16 accredited doctoral programs
are classified under nursing administration, the executive and
systems-leadership track, as distinct from a clinical population
focus. That is 5.2% of the
accredited DNP programs this site holds federal figures for.
A short list, and a local one.16 institutions are ranked here, so a position is a standing among 16 and not a national one — the same program carries a different number on the national list.
2
The accreditation claim holds for this track.CCNE accredits the DNP whatever the track, and nursing administration has no separate programmatic accreditor — unlike nurse anesthesia, which COA accredits and which is ranked on its own outcomes, or midwifery, which ACME accredits.
3
It is a systems degree, not a clinical one.The federal survey classifies these under nursing administration rather than a patient population, and the graduate is more likely to be running a service than carrying a panel.
4
No wage series reports this degree.Medical and health services management, the occupation most of these graduates enter, has a national median of $123,860 — across a population that is overwhelmingly not nurses and mostly holds no doctorate.
How This Ranking Is Scored
Three published figures, weighted. Scores are relative to the
16 institutions on this page and to nothing
else.
50%
Established program
Program-level. DNP conferrals in this CIP and award level in the reporting year, saturating at 25. Above that a program scores full marks and gains nothing further for size.
30%
Published in-state graduate tuition
Institution-level. Average annual tuition for full-time graduate students, 2023-24, from IPEDS. Not a DNP per-credit rate, not including program differentials, and not net of aid.
20%
Institution-wide undergraduate completion
Institution-level and undergraduate. The IPEDS 150%-of-normal-time rate for first-time, full-time bachelor's students.
Nothing is imputed. A program that does not publish a figure is scored on
the ones it does publish, with the remaining weights renormalized; below
2 published figures it is listed
without a position rather than ranked on a single number. Accreditation is
a condition of appearing at all, not a factor that earns points.
What the rubric cannot see.
The Best DNP Nursing Leadership Programs In 2026, Ranked
Scores are relative to these 16 institutions and to
nothing else. This is a short list, and a position in it is among
16, not a national standing. The same
program carries a different number on the
national list.
What the federal record publishes for each program, and how its score
was composed.
Samford files six separate DNP records federally, covering nurse anesthesia, family practice, psychiatric mental health, emergency and trauma, nursing administration and a general track. That much specialty breadth is unusual for a private university of about 6,000 students, and it puts Samford in the top tenth of accredited institutions both for the number of nursing doctorates it confers and for how many it confers against its size. The nurse anesthesia program is accredited by the Council on Accreditation of Nurse Anesthesia Educational Programs, and the next review is scheduled for spring 2035, which is settled well past the length of any program you would start now. The nurse leader track pairs online coursework with practicum blocks you attend in person.
Baylor confers 196 doctorates in nursing practice a year, which is among the largest outputs in the country and is explained by an online school running several tracks at once. The pediatric route splits in two and the college is explicit about the difference: a primary care track working with children and families, and an acute care track for pediatric patients with complex, critical or chronic illness in hospitals, intensive care units and emergency departments. The family route is post-master’+A+’s only, gated on an MSN in family practice, a 3.0 cumulative GPA and existing board certification. Note that the pediatric track is not currently offered at post-master’+A+’s level, so the two population focuses admit from different places.
Spring Arbor built its online DNP around a calendar rather than a semester. Courses run seven weeks with a one-week break between them, and the degree is designed to finish in 20 months, which is short enough to change the arithmetic if you are weighing a doctorate against staying where you are. Alongside the degree it runs three online post-master’s certificates, and they are scoped to who you already are: family nurse practitioner in two versions, one for nurse practitioners converting and one for nurses who are not yet NPs, an adult-gerontology primary care route for non-NPs, and a nurse educator certificate.
Hopkins calls the advanced practice doctorate online, and then adds the condition that decides it: from the fall 2024 intake you have to be living in Maryland or Washington DC by the third semester, because that is where the clinical placements are. Read that before anything else. The adult-gerontological acute care track runs 70 credits with 840 clinical hours plus 160 project practicum hours, and wants a year of full-time RN work with unstable, technology-dependent patients in intensive, intermediate, progressive, stepdown or telemetry care before you start. Nurse anesthesia is taught on site rather than online, and applies in a different cycle: 1 September for a summer start against 1 November and 15 January for the practitioner tracks. Undergraduate statistics has to be a B, and the school says a B minus will not be accepted.
Duquesne’+A+’s DNP is hybrid, and its nurse anesthesia curriculum rotates you through adult, pediatric, obstetric and ambulatory anesthesia rather than concentrating in one setting, which is the breadth a certification exam assumes. Nineteen doctorates a year from a private university of 8,234 in Pittsburgh puts it among the more established programs in western Pennsylvania, and federal records flag it for distance study. Pittsburgh has three accredited institutions to Philadelphia’+A+’s eleven, so the local competition for preceptors is thinner at one end of the state than the other. The nurse anesthesia route is a 92-credit plan across nine semesters and 36 months, and it wants two years of critical care behind you before you start. A residency does not count toward that two years.
South Carolina publishes a semester count for every route, and the spread is wide enough to matter. The post-master’s clinical expert major is 33 credits over six semesters. Healthcare leadership runs 36 to 39 credits over seven. Nursing education is the widest of them, 33 to 60 hours over six to nine semesters, because what you need depends on what you arrive holding. From a BSN the commitment is different in kind: those options run nine, eleven or twelve semesters depending on the route, which is three to four years before you account for anything slipping. Full-time and part-time plans of study are published for the BSN entry point.
Winona State scopes its post-master’s doctorate narrowly: your master’s has to be in nursing with a focus in administration or leadership. A clinical practitioner master’s is not the intended input here, which makes this a leadership doctorate in substance as well as in name. A year of clinical nursing experience in a master’s-level role is recommended on top of that. The provision worth knowing before you commit is that you can take up to 12 credits as a non-degree student and transfer them in once you are accepted. That lets you test the program and the workload against your life before carrying a full application, which very few schools allow.
Edgewood runs two doctorates with different accreditors and different purposes. The nurse anesthesia program is new, launched in 2025, accredited by the Council on Accreditation of Nurse Anesthesia Educational Programs, and it leads to eligibility for the national certification examination and licensure as a certified registered nurse anesthetist. The executive leadership doctorate is the older one, accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education and approved by the Wisconsin Board of Nursing. It needs a minimum of 30 credits over two years full-time, and the practicum is sized to you, between 500 and 1,000 hours depending on what your master’s already covered. Its coursework runs to epidemiology, biostatistics, healthcare finance, informatics and quality management, so it is a management degree in substance as well as in name.
Rhode Island College runs its DNP as two distinct programs. The BSN-to-DNP is a dual nurse practitioner route, and its adult-gerontology acute care option prepares you to certify as both a clinical nurse specialist and a nurse practitioner, so it is two credentials out of one program rather than the usual one. That route is mostly online and can be taken full or part time, but it wants at least a year of acute care behind you first. The MSN-to-DNP leadership program is the separate track for nurses who already hold a master’s. One administrative limit is worth knowing before you start: no more than six credits taken at the college as a non-matriculated student will count toward the degree, so testing the water has a ceiling.
Southern Indiana publishes three separate credit totals and the gap between them is most of the decision. The post-master’s advanced nursing practice route is 35 credits in the specialty. The BSN-to-DNP family nurse practitioner route is 72. Organizational and systems leadership, also from a BSN, is 70 with 1,000 practice hours attached. What makes the post-master’s route worth a close look is the transfer policy: the college accepts up to 42 credit hours from your MSN, which is more generous than most and is why that first number is as low as it is. Coursework is online with synchronous intensives twice a year, so there are fixed dates in the diary rather than an open-ended commitment.
PennWest runs its doctorate fully online at 27 credits, taken part-time across five semesters. The hour arithmetic is the part to read twice: the degree requires 1,000 clinical hours counted across your master’s and this program together, it accepts 500 transferred hours from master’s-level work, and it builds in a further 504 practicum hours. A nurse arriving with a full master’s practicum has a clear path through that, and one arriving short does not. You have to supply written documentation of the hours your master’s included at the point of application rather than later. A master’s in a related field such as business or health science can qualify you if you also hold a bachelor’s in nursing.
Oklahoma publishes the conversion most schools leave implicit: one credit hour of practice inquiry equals 64 clinical hours. That single line lets you work out what a given semester actually costs you in time rather than in credits. The degree spans 35 to 51 credit hours and 1,000 to 1,280 clinical hours depending on route, split into 31 didactic credits and 20 clinical. For nurse anesthesia from a BSN the college describes its strongest applicants rather than just its minimum: a grade point average above 3.5, at least two years of critical care, and demonstrated unit leadership through charge roles, preceptorships or governance. The interview runs two to three hours.
Creighton is unusually direct about what the degree costs you in time. Its own page warns that full-time students may struggle to hold down full-time work, and it puts the scholarly project at roughly 30 to 40 hours a semester on top of coursework, which is the kind of number most schools leave you to discover after you enroll. Coursework across all tracks and specializations runs online, full time or part time. Nurse anesthesia is the exception in scale rather than in format: 2,250 clinical hours spread across large metropolitan hospitals, rural and specialty hospitals and community clinics, so the rotations are deliberately not all in one kind of setting.
This is a graduate health professions school rather than a university with a nursing college inside it, and the doctorate is built for people already running something. The curriculum is modeled on executive MBA programs, which here means online coursework broken up by in-person intensives rather than a fully remote degree. You pick the pace at admission: four semesters or five, with two part-time options beside them, and the choice is framed around what your job will tolerate. Everyone on this campus is in a health profession, so the people in your cohort are clinicians rather than general graduate students. Against an enrollment of about 1,700 it confers nursing doctorates at one of the higher rates in the country, which is what a specialist campus looks like in the federal data.
Toledo splits its DNP by how much of it you can do from home. The nurse executive and nurse leadership pathways are delivered entirely online. The nurse practitioner tracks are not: they combine online coursework with required in-person clinical experiences and on-campus skills immersion days the college strongly recommends rather than mandates, so the honest planning assumption is that you will be traveling. Nurse anesthesia is a different scale again at 97 credits. One admission rule catches people out: coursework more than seven years old at the point you apply will not count, so a master’s you finished a decade ago may not carry across the way you expect.
Western University does something for career-changers that almost no practitioner program does: an applicant without a full year of registered nurse experience still qualifies. You are placed on a modified curriculum and must complete 1,800 hours of RN employment by the end of the first year instead of before you start. For a nurse who wants to keep moving rather than wait out a year at the bedside, that is the whole decision. The prerequisite that catches people is smaller and stricter: a statistics course of at least two semester units passed at C or better, taken at a regionally accredited institution in the United States.
These programs are classified by the federal survey under nursing
administration rather than under a clinical population. In
practice that means the coursework leans toward systems, finance,
quality and organizational leadership, and the graduate is more
likely to be running a service than carrying a patient panel.
It is still a DNP. The supervised practice requirement applies,
the scholarly project applies, and the degree is the same terminal
credential. What differs is what the project is about and where
the hours are spent.
11 of the 16 are flagged as delivered at a distance. That flag covers coursework only, the practice hours remain in person.
On pay: no federal wage series reports what a nursing-leadership
doctorate earns, because the federal survey classifies by
occupation and never by credential. The occupation most of these
graduates enter is medical and health services management, whose
national median is $123,860 across
597,080 people.
That population is overwhelmingly not nurses. It includes
hospital administrators, practice managers and insurance managers,
most holding no doctorate at all. It is context for the field, not
a salary for this degree.
Leadership Doctorate Or Clinical Doctorate
The most expensive mistake on this page is applying to the wrong
kind of DNP, and the two are easy to confuse because they carry the
same three letters.
What a leadership doctorate prepares you for
Running a service rather than carrying a panel. The coursework is finance, operations, health policy, informatics and quality improvement, and the doctoral project is usually a change made inside an organization and measured. Graduates move into nursing administration, executive practice and faculty roles.
What it does not prepare you for
Advanced clinical practice. A certification as certified nurse practitioner attaches to one of 6 population foci and comes from a clinical track, so this route does not carry you toward one. If you want to diagnose and prescribe, the track on this page is the wrong one however good the school is.
Which you already are decides more than which you want
Most programs here take nurses who already hold a master’s, and a good number scope entry specifically to nurses already working in administration, leadership or education. A clinically prepared nurse moving into management and a manager formalising what they already do are treated as different applicants by most of these schools.
Doing both is possible and is a different commitment
Some institutions run a dual route that adds an advanced practice specialty alongside the leadership preparation, and a few will let a certified practitioner add leadership coursework instead. Both are longer than either alone, and neither is the default.
Does a DNP in nursing leadership let me prescribe?
A degree confers no prescriptive authority. It comes from a state advanced practice license and the national certification behind it, so a DNP-prepared and a master’s-prepared nurse practitioner holding the same license prescribe the same things.
Is a leadership DNP the same as an MBA for nurses?
They overlap on finance and operations and diverge on everything else. The doctorate is accredited as a nursing degree, sits inside a nursing school, and ends in a practice project rather than a general management curriculum. Some institutions run the two as a joint degree, which is the honest answer to wanting both.
How many schools offer this track?
16 institutions file a DNP under nursing administration in the federal survey, which is 5.2% of the accredited field. It is a small population, so a rank here is a standing among 16 scored institutions rather than a national placement.
What do graduates earn?
No wage series reports earnings by degree, so there is no figure for a DNP specifically. Medical and health services management, the occupation most of these graduates enter, carries a national median of $123,860 across a population that is overwhelmingly not nurses and mostly holds no doctorate.
Do I need clinical experience to apply?
Usually, and often in a leadership role rather than any role. A number of these programs ask for a year or more of practice at master’s level, and some want a reference from someone who has done the job you are applying to move into. That is a stricter test than a grade point average and it is worth reading before you apply.
Every federal figure on this site is read from the administering agency’s own page, never from a secondary aggregator, and the reading date is recorded beside it.
