This Is The State Where Nurses Make The Most

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 3, 8:24AM EDT

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This Is The State Where Nurses Make The Most — © gpointstudio / iStock via Getty Images

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are nearly 3 million registered nurses in America. Their mean annual wage is $80,010, which makes nursing among the best-paid jobs in the country. The effort to become an RN is considerable. Most nurses go through a four-year bachelor’s degree in nursing. Once they graduate, what they can earn relies considerably on location.

The BLS defines a registered nurse as:

Assess patient health problems and needs, develop and implement nursing care plans, and maintain medical records. Administer nursing care to ill, injured, convalescent, or disabled patients. May advise patients on health maintenance and disease prevention or provide case management. Licensing or registration required. Includes Clinical Nurse Specialists. Excludes “Nurse Anesthetists”, “Nurse Midwives”, and “Nurse Practitioners”.

It puts the total number of registered nurses in America at 2,986,500. Their pay, calculated on an hourly basis has a mean of $38.47. The lowest 10% of nurses based on pay make mean pay of $25.68 an hour or $53,410. In the 90th percentile, the hourly figure is $55.88, which translates into annual compensation of $116,230.

“General Medical and Surgical Hospitals” employ the most nurses nationwide at 1,729,200. Their mean annual wages are $81,680. The second-largest RN group is employed in the “Offices of Physicians”. This totals 192,300 RNs with a mean annual wage of $71,660.

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The state where RNs are paid the most is also the state with the most RNs. California has 307,060 RNs and their mean annual wage is $120,560. Hawaii, among the smallest states with 11,260 RNs, ranks second in pay at a mean annual wage of $104,830.

The states where RNs are paid the least are South Dakota which has 13,130 RNs who make a mean wage of $60,960, followed by West Virginia which has 19,800 RNs who have an annual mean wage of $65,130.

The Five States Where Registered Nurses Make The Most

State Employment Annual Mean Wage

California            307,060              $120,560
Hawaii                  11,260              $104,830
Massachusetts      84,030               $96,250
Oregon                 36,840             $96,230
Alaska                    6,240                $95,270

Click here to read These Are The 25 Highest Paid Jobs In America

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.