Nursing Salaries & Salary Outlook
Would you like to join one of the fastest-growing occupations in America while helping to improve the quality of life of others? Begin working towards a nursing degree today. Learn more about the potential salaries in this rewarding field.
Nursing Salaries
Do you have a knack for making other people feel better? If so, you may want to consider joining the largest sector of the health care industry: that of the registered nurse. Not only do registered nurses use their training and people skills to help improve their patients’ lives, they also constitute one of the fastest-growing occupations, expected to generate 587,000 new jobs over the 2006-2016 period, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). While job opportunities are plentiful, the BLS notes that competition may be keen for higher-paying nursing positions and that applicants with bachelor’s degrees fare much better than those without the proper formal education. Begin working towards a nursing degree online today, and give yourself the advantage in this rewarding field.
A Wealth of Nursing Opportunities
As you might imagine, the majority of registered nurses (59 percent) work in hospitals. The other 41 percent are employed in widely varied capacities, ranging from home health care services, to mental health/substance abuse outpatient care centers, to geriatric care facilities. Nurses may specialize in a particular setting (such as surgery or the emergency room), specific health condition, organ/body system types, or well-defined sectors of the population. These specializations often require a tailored nursing degree program, so be weighing your options from the get go. The options are as plentiful as individuals’ health issues are varied. Regardless of speciality or work environment, all nurses treat patients, educate people about various medical conditions, and provide both advice and support to their patients’ family members.
The Many Degrees of Nursing
Students pursuing nursing degrees receive training in anatomy, physiology, microbiology, chemistry, nutrition, psychology, and some liberal arts subjects. Additionally, nursing degree programs provide supervised clinical experience in hospitals and other health care facilities. Licensed graduates typically qualify for a variety of entry-level positions, while the four advanced practice nursing specialties-clinical nurse specialists, nurse anesthetists, nurse-midwives, and nurse practitioners-require master’s degrees.
Your Future in Nursing: Sunny Job Prospects and Solid Salaries
According to the 2008 BLS data, registered nurses earn a mean annual wage of $65,130. Those in the 90th percentile of yearly income earned an estimated $92,240, while those in the 10th percentile earned $43,410. Some of the highest-paying fields in nursing include the motion picture industry and the federal executive branch, who reported mean annual wages of $77,690 and $74,460, respectively. In addition to hospitals, physicians’ offices and home health care providers boasted the highest levels of employment for nurses. An occupational breakdown like this one indicates not only that opportunities abound, but that the opportunities are spread across both the public and private sector.
2008 BLS findings also delineate the regions that offer the best employment and salary prospects to registered nurses. In descending order, South Dakota, Massachusetts, and Mississippi employed the highest concentrations of workers. California, Massachusetts, and Hawaii were the top-paying states for this occupation. Interestingly, all five of the highest-paying metropolitan areas were found in California, four of them in the San Francisco Bay Area (the regions of Santa Clara, San Francisco, Oakland, and Napa). Annual mean wages for this region ranged from $88,970 (Napa) to $104,400 (San Jose/Sunnyvale/Santa Clara metropolitan area).
Karin Hansen
Karin Hansen holds a BA in English from San Francisco State University and currently works two part-time jobs. In her spare time, Karin enjoys traveling, trail running, and reading.
