Nurse Practitioner Salary

The bottom tenth of nurse practitioners earn under $101,340. The top tenth clear $174,420. That is a range of $73,000 inside one occupation, and it is the single most useful thing the survey publishes, because it tells you what a nurse practitioner salary can reach rather than what it usually is.

The middle half sits between $117,990 and $156,700. If you are weighing an offer, that is the band to measure it against. An offer above $156,700 puts you in the top quarter of the occupation nationally, though in a high-paying state the same number is unremarkable, which is why the state table below matters more than this paragraph does.

What moves you through that range is setting, specialty, hours, call, years in post and how hard you negotiate. What does not move you through it, on any evidence this survey can offer, is which graduate degree you hold.

This is the comparison most people reading this page are actually running, because most of them hold an RN license today. Registered nurses report a median of $97,550 across 3,379,720 jobs. Nurse practitioners report $132,300. The step is about $35,000.

Both are occupation medians, so this comparison is one the survey genuinely supports: it is two different jobs, measured the same way. That is not true of any comparison between degrees.

Set that step against what the education costs and how long you are out of full-time earnings, and note that the step is not uniform. In a state where staff nursing pays well the gap narrows; where it pays poorly it widens. The table below gives you the practitioner half of that calculation for your own state.

For scale in the other direction, nurse anesthetists report $236,590. That is a different occupation doing different work under a different accreditor, not a better-paid version of this one, and the gap between them measures the job rather than the credential.

Not in a way the federal data can show you, and it is worth being exact about why rather than hedging. There is no nurse practitioner salary broken out by degree anywhere in the federal record.

OEWS surveys establishments about the jobs they employ people in. It records occupation, wage, industry and geography. It does not record what degree the person holds, so there is no DNP wage series, no master's wage series, and no way to difference the two. Every figure on this page describes master's-prepared and doctorally- prepared nurse practitioners mixed together in whatever proportion they exist in the workforce.

That is not the same as saying the doctorate is worthless. It says the mechanism is different from the one people imagine. A DNP does not add a premium to the job you already hold. It opens roles whose job descriptions ask for a doctorate, which are mostly faculty, executive and quality roles rather than clinical ones, and those are separate occupations with separate wage series of their own.

And the profession does not require it. All NPs must complete a master’s or doctoral degree program and have advanced clinical training beyond their initial professional registered nurse (RN) preparation. The credential this profession issues does not ask for a doctorate, so the degree is a choice about where you want to compete rather than a condition of entry. Weigh the degree on where you want to compete, not on a pay rise the data cannot promise.

BLS projects employment for nurse anesthetists, nurse midwives and nurse practitioners together to grow 36% from 2025 to 2035.

Read the scope rather than the number. That rate covers three occupations bundled together and BLS does not split them in this profile, so it is not a nurse practitioner growth rate and should never be quoted as one. It is the closest federal figure that exists, which is a different claim.

Growth in the occupation is also not the same as ease of finding your first post. The number of programs graduating into this field has risen alongside demand, and new graduates in saturated metros report a competitive market that a national projection does not capture.