The 2026 State of Nursing Survey from Nurse.org surveyed 2,090 nurses and published data this week that, if you've spent any time on a hospital floor, will read as confirmation rather than surprise. 27% of nurses were physically assaulted in the past year. More than half — 54% — experienced verbal threats or aggressive language. 34% said they do not feel safe from violence at work.
The data gets worse when you break it out by unit. Among telemetry and progressive care nurses, 59% and 58% respectively reported physical assault in the past year. Emergency department nurses: 69% do not feel safe from violence in their workplace. Psychiatric nurses: 63% the same. These are not rare incidents or outlier facilities. This is the baseline experience for the majority of nurses in the highest-acuity units.
Why Nurses Don't Report
Of nurses who experienced a workplace incident, only 54% formally reported it. The most common reason for not reporting: they didn't believe anything would change. Among nurses who did report, the most common outcome was no action taken. This is a closed loop. The reporting infrastructure doesn't produce visible change, so nurses stop using it, which produces lower official incident counts, which facilities use to justify not investing in prevention.
The Joint Commission's new 2026 National Performance Goal 12 (NPG 12) requires accredited hospitals to address nurse staffing and workplace conditions — but NPG 12 is primarily focused on staffing ratios, not assault prevention protocols specifically. The Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act (H.R. 2531), reintroduced in Congress in April 2025, would mandate preventive workplace violence programs under OSHA enforcement — but the rule has not advanced under the current administration, which sidelined OSHA's proposed healthcare workplace violence standard.
The pattern is familiar from every floor I've worked. The patient punches someone on night shift. The nurse writes an incident report. Administration thanks them for reporting. Two months later, same patient returns, same unit, nothing in the chart about the prior assault. The documentation exists; the institutional memory doesn't. The survey data reflects this exactly — nurses stop reporting because the reporting goes nowhere.
Specialties at Highest Risk
The survey identified a clear specialty hierarchy. Emergency and psychiatric units bear the highest assault rates — not because those nurses are less capable of managing difficult patients, but because those units structurally concentrate patients in acute behavioral crisis with the least predictable escalation trajectory. Telemetry and progressive care units, which often absorb overflow from ICU and ED and care for patients with altered mental status or pain-mediated agitation, ranked second and third in assault rates.
The 2026 data continues a trend that was visible in 2023–2024 survey cycles. Violence against nurses is not a pandemic-era anomaly that has since resolved. It is a permanent feature of the clinical environment that has been inadequately addressed by both regulatory frameworks and institutional policy.
What the Numbers Mean for Staffing and Retention
The same 2026 State of Nursing Survey found that 23% of nurses said they want to leave the profession — a 53% increase from 2025. The connection between workplace violence and attrition is direct. Nurses who have been assaulted and received no institutional response do not feel that their employer has made a commitment to their safety. That perception drives exit decisions.
For hospital systems already operating under the Colorado Hospital Association's projected 10,000-nurse shortage and the national turnover rate of 17.6% — costing an average of $60,090 per departing RN per Becker's 2026 workforce data — the violence-to-attrition pathway is a direct financial problem, not just a safety one. Facilities with the weakest workplace violence response programs will continue to lose nurses to competitors who make the investment. The survey data provides the quantification.