No suppression applies, so the highest and lowest figures above are genuinely the national extremes.
Pay band: Registered Nurses
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $68,940 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $97,550 |
| Top tenth earn over | $137,470 |
| This salary | $97,550 |
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 Registered Nurses
The national median for this job
$97,550around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $68,940 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $97,550 |
| Top tenth | $137,470 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Registered Nurses, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Alabama · $77,080 |
|---|---|
| Highest | California · $140,270 |
| Spread | $63,190 |
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 | $95,970 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $98,760 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| WA | $124,200 | $96,157 | $88,573 |
| HI | $136,320 | $95,503 | $87,933 |
| CA | $140,270 | $98,187 | $87,215 |
| OR | $129,010 | $88,692 | $84,693 |
| AK | $109,480 | $85,849 | $84,402 |
| NV | $103,670 | $81,762 | $84,308 |
| NM | $94,340 | $71,906 | $79,555 |
| TX | $95,970 | $76,345 | $78,564 |
| WI | $95,530 | $71,819 | $77,144 |
| ID | $92,460 | $69,829 | $76,378 |
| MN | $101,510 | $74,863 | $76,067 |
| AZ | $99,500 | $76,743 | $75,905 |
| MI | $94,300 | $71,413 | $75,823 |
| VT | $97,460 | $73,071 | $75,616 |
| PA | $96,430 | $73,708 | $75,598 |
| RI | $100,640 | $76,202 | $75,141 |
| NH | $99,700 | $78,969 | $74,962 |
| NY | $109,440 | $80,384 | $74,688 |
| CO | $100,260 | $75,660 | $74,629 |
| WY | $83,760 | $67,755 | $74,581 |
| DE | $99,520 | $73,505 | $74,058 |
| ND | $80,730 | $65,309 | $73,735 |
| CT | $102,740 | $76,193 | $73,482 |
| GA | $93,550 | $70,573 | $72,982 |
| NJ | $106,500 | $79,159 | $72,701 |
| IL | $95,990 | $71,752 | $72,583 |
| MT | $85,280 | $65,367 | $72,434 |
| OK | $82,920 | $63,933 | $72,416 |
| SD | $78,060 | $63,745 | $72,360 |
| NE | $84,730 | $65,286 | $72,238 |
| MD | $99,790 | $74,656 | $71,809 |
| LA | $80,230 | $63,251 | $71,596 |
| MA | $104,550 | $77,473 | $71,577 |
| AR | $78,940 | $61,902 | $71,557 |
| TN | $81,500 | $66,165 | $71,518 |
| OH | $82,510 | $65,323 | $71,149 |
| IN | $83,500 | $65,139 | $70,661 |
| KY | $81,040 | $63,123 | $69,774 |
| IA | $78,630 | $61,770 | $69,587 |
| VA | $93,600 | $70,056 | $69,535 |
| WV | $80,130 | $62,421 | $69,532 |
| NC | $84,350 | $65,313 | $69,380 |
| MO | $81,780 | $63,456 | $69,153 |
| MS | $77,090 | $60,071 | $68,816 |
| SC | $82,360 | $63,625 | $68,284 |
| UT | $84,600 | $64,581 | $67,979 |
| DC | $102,540 | $75,219 | $67,885 |
| ME | $86,990 | $65,450 | $67,407 |
| KS | $79,320 | $60,494 | $67,242 |
| AL | $77,080 | $59,773 | $66,437 |
| FL | $84,190 | $68,058 | $65,787 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for registered nurses, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $97,550 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- Take-home figures for registered nurses 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 California, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $98,187.
- Levelling out prices for registered nurses is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — Florida sits at the bottom on $65,787.
- All wage figures for registered nurses are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $97,550. 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 registered nurses 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 $98,187, in California. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- The price deflation applied to registered nurses uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is Florida at $65,787. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Florida anchors the bottom at $65,787 — and the two source series are dated independently.