How we measure pay

Where each number comes from

• Postings with published pay19,197 open roles from 144 employers, collected October 15, 2026.
• Employer-reported wage offers6,738 distinct offers from PERM and LCA filings, decided July 2025 – June 2026.
• Hospital factsCMS Hospital General Information: address, type, ownership, emergency services and overall rating.
• License statusNurse Licensure Compact status as of October 15, 2026, from state implementation records.

Postings with published pay

• We collect open roles from employer career sites that publish a pay range.
• We use the midpoint of the range. Annual pay is converted to hourly by dividing by 2,080.
• We report medians and percentiles, not averages.
• Ranges that cannot be read as pay are left out.

Employer-reported wage offers in federal filings

Employers that sponsor foreign-born clinicians report the wage they offer in public filings with the U.S. Department of Labor Office of Foreign Labor Certification: PERM labor certifications and Labor Condition Applications. We use those disclosure files for healthcare occupations.

• Only certified filings decided July 2025 – June 2026.
• The worksite state is required; filings without one are skipped.
• Each distinct offer (employer, title, wage, city) counts once, with at most 10 offers per employer and profession in a state.
• Managers, directors, residents, trainees and instructors are dropped.
• Hourly values far from the profession median are treated as errors and dropped.
• A wage range whose top is far above its bottom is treated as a cap, and the bottom is used.
• They are wage offers, not job postings, and are never counted as open roles.

What the numbers are not

• They are not survey estimates and not a promise of pay on a specific role.
• Postings and filings measure different things and are never blended into one number.
• Pay differs by experience, shift, specialty and employer, so use the ranges, not a single number.