The National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN), in partnership with the National Forum of State Nursing Workforce Centers, launched the 2026 National Nursing Workforce Survey on March 25, 2026. The survey runs through September 2026 and is the most comprehensive data collection effort on the U.S. nursing workforce conducted anywhere. If you're a licensed RN or LPN and haven't received a survey invitation yet, you may still.
This matters beyond a routine data exercise. The prior edition — the 2024 National Nursing Workforce Study — found that 39.9% of RNs and 41.3% of LPNs reported intent to leave the workforce or retire within the next five years. It also documented that more than 138,000 nurses left the workforce between 2022 and 2024. Those figures directly shaped HRSA's projection of a 263,870 RN shortage by 2026, which in turn drove CMS's $200M nursing home staffing campaign and multiple state-level workforce funding bills now in committee.
The 2026 edition will capture a snapshot of the workforce at a specific inflection point: post-pandemic stabilization, post-federal staffing mandate repeal, and amid a structural shift toward outpatient and home-based care. Researchers and policymakers will use the data to model shortage severity through 2030, calibrate nursing school enrollment targets, and argue for or against Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement changes that affect how many nurses facilities can actually afford to hire.
The biennial survey has been conducted since 2013 and reaches hundreds of thousands of licensed nurses through state nursing boards. In 2024, it surveyed approximately 800,000 nurses. The 2026 version is expected to be similar in scope. Key questions cover employment status, specialty, work setting, hours worked, intent to leave, reasons for departure, and compensation.
For working nurses, the practical implication is this: if you get a survey invitation through your state board of nursing, completing it takes about 10 minutes and directly influences the data that shapes staffing legislation, workforce funding, and nursing school capacity decisions. Aggregate responses — not individual responses — become the foundation for policy arguments at both state and federal levels. Nurses who are burned out, understaffed, or planning to leave are precisely the demographic the survey needs to hear from.
Results from the 2026 survey are expected to be published in 2027 in the Journal of Nursing Regulation, with preliminary findings potentially available to state workforce centers sooner. The 2024 findings are available now at ncsbn.org/workforce for anyone looking at the current baseline.
The survey's significance also lies in what it measures beyond raw numbers. Past editions documented the geographic distribution of the nursing workforce — which states have surpluses and which have critical gaps — and the specialty mix of active nurses. That data informs how states allocate nursing school funding, how workforce centers prioritize rural recruitment programs, and how federal agencies like HRSA calculate shortage designations for Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSAs). If your community is designated an HPSA, it becomes eligible for specific loan repayment programs and recruitment incentives that otherwise aren't available.
Nurses who've left the bedside but maintain active licenses are particularly valuable respondents. The 2024 data revealed that a meaningful portion of inactive license holders weren't permanently out of the workforce — they had left for reasons like school, childcare, or burnout, and many expressed openness to returning under the right conditions. That nuance — the difference between "left nursing" and "paused nursing" — shapes how workforce planners think about re-entry incentives versus new-grad pipeline expansion. Both matter, but they require different policy interventions and different dollar amounts.
The 2026 survey is also capturing data during a specific policy window: the CMS nursing home staffing mandate was repealed in December 2025, Joint Commission staffing goals just took effect in 2026, and multiple states have active ratio legislation in committee. The data will land in 2027 at a moment when policymakers on both sides of the staffing mandate debate will be looking for evidence. Your response, even anonymized, contributes to that evidentiary record. If the workforce data shows nurses are leaving in increasing numbers and citing unsafe conditions, that argument gets harder to dismiss legislatively.