Nurse.org's 2026 State of Nursing Survey dropped on April 6, and the trend line reversed. After three years of slow improvement, job satisfaction fell from 55% in 2025 to 47% in 2026. The share of nurses who say they're likely to leave the profession entirely jumped nearly 50% in a single year, from roughly 15% to 23%. And 43% — effectively half the bedside workforce — say they're likely to leave the bedside within 12 months.

This is the largest published nursing workforce survey of the year. It matters because post-COVID recovery numbers finally started looking better in 2024–2025. Now they're unwinding.

The numbers that actually matter

  • Job satisfaction: 47% (down from 55% in 2025)
  • Likely to leave bedside in next year: 43%
  • Likely to leave profession entirely: 23%
  • Would recommend nursing as a career: 47% (a majority would not)
  • Happy with their decision to become a nurse: 68%

That last number is the one worth sitting with. Most nurses still say they like being nurses. They do not like their current jobs. Those are not the same thing.

Workplace violence has become routine

The survey's workplace violence numbers are the worst they've ever published:

  • 52% experienced verbal threats or aggressive language in the past year
  • 27% were physically assaulted at work
  • 10% experienced unwanted sexual contact
  • 34% say they do not feel safe from workplace violence on their shift

More than a quarter of American nurses were physically assaulted last year. This is not an outlier unit or a bad ER somewhere. This is the national picture. Nurses have been publishing these numbers for five years, and the policy response has been thin.

Pay isn't keeping up

On the compensation side, 55% saw a raise this year — which sounds positive until you look at what the survey found when it asked what that money actually covers.

  • Only 20% say they are financially comfortable
  • 49% cover essentials only with careful budgeting
  • 37% cannot handle a $1,000 emergency without debt
  • 41% of nurses staying at the bedside say the reason is financial necessity — the #1 answer

"Staying because I need the money" is now the top retention factor in bedside nursing. Management support, by contrast, was picked by 8%. That gap tells the story.

AI is being rolled out faster than training

One-quarter of nurses surveyed are now using AI tools at work — charting assists, triage, documentation, sepsis alerts. But only 40% of them say they received adequate training. Only 22% trust AI for patient safety decisions. And only 40% said they had meaningful input into which AI tools their hospital picked.

For context, we covered the current landscape of AI charting tools in our AI charting tools guide on April 19. This survey confirms: nurses are getting the tools and the workload change without the governance.

What's different about 2026 vs. 2025

The 2025 survey showed a profession that was tired but stabilizing. Turnover rates had started leveling off. 2026 shows the opposite: a reversal. A few reasons are visible in the data:

  • Federal staffing mandates rolled back in late 2025 (CMS minimum staffing rule repeal took effect Feb 2, 2026 — see our coverage)
  • DOGE federal grant freezes hitting community-nursing programs, public-health nurse pay, and HRSA-funded pipelines
  • Post-COVID contract expirations with wages that haven't kept up with inflation
  • Workplace violence rates still climbing
  • Faculty shortages squeezing the supply side — the pipeline isn't filling the exits

What hospitals will try

Expect a predictable menu of HR responses: engagement surveys, wellness resources, more pizza, a new employee assistance program URL, maybe a sign-on bonus for night shift. None of those move a 43% intent-to-leave number. The variables that do move it — safe ratios, enforceable workplace violence policies, wages indexed to local cost of living, management that listens — are the expensive ones.

For nurses personally: if you're in the 43%, you're not alone. If you're in the 23% planning to leave nursing entirely, take the survey question seriously and put a plan in writing. A bad unit is not the whole profession, but a profession with these numbers is not going to self-correct quickly.

Why this matters

If half your floor is planning to be gone in a year and a quarter of them are planning to leave nursing entirely, the staffing projections from Joint Commission, CMS, and AHA are optimistic. This is not a recruitment problem. It's a retention problem — and money alone won't fix it, but money is the only retention variable showing up in the data.