CRNA Salary: What Nurse Anesthetists Earn

Nurse anesthetists earn 1.79 times the nurse-practitioner median, a difference of $104,000 a year. It is the largest gap between two advanced-practice nursing occupations in the federal data, and it is the comparison most often used to argue that a DNP pays for itself.

It does not support that argument. Nurse anesthetists and nurse practitioners are different occupations doing different work, so the gap between them measures the job rather than the degree. A nurse practitioner in primary care and a nurse anesthetist in an operating suite are doing different work with different training, different risk and different hours. Moving between them is a career change, not a credential upgrade, and the doctorate is not what separates the two figures.

The comparison that would settle the credential question, a doctorally-prepared nurse anesthetist against a master’s-prepared one doing the same job, cannot be made from this data at all. BLS classifies by occupation, not by credential: there is no DNP wage series, and every figure here covers everyone in the occupation regardless of which degree they hold.

Nurse anesthesia is the one advanced-practice specialty where the move to doctoral entry actually happened. Council on Accreditation of Nurse Anesthesia Educational Programs requires it, so there is no master’s route into the occupation to weigh against a doctoral one.

Everywhere else in advanced practice, the doctoral-entry recommendation set a target that never became a requirement. A master’s still qualifies you to sit a nurse practitioner certification exam today. That difference is why a CRNA salary page and a nurse practitioner salary page are answering genuinely different questions: here the degree is the price of entry, and there it is a choice.

Two practical consequences. Nurse anesthesia programs are also accredited by COA rather than by CCNE, so a school’s CCNE accreditation says nothing about its anesthesia track. And the 1,000-hour practice expectation that shapes other DNP programs sits alongside anesthesia’s own clinical case requirements rather than replacing them.

Employment across nurse anesthetists, nurse midwives and nurse practitioners together is projected to grow 36% from 2025 to 2035.

That figure covers all three occupations together and this site does not split it, because the published profile does not. A nurse-anesthetist-specific growth rate exists in the underlying projections tables, and until someone pulls it and records it with its own source, quoting one here would be attaching a number to a URL that does not carry it.