Benchmarking Nurse Manager and DON Pay Separately From Staff RN Wages

When Leadership Pay Gets Lost in the RN Average

Before a budget review, a Director of Nursing pulls up the facility's compensation spreadsheet. The tab that's supposed to show nurse manager and DON pay is really just one long list — staff RNs, charge nurses, nurse managers, and the DON herself, all run through the same median formula. In aggregate, the numbers look fine. Nothing jumps out.

Then she filters down to just the five people who carry budget authority, staffing-plan sign-off, and compliance responsibility. Three of them are paid below what she'd call competitive for the weight of the role. Nobody caught it earlier because their rows were buried inside a staff RN average that was never built to answer this question in the first place.

This is a common and quiet problem. Nurse managers and DONs are nurses by license and often by career path, so it's tempting to benchmark their pay as a variant of staff RN wages — "RN plus a bump for the title." That approach misses the fact that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks these as genuinely different occupations, with different reporting, different percentile spreads, and different geographic behavior. By the end of this piece, you'll know which BLS occupational codes actually apply to each role, and how to build two separate, defensible pay bands instead of one blended one.

Why Nurse Manager and DON Pay Can't Share a Benchmark With Staff RN Wages

The BLS classifies occupations by Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) code, and a staff RN and a nurse manager sit in different codes even though many nurse managers hold the same RN license they used on the floor. Registered nurses are classified under SOC 29-1141. Directors of nursing, nurse managers, and comparable clinical-administrative leadership roles generally fall under SOC 11-9111, Medical and Health Services Managers — the same code that also covers hospital administrators, clinic managers, and other non-clinical healthcare leadership functions, according to BLS OEWS occupational definitions.

Running one blended average across both groups quietly asks the wrong question. It asks whether your nurse managers are paid like staff RNs with a few more years in — rather than whether they're paid like the management-track professionals the job actually requires them to be: budget owners, FTE planners, and staffing-law compliance stewards.

So why do so many facilities still run one combined average across both jobs? Usually it's headcount. Leadership rows are few compared to the staff RN roster, and folding them into the larger dataset feels like it simplifies the spreadsheet. It doesn't — it just hides a pay gap inside a bigger number.

The BLS Data You Actually Need for Nurse Manager Salary Benchmarking

Nurse manager salary benchmarking starts with pulling the correct SOC code, and that's where it gets more nuanced than it first appears. SOC 11-9111 is reported broadly: it covers nurse managers and DONs alongside non-nursing healthcare administrators, and BLS OEWS doesn't break the code down to a "nurse manager" sub-line at the national level. The median wage for 11-9111 in your state is a blend of nursing leadership and other healthcare management titles, not a number that isolates nursing leadership on its own.

Because of that, confirm the current national, state, and metro-level wage figures for SOC 11-9111 directly through the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics query tool before locking a band — this piece intentionally doesn't publish a point figure for that code, since doing so without a verified, current source would be worse than leaving the gap visible.

The comparable RN benchmark is on firmer footing, because the occupation is reported narrowly. The national RN median sits at $93,600 per year (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, using May 2024 data), and the May 2025 OEWS percentile breakdown runs from $68,940 at the 10th percentile up to $137,470 at the 90th, with the median at $97,550. For a deeper walk-through of how to read that percentile table correctly — including where facilities most often misread it — see how to read BLS OES wage data.

Building Separate Pay Bands for DONs and Nurse Managers

Once you have the right occupational code pulled for each role, the band-building math is the same formula applied twice, not once. A pay band is typically a minimum, a midpoint anchored to a chosen percentile (often the median), and a maximum set at a fixed spread above and below that anchor.

For a staff RN band, you can anchor directly to sourced figures. Using the national May 2025 OEWS percentiles — $80,330 at the 25th percentile and $112,350 at the 75th — a facility might set its staff RN band to roughly track that spread, with the $97,550 median as the midpoint of the grade.

For the nurse manager or DON band, the same formula applies, but because this article doesn't carry a sourced SOC 11-9111 figure, here's the method shown with placeholder numbers — clearly labeled as illustrative, not a market claim. If your own state-level BLS pull for 11-9111 returns a median near $104,000, a band built on a ±15% spread would run from roughly $88,400 to $119,600, with $104,000 anchoring the midpoint. Replace that placeholder with your actual confirmed figure before the band goes into a budget document. For a fuller walk-through of band construction, including how to handle step increases and tenure adjustments, see how to build nurse pay bands.

State and Metro Adjustments for Leadership Pay

Geography moves both benchmarks, but it moves them differently, and leadership roles are often more locally competitive than staff roles because there are fewer candidates for each opening. RN state medians illustrate how wide the national spread can get: California sits at $140,270, New York at $109,440, Texas at $95,970, and Florida at $84,190 (BLS OEWS, May 2025 data). A national RN median tells you almost nothing about whether a specific facility's offer is competitive in its own labor market.

The same local-versus-national gap shows up at the metro level. Ohio's statewide RN average wage is $82,510, while the Columbus, Ohio metro average runs higher at $83,900 (ONET local wage data, May 2025) — a modest difference, but one that would understate a Columbus-area offer if the facility benchmarked only against the statewide figure. (ONET Database by U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, used under the CC BY 4.0 license.)

A DON or nurse manager in a major metro market is competing against the adjacent hospital systems in that same metro, not against a national median for SOC 11-9111. Pull state and metro figures for the leadership code specifically, the same way you would for RN wages, before setting the band. For the mechanics of choosing state versus metro as your anchor, see state vs. metro wage benchmarking.

Where This Fits Inside a Full Compensation Strategy

Nurse manager and DON pay bands shouldn't live as an afterthought bolted onto the staff RN benchmark — they're a separate line item in a broader compensation build that also has to account for charge nurse differentials, shift premiums, and any state staffing-committee obligations tied to leadership roles. For the full method, from gathering BLS data through publishing a band internally, see the BLS nurse wage benchmarking guide and, if HR owns this process rather than nursing administration, the companion piece written for that audience, nurse compensation for HR directors.

A pay band should answer one question: is this specific role's pay inside, above, or below the current market band for its specific occupation — not a neighboring one.

That's the whole test. A blended RN-and-leadership average can't answer it, because it was never built to isolate the leadership role in the first place.

This is also where a wage-gap alert earns its keep — not as a replacement for the BLS pull, but as the layer that flags when a specific nurse manager or DON's pay has drifted outside the band you built, before it turns into an exit interview. The dashboard pulls public BLS OES wage data and flags those gaps directly; it holds no patient data, doesn't integrate with EHR or payroll systems, and doesn't touch scheduling. It's a benchmarking and early-warning layer, not a system of record.

Confirming the Numbers Before You Act

Before any pay band goes into a budget cycle, confirm the current SOC 11-9111 figures directly from BLS OEWS at the national, state, and metro level — the figures move with each release, and a number that was accurate last year may not be this year. If your state's labor department publishes its own healthcare-management wage report, reconcile the two rather than relying on either alone.

If you'd rather not run this as a manual pull every budget cycle, a trial of the dashboard will show how the wage-gap alerts and pay-band tooling apply this same method automatically, role by role, using current public wage data. For the complete set of benchmarking resources referenced across this series, the nurse wage benchmarking resource hub is the starting point.