Stop Saying There's a Nursing Shortage — Time

RESOLVING THE LEDGER

Stethoscopes on the wall of a class at the MGH Institute of Health Professions on Jan. 13, 2026. —Suzanne Kreiter—The Boston Globe/Getty Images

Turn on the television or flip through a newspaper, and you might think that the U.S. desperately needs to train more nurses.

Arizona has nearly 30,000 nursing vacancies , local TV stations there recently reported; Pennsylvania Republicans met in early June to discuss how to fill the state’s nursing shortage, two schools are even opening new nursing programs in Georgia to meet that state’s projected nursing shortage. “The Nursing Shortage Starts in the Classroom,” a recent Wall Street Journal headline proclaimed.

Yet more people are going into nursing; 280,308 people passed the NCLEX examination to become a registered nurse (RN) or licensed practical nurse (LPN) in 2025, a 34% increase from 2016, according to the National Council of State Boards of Nursing. And currently 7 million registered nurses and practical nurses hold an active license in at least one state, according to the National Council of State Boards of Nursing.

But there were only about 3.4 million jobs for registered nurses in 2024, the most recent year for which data are available, and 651,400 jobs for licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses in that year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—meaning that there are substantively more actively licensed nurses than there are nursing jobs. This suggests that well over two million licensed nurses are not currently working as nurses for patients.

This data—and the experience of many nurses across the country—suggest that the U.S. may have less of an actual shortage of licensed nurses than a shortage of nurses who are willing to work in bedside jobs that have become increasingly demanding. Pressure on nursing has not let up since the pandemic, nurses say, because of cost-cutting at hospitals and health systems that ask them to do more work with fewer resources.

“We’re really putting a lot of money into building a pipeline for nursing, but if nurses are leaving after a year or two of getting into employment, the problem isn’t so much a pipeline problem as a leaking gas tank,” says Karen Lasater, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing who studies what she calls the nursing-retention crisis.

Why nursing jobs are getting more difficult

Conditions for nurses were bad before the pandemic, got even worse during it, and appear to be deteriorating further a few years out, according to research Lasater and her colleagues recently published. Postpandemic, more than two thirds of hospital nurses reported having too few staff, compared to 57% before the pandemic, according to the paper, which surveyed 50,044 nurses in hospitals across New York and Illinois. From December 2023 to March 2024, about one third of nurses said they were dissatisfied and that they intended to leave their employer—“significantly” higher than pre-pandemic and pandemic levels, according to the paper.

It wasn’t just their imagination that the work seemed like it was getting harder. Among nurses working on medical-surgical units, the average staffing ratio increased to six patients per nurse, up from 5.7 prepandemic, according to the paper. (In California, one of the few states with mandated staffing ratios, ER nurses are staffed at a ratio of four per patient, and labor and delivery nurses are staffed at a ratio of two per patient.)

“I fear that we’re headed to a worse place, because it’s apparent that we didn’t learn much from the COVID-19 pandemic,” Lasater says.

Ariana Lucio, a 45-year-old nurse in El Paso, Texas, has been a nurse for 14 years and currently works in the medical-surgical unit at Del Sol Medical Center, which is owned by HCA Healthcare, the largest health system in the U.S. HCA operates a network of for-profit hospitals across the country. Her hospital has been cutting back on staffing and embracing technology that makes work harder for nurses, says Lucio. Adequate staffing is a key issue for nurses unions and organizations , and Lucio, who is a member of National Nurses United, has protested staffing conditions at the hospital in the past.

Her unit used to have a unit clerk who would answer the phones, stock supplies, and handle paperwork, but the hospital eliminated the position, she says. Now, she says nurses are running to answer phones, clean the break room, and pick up the tasks the unit clerk used to do. In the past, the charge nurse—often the person managing a specific hospital unit—wasn’t assigned patients, Lucio says. No longer. The added responsibility of patients means the charge nurse can’t as easily help other nurses with difficulties they may encounter.

The hospital also used to predominantly use “sitters”: hospital employees who stay in a patient’s room for a given amount of time to keep a patient company or ensure that they stay in bed for safety reasons. But Lucio says that the hospital is relying more on virtual sitters: a person on a computer screen who watches and can talk to the patient remotely. If a patient tries to get out of bed and doesn’t listen to the virtual sitter’s instructions to get back in bed, the virtual sitter messages the nurses on duty, who then have to get the patient back in bed, Lucio says. With in-person sitters, the nurse is called less frequently because the in-person sitters can get the patient back in bed.

“It’s gotten harder, especially after COVID,” says Lucio, who recently became so burned out that she went from working full-time to part-time. “It’s coming not so much from patients but from changes in the administration.”

HCA, which owns Del Sol Medical Center, referred questions about staffing to a public relations team handling the hospital’s communications. In a statement to TIME responding to these examples of how staffing conditions have changed, Del Sol Medical Center said that its staffing is “safe and appropriate” and that it utilizes technolo...

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