Registered Nurse
Also known as: Nurse, RN
Provide hands-on patient care, administer treatments, and serve as the backbone of healthcare delivery.
Salary Range
The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for registered nurses.
About 1 in 63 reaches this level
About 3.47M RNs in the US (BLS Employment Projections, SOC 29-1141, 2025). A further ~54,500 work as nurse anesthetists (BLS Employment Projections, SOC 29-1151, 2025), a separate job code reached after an RN license, ICU experience and a doctorate. They earn ~$250K total comp: the BLS mean for nurse anesthetists is ~$248K, and the top quarter clear $294K (BLS OEWS, May 2025). CRNA is the highest-paying clinical nursing role; Chief Nursing Officers can earn more but sit on an administrative track. 1.6% is CRNA jobs as a share of RN jobs (54,500 / 3.47M), not a lifetime rate.
Salary data based on 2025 BLS, Glassdoor, and industry reports. Actual compensation varies by location, experience, and employer.
How to Become One
This career typically requires a bachelor's degree. Here are the top colleges for it:
Cost to Qualify
A BSN costs whatever your university costs - nursing is an undergraduate major, not a separately priced programme. Four years of published tuition and fees is about $48,000 at a public university in your own state and about $180,000 at a private one; the national average across all four-year colleges is roughly $72,000. It is not the only accredited route to the licence: BLS names an associate degree in nursing and a hospital diploma programme as the other two, and a two-year associate runs about $8,300 in community-college tuition, so a student who cannot fund four years still has a licensed way in. Many employers, and most hospitals seeking Magnet status, prefer or require the BSN, which is why RN-to-BSN bridge programmes exist. Almost nobody pays the private sticker: the typical nursing graduate finishes owing $27,000. Add a $200 NCLEX-RN exam fee (rising to $350 in February 2027) and a state licence fee of $75-$200. Cost-to-starting-pay ratio is 1.1x.
Sticker price, not what most people pay — scholarships, aid and in-state status all move it. Room and board is shown separately on each college's page.
AI Risk Assessment
AI helps nurses but cannot do the core of the job. Most nursing happens at the bedside and has to be done by a licensed person: checking on patients, starting IVs, caring for wounds, giving medicines, and talking with families. A 2025 Microsoft Research study measured how much of each job's tasks AI chatbots can help with, using 200,000 real conversations. Registered nurses came out 460th of 785 jobs, in the lower half. The parts of nursing AI reaches are mostly paperwork and information: charting, monitoring alerts, and looking things up. That is the rubric's "2 Low": AI assists, and demand soaks up the time it saves.
Demand for nurses is strong. BLS projects registered nurse jobs to grow 6% from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all jobs, with about 180,800 openings a year, many of them to replace nurses who retire or leave. The federal Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) projects a national shortage of RNs: 8% in 2028, easing to 3% (about 109,000 full-time nurses) by 2038. The shortage is much worse outside cities: 24% outside metro areas in 2028, against 5% inside them.
The risk is slow and long-term. If AI keeps taking charting and monitoring time off nurses' plates, hospitals could give each nurse more patients over a decade, which would slow hiring rather than cut jobs. We have not found evidence of that happening yet.
What would change this score. If hospitals start raising patients-per-nurse ratios and pointing to AI as the reason, or new nursing graduates start struggling to find jobs while the shortage projections hold, it goes to 3. Otherwise it stays at 2.
Sources
Ratings reflect a 10-year outlook based on 2025-2026 research, weighted toward entry-level impact. Individual outcomes will vary.
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