A new annual survey report brings warnings of sharp drops among nurses’ views of their jobs and careers during the past year.
Released this week, it found a year-to-year drop in reported job satisfaction among nearly 2,100 nurses from 55% to 47%. It’s the first time since 2022’s 28% low that the measure hasn’t improved from the prior year, according to nurse.org, which conducted the survey.
The job satisfaction responses varied by specialty, with nurse educators and NICU nurses most often reporting they were satisfied while only 23% of progressive care, 31% of geriatric care, 34% of telemetry and 35% of emergency nurses saying the same.
Meanwhile, 43% of nurses said they are likely to leave the bedside in the next year, an increase from last year’s 39%, and 23% said they’re likely to leave the profession within the next year, up from 15%.
“None of these shifts is catastrophic on its own,” the 2026 State of Nursing Survey report reads. “But taken together, they suggest that the structural problems facing nursing were not resolved by the brief period of recovery that followed the pandemic. They were, at best, partially and temporarily eased.”
On the other hand, the percentage of respondents who said they were happy with their decision to become a nurse stayed roughly flat, at 68%, as did the portion who said they would recommend a nursing career to friends or family, at 47%.
Such rates suggest “nurses are not losing faith in the profession. They are losing patience with the conditions,” the report reads. However, when asked about the factors that have kept nurses at the bedside, financial necessity topped the responses by a fair margin (cited by 41%) and beat other factors such as a commitment to patient care (28%) and personal satisfaction (24%).
As for those frustrations, 42% of respondents said staffing in their unit had worsened over the past year, compared to 8% who said it improved, while 42% said their working conditions had worsened, as opposed to 8% who reported conditions had improved.
Reports of workplace violence “remain alarming,” with 52% saying in the past year that they experienced verbal threats or aggressive language, 27% physical assault and 10% sexual harassment or unwanted sexual contact. Thirty-four percent said they don’t feel safe from violence in their workplace and, among the third of nurses who said they had reported their most serious incident to their employer, 16% said no action was taken, while others said they didn’t know what changed (9%) or ultimately felt blamed or discouraged (5%).
“Many nurses choose not to report incidents at all, citing a belief that nothing will change,” the report reads. “That fatalism—earned after years of inadequate institutional response—means the true scale of workplace violence in nursing is almost certainly larger than what survey data captures.”
The survey also touches on nurses’ financial well-being. Here, 55% said they increased their compensation during the past year, yet 25% said their income barely or does not cover essential monthly expenses and 37% said they wouldn’t be able to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense without going into debt. Thirty-seven percent said financial pressures drove their decision to take on extra shifts or overtime in the past year, while 15% said they’d taken a second job.
“None of this erases the progress of the past few years. Burnout and mental health metrics improved dramatically between 2022 and 2024, and nurses' core love for the profession has remained steady,” the report reads. “But the 2026 data is a clear signal that improvement is not inevitable—and that without meaningful, sustained action on staffing, pay, safety and support, the gains of recent years will continue to erode.”