There is No Nurse Shortage

Updated May 2026

The myth of a “nurse shortage” persists, despite data showing that the supply of U.S. nurses is robust and growing significantly faster than the population overall. The members of National Nurses United, the nation’s largest and fastest-growing union and professional association of registered nurses (RNs), live this reality every day:

There is no nurse shortage. Rather, there is a nurse retention crisis due to the industry’s systematic failure to invest in safe, quality, human-to-human patient care. In other words, hospital management has created a staffing crisis – where there is a shortage of nurses willing to care for patients under the unsafe working conditions set by the hospital industry.

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Recent data shows that the supply of U.S. nurses is robust and growing.

• Data released on May 15, 2026 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) indicates there are around 1.15 million registered nurses with active licenses who were not employed as RNs, as of May 2025.
  • According to the latest available RN employment data from the BLS, there were 3.76 million employed registered nurses working in the United States in May 2025. In comparison, there were 4.91 million actively licensed RNs, according to the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, as of May 2025.
  • This represents an increase of 17,661 registered nurses not working as RNs compared to May 2024, when there were 1.13 million registered nurses with active licenses who were not employed as RNs.
• Data from the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN) shows that the number of licenses issued for the first time has steadily grown. The NCSBN reported that in 2025, 192,915 first-time U.S.-educated candidates passed the NCLEX-RN exam – compared to 2016, when 157,206 U.S.-educated candidates passed the NCLEX-RN exam for the first time.
• A nursing workforce analysis, published in February 2024 in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), projected that the registered nurse workforce is growing fast enough to outpace the wave of expected retirements of Baby Boomer RNs. Using a sample of 455,000 RNs and U.S. Census data, the analysis determined the RN workforce is projected to increase by roughly 1.2 million by 2035 – even after replacing the RNs who are expected to retire within this time frame.

Hospital working conditions – namely chronic understaffing – are driving nurses away.

Survey data – encompassing the perspectives of tens of thousands of nurses – demonstratively proves that there is only a shortage of nurses willing to work in environments that risk their licenses and the safety of their patients.

• A February 2026 analysis of survey data, published by the peer-reviewed JAMA Network, found that the top factor that would increase RNs’ likelihood of returning to employment as RNs was adequate staffing (65 percent). The study analyzed survey responses from more than 4,000 RNs across 10 states, who were employed but not in health care, not currently employed, or retired; had their most recent job as a hospital staff RN; and had left their job in the past five years.
• An April 2024 report, published in the peer-reviewed JAMA Network, used survey data of nearly 8,000 nurses in New York and Illinois who left the health care profession entirely and found that only 59 percent of retired nurses said their retirements were planned – “suggesting nearly half of nurse retirements are premature exits due to poor working conditions.”
• A July 2024 report in the peer-reviewed JAMA Network published survey responses from more than 16,000 Michigan nurses that found “planned departure rates, abusive or violent events, and unsafe conditions remained high, and understaffing remained a primary concern.”

Dr. Karen Lasater, associate director of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing's Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research, concluded in a 2024 opinion piece published in JAMA: “A major factor influencing nurses’ intentions to depart and their actual decision to do so is understaffing” and “[efforts] to train and recruit more nurses are akin to fueling a car with a leaking gas tank…if staffing conditions are poor.”

NNU believes nursing education and training can and should be improved, particularly to increase equity and access to affordable programs. However, the focus on the “pipeline” excuses hospital executives for their failure to retain their nursing staff, due to lack of safe working conditions. 

Hospital working conditions have not returned to pre-Covid conditions. 

An April 2026 study on hospital nursing published in Medical Care, a journal of the American Public Health Association, found “[working] conditions in hospitals, quality and safety, and nurses’ job outcomes have not returned to pre-pandemic levels—they are significantly worse, and in some cases, even worse than they were at the height of the pandemic. In particular, the study, which examined 547,689 medical and surgical patients and 2,782 direct-care nurses in 132 Pennsylvania hospitals, found: 

• Nurses’ reported job dissatisfaction and intentions to leave their employer within the year were at their highest levels post-pandemic (32.2 percent of nurses reporting job dissatisfaction and 27.4 percent intending to leave their employer) and were statistically significantly higher than during pandemic and pre-pandemic levels. 
• After the pandemic, more than two-thirds of nurses (67.4 percent) reported there are too few staff for the work to be completed, whereas before the pandemic, only 56.9 percent of nurses did. After the pandemic, the average patient-to-nurse ratio in medical-surgical units was 6.0, whereas before the pandemic, the ratio was 5.7. 

Understaffing also exacerbates a key issue that has received much attention among legislators and the media: workplace violence. 

A February 2024 report from National Nurses United on workplace violence found: 

• Eight in 10 nurses (81.6 percent) have experienced at least one type of workplace violence within the past year.
• Nearly half of nurses (45.5 percent) reported an increase in workplace violence in their unit in the previous year. 
• Employers’ failures to prevent workplace violence – which includes improving staffing – have a direct impact on nurse employment, with 37.2 percent of nurses reporting that they considered leaving their job and 19.2 percent who either changed or left their job. 

Safe nurse-to-patient staffing ratios lead to increased employment and better retention of nurses working in hospitals. 

As long as working conditions continue to decline at hospitals, investments in the nursing workforce alone are insufficient to stem the staffing crisis. A critical first step is passing federal minimum standards for nurse-to-patient staffing ratios. 

Nurse retention in California surpassed other states after its nurse-to-patient staffing ratios were implemented in 2004. 

More than two decades ago, California became the first state to require such minimum standards hospital-wide, providing ample opportunities to study the impacts of this law compared to other states. 

• In 2015, the Hospital Nurse Staffing Survey, published by the Texas Center for Nursing Workforce Studies, reported that more than a decade after implementation, California had lower nurse vacancy and turnover rates than Florida, Texas, or New York. 
  • California had a median facility turnover rate of 3.2 percent, compared to 8.7 percent in New York, 16.2 percent in Florida, and 21.9 percent in Texas. 
  • California had a position vacancy rate of 6.9 percent, compared to 5.9 percent in New York, 8.5 percent in Florida, and 9.8 percent in Texas. 
• In March 2025, the peer-reviewed Policy, Politics, and Nursing Practice journal published a cross-sectional study of nurse job outcomes and nurse staffing variables – using data from a survey of more than 14,000 registered nurses in California, Florida, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania in nearly 500 hospitals – found “nurses in California had lower burnout, job dissatisfaction, and intentions to leave their employer, as compared to nurses in other states,” attributed in part to safer staffing. 
• Nursing workforce reports by the University of California San Francisco show that, in the period from 2004-2005 to 2009-2010, new nurse graduates per academic year grew 72 percent and active licenses grew 17 percent. According to the American Hospital Association’s annual survey from 2005 to 2009, the number of RNs working in community hospitals grew 18 percent. 

Safe patient assignments lead to better patient outcomes.

Safe nurse-to-patient ratios mean nurses can devote more time to patient care, leading to higher quality patient care and fewer deaths. 

• A 2021 study, published in Medical Care, showed that if New York had the same staffing mandate as California, at least 4,370 lives would have been saved over a two-year period, among Medicare patients alone. 
• A 2017 study published in the Journal of Emergency Nursing found that when emergency nurses cared for three additional patients in 24 hours, the time for diagnostic evaluation in trauma emergency departments doubled from approximately half an hour to one hour, and in non-trauma emergency departments, time to diagnostic evaluation increased by approximately 15 minutes. 
• A 2010 study published in Health Services Research showed that if New Jersey and Pennsylvania had the same staffing mandate as California, the result would have been nearly 14 percent fewer surgical deaths in New Jersey and more than 10 percent fewer surgical deaths in Pennsylvania. 

The bottom line is that hospitals have the power to end the staffing crisis. 

Durable solutions require a tough examination of the unsafe conditions the hospital industry has set for nurses and how these unsustainable working conditions drive nurses away from the bedside. 

Focusing solely on nursing supply is insufficient and counterproductive – without also implementing solutions to keep the nursing profession attractive, especially once nurses have passed their licensing exams and are working in hospitals and acute-care settings. Additionally, nurses do not need empty promises of technological efficiency. Instead, they need safe staffing, more resources like personal protective equipment, and union representation to make nursing a sustainable profession. 

The reality is that hospitals have the power, right now, to end the staffing crisis by providing the staffing levels and care conditions that protect both patients and nurses.