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09/01/2026
Save this one.
Build a 7-slide carousel from the BLS May 2025 state table:
Slide 1 — "Where your licence is worth most. And least."
Slide 2 — Top 5 states by RN mean wage
Slide 3 — Bottom 5 states by RN mean wage
Slide 4 — The national mean: $101,420
Slide 5 — The cost-of-living caveat, stated honestly
Slide 6 — What to do with this: compact licence states, remote roles, relocation maths
Slide 7 — "Save this before your next contract conversation"
Caption: The spread between the highest and lowest paying states for the same RN licence is roughly $73,000 a year. Most nurses have never seen their own state on a list next to the others.
Pull the state figures from bls.gov/oes — search "registered nurses" then your state. Do not use a staffing agency's version of this table; use the federal source.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025.
Three sets of letters. Three very different numbers.
RN — $97,550 median
NP — $132,300 median
CRNA — $248,320 mean
That's a $34,750 step from RN to NP, and $150,770 from RN to CRNA. All BLS, May 2025.
Two honest caveats. RN and NP are medians; the CRNA figure is a mean, which runs higher. And none of this accounts for what the qualification costs you in tuition and lost income while you study — we'll do that maths properly next week.
But if you've been told advanced practice "isn't really worth it financially," that is not what the federal wage data says.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025.
Which set of letters are you working toward?
08/26/2026
HIS WEEK IN NURSING HISTORY — No. 01
→ 24 August 1879: Mary Eliza Mahoney is days from graduating as America's first Black professional nurse.
→ 26 August 1910: Florence Nightingale has two weeks left to live. She is 90, blind, and still dictating letters about hospital sanitation.
→ Late August 1942: the surviving Australian nurses of the Vyner Brooke are six months into three and a half years of captivity in Sumatra.
New edition every Wednesday.
What's the oldest piece of equipment still in use on your unit?
She worked as a cook, a maid and a washerwoman in the same hospital for fifteen years before they let her apply.
Mary Eliza Mahoney started at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston at eighteen. In 1878, at thirty-three, she was finally accepted into its nursing programme — two years over the age limit, waived because she was that reliable.
Sixteen-hour days. Forty-two students started. Three finished.
She graduated on 1 August 1879 as the first Black professional nurse in the United States, and she was the only student in her class who never missed a single day.
Fifteen years of mopping to reach the door.
Image: Mahoney's 1879 graduation portrait, public domain.
Same NCLEX. Same licence. Same job title.
$150,280 in California. About $77,000 in Alabama and South Dakota.
That's the BLS mean wage for registered nurses, May 2025. A $73,000 spread on an identical credential.
Before anyone says it: yes, cost of living. California housing eats a large part of that gap and this figure isn't adjusted for it. But it does not eat all of it, and nobody relocating for a $70,000 raise regrets running the numbers first.
The national mean sits at $101,420, so if you're materially under that, it's worth knowing whether that's your state or your employer.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025.
Save this for your next review conversation.
08/19/2026
The BLS released new wage data on 15 May. The median American RN now earns $97,550 a year.
If you've been quoting $93,600, that was the May 2024 figure. It moved.
A few things buried in the same release that matter more than the headline:
The RN mean wage is $101,420. There are 3,379,720 RNs in the country. And of America's ten largest occupations, only two pay above the national average wage of $69,770 — registered nurses, and general and operations managers.
Nursing is one of the only mass-employment jobs in the United States that pays above average. That is genuinely unusual, and it is worth knowing when someone tells you the budget won't stretch.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, released 15 May 2026.
We're going to spend the next month going through this data properly — state by state, specialty by specialty. Follow if you want the numbers without the recruitment pitch.
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