Registered nurse salaries by state and employer
What registered nurses earn at public employers: university and county hospitals, health care districts, public health departments, state prisons and state hospitals. What full-year nurses actually earned, overtime included, next to the official pay range, with nurse practitioners ($232,328 on average in California) and LVNs ($90,412) counted on their own. Private hospitals and clinics aren't public employers, so they aren't in these figures. So far the site covers California; more states follow as we collect their data.
Work in progress
Public nurse pay in more states, as we collect the data
This page will compare registered nurse pay across states. For now it covers California, where the State Controller publishes the pay of every city, county, special district, state department and University of California campus. Each state publishes public pay differently, so we add states one at a time, after checking their files.
Until then, the California page has everything we've published so far.
Sources for the state figures
Total pay is gross wages before tax, overtime included, of registered nurses who worked roughly the full year. Each state's page explains its full-year rule.
- State Controller's Office, Government Compensation in California, 2025: wages of every registered nurse position.