The first-time NCLEX-RN pass rate for U.S.-educated candidates fell from 91.2% in 2024 to 86.7% in 2025 — a 4.5 percentage-point drop that represents the largest single-year decline since the Next Generation NCLEX launched in April 2023, according to NCSBN annual reporting data. The overall pass rate (including repeat test-takers) fell to 69.1% in 2025, down from 73.3% in 2024.

For a workforce already running short-staffed, the numbers prompted immediate concern: every NCLEX failure is a nurse who isn't yet working. With BLS reporting 189,000 RN job openings annually and vacancy rates at major health systems still running 10–18% in many specialties, the pipeline matters.

What the Numbers Actually Show

The 86.7% figure for 2025 is lower than the pre-pandemic norm (which hovered around 84–86% for U.S. candidates for most of the 2010s) but is not historically catastrophic. The 2024 number of 91.2% was itself unusually high — a possible artifact of the transitional year when candidates rushed to test before the full Next Gen rollout or after special accommodations expired.

In Q1 2026, the first-time pass rate stabilized at 86.8%, near the pre-pandemic range. That's encouraging, but it doesn't fully explain the 2025 dip, and NCSBN has not released a formal root-cause analysis.

Three Competing Explanations

1. Pandemic clinical gap. Nursing students who graduated in 2024–2025 often had their first 1–2 clinical years disrupted by COVID-19 restrictions, telehealth-only rotations, and simulation-only substitutions for bedside hours. The Next Gen NCLEX is explicitly designed to assess clinical judgment — exactly the skill you build in bedside rotations, not lecture halls. Students who missed those hours may be encountering their first real clinical judgment tests on the exam itself, not in practice.

2. Inflated 2024 baseline. The 2024 rate of 91.2% was abnormally high. NCSBN's internal analyses and independent education researchers have noted that several factors — including schools coaching specifically to the new NGN item formats and a less-experienced candidate cohort compared to years prior — may have inflated that baseline. If 2024 was an outlier high, then 2025's decline is partly a reversion, not a collapse.

3. Changing candidate pool composition. Internationally educated candidates and repeat test-takers — both groups with historically lower first-time pass rates — are a growing share of the overall testing pool. If their share increased in 2025, the composite first-time rate could decline even if U.S.-educated first-timers held steady. Disaggregated data by candidate origin hasn't been fully published for 2025.

The New 2026 NCLEX Test Plan

Adding a variable to all of this: on April 1, 2026, a revised NCLEX test plan took effect. The 2026 plan adds renamed content categories and new activity statements across several client needs subcategories, with continued emphasis on clinical judgment and Next Gen item types (bowtie, trend, extended drag-and-drop). Candidates testing in 2026 and beyond are working from updated blueprints.

Q1 2026's 86.8% first-time pass rate was measured under the new plan's early rollout period — too early to know whether the revision made the exam harder, easier, or neutral.

What Nursing Schools Are Doing

Several major nursing programs have adjusted their curricula in response to the NGN transition and 2025 pass rate data. Common interventions include:

  • Integrating NGN-style bowtie and trend-analysis practice items starting in the first semester
  • Adding clinical judgment simulation hours to compensate for the pandemic-era bedside shortfall
  • Requiring mid-program ATI or HESI predictive assessments with remediation pathways for at-risk students
  • Delaying graduation for students who score below program-defined NCLEX readiness thresholds

The University of Virginia School of Nursing is among those changing curriculum in August 2026, per Becker's Hospital Review reporting — though the specific changes weren't publicly detailed.

The Staffing Math

At scale, a 4.5-point pass rate drop matters. BLS OEWS May 2025 shows 3,379,720 employed RNs nationally. If approximately 150,000–180,000 new U.S. candidates test annually, a 4.5% decline in first-time pass rates means roughly 6,750–8,100 additional first-time failures. Those candidates can and do retest, but each failure adds 45–90 days to their entry into the workforce — and delays that ripple into staffing vacancy statistics at a moment when nursing shortage projections already run to 100,000+ unfilled positions by 2030.

NCSBN is expected to publish its full 2025 annual NCLEX program report later in 2026. Until then, the Q1 2026 stability at 86.8% is the most current positive signal.