Illinois Nurse Turnover & Wage Landscape: A 2026 Guide

Why Illinois Nurse Workforce Data Starts in Chicago

Picture a Director of Nursing at a 120-bed community hospital on Chicago's north side, reviewing the unit schedule for the coming month. She notices the same pattern she saw three months ago: two experienced RNs on the telemetry unit have quietly reduced their availability, a med-surg opening has been posted for eleven weeks, and the most recent travel-nurse invoice — covering a single four-week contract — has made its way to the CFO's desk. Nothing in her spreadsheet told her any of this was coming.

That experience is not unique to Illinois, but the Illinois labor market has a specific structural feature that shapes how nurse managers and CNOs should read workforce data: the Chicago metropolitan area is, by a wide margin, the state's dominant nursing labor market. A hospital in Peoria, Rockford, or Springfield operates in a meaningfully different wage environment than a facility in Cook, DuPage, or Lake County — and state-level averages, if read without metro context, can quietly mislead pay-band decisions.

This guide pulls together what the national data tells us about RN turnover trends and wage benchmarks, explains where Illinois fits structurally, and offers a framework for how Illinois nurse leaders can read their own workforce numbers more clearly. By the end, you'll have a cleaner model for distinguishing between a statewide signal and a Chicago-market signal — and for knowing which one your pay decisions should be anchored to.

Illinois Nurse Turnover in National Context

Illinois nurse leaders are operating inside a national turnover environment that reversed course in 2025. After two consecutive years of improvement, the national staff RN turnover rate rose to 17.6% in 2025, up 1.2 percentage points from 16.4% in 2024 — reversing a prior decline (NSI 2026 National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report, via Becker's Hospital Review, 2026).

That reversal matters for planning. A rate of 17.6% is not a crisis in isolation, but it carries a compounding cost: the NSI 2026 report puts the average per-RN-departure cost at $60,090 — down slightly from $61,110 the prior year but still a figure that accumulates quickly. For the average hospital, the same report estimates total annual RN-turnover loss at $4.2M–$6.2M per year, with a $5.19M average (NSI 2026, via Becker's, 2026). Every percentage point of RN turnover costs the average hospital approximately $295,000 per year (NSI 2026, via Becker's, 2026).

The Illinois nurse turnover picture at the state level is not separately reported in this library, but the national range gives important context: the NSI 2026 data shows RN turnover varying from 5.6% to 40.0% depending on hospital bed count (NSI 2026, via Becker's, 2026). Illinois facilities span this entire range — a 50-bed critical-access hospital in downstate Illinois and a 300-bed suburban Chicago system sit at very different points on that curve, and the appropriate benchmark for each is different.

For Illinois-specific illinois nurse turnover rates by facility type, size, or unit, the most direct source is the NSI annual report itself, supplemented by the Illinois Health and Hospital Association's workforce data releases. Readers should verify current figures directly with those sources rather than relying on any single estimate.

The Chicago Metro Effect on RN Wages

State-level wage averages, while useful as a first orientation, compress a lot of variation in a state like Illinois. The Chicago-Naperville-Elgin Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) is home to the majority of the state's hospital capacity and a large share of its nursing workforce — which means wages in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry, and Will counties pull the statewide average in ways that may not reflect conditions in secondary markets.

The BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program publishes MSA-level wage data for Registered Nurses (SOC 29-1141) and Licensed Practical and Vocational Nurses (SOC 29-2061) annually. The specific May 2024 Illinois state-level and Chicago MSA RN and LPN/LVN median wages are not available in this article's sourced library and should be pulled directly from the BLS OEWS May 2024 release at bls.gov/oes before using them in pay-band decisions. This is not a gap in the data — BLS publishes it reliably — but it is a gap that should be filled from the primary source, not from a secondary summary that may carry a different vintage.

What the national BLS data does confirm as anchors:

• National RN median annual wage: $93,600 (May 2024), with the 10th percentile below $66,030 and the 90th percentile above $135,320 — BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook (Registered Nurses), May 2024.
• National LPN/LVN median annual wage: $62,340 (May 2024; $29.97/hr), with the 10th percentile below $47,960 and the 90th percentile above $80,510 — BLS OOH (LPN/LVN), May 2024.

Major metro markets — of which Chicago is one — tend to sit above the national median for both roles, reflecting higher costs of living, unionization rates, and competitive labor-market density. Illinois nurse leaders benchmarking pay bands against a national figure alone are likely under-estimating the wage floor their Chicago-area staff can find elsewhere. The BLS nurse wage benchmarking guide on this site walks through how to read percentile bands rather than median-only figures, which is the more useful frame for competitive pay-setting.

Understanding the difference between a state-level and a metro-level signal is also covered in the state vs. metro wage benchmarking guide — a distinction particularly relevant for Illinois, where the Chicago MSA's weight in state averages is large.

Reading Illinois RN Vacancy and Recruitment Conditions

Vacancy is the other side of the illinois nursing workforce equation, and nationally the picture in 2025 is meaningful: the NSI 2026 report puts the average RN vacancy rate at 8.6%, representing an average of 43 unfilled RN FTEs per hospital, with 33.1% of hospitals carrying vacancy rates at or above 10% (NSI 2026, via Becker's, 2026). The average time to fill an experienced RN position is 78 days (NSI 2026 Recruitment Difficulty Index, via Kahuna Workforce, 2026).

For a 150-bed Illinois hospital running close to that national average, 43 unfilled RN FTEs is not an abstraction — it is a schedule problem that arrives every two weeks at payroll, every month on the CFO's desk, and every week in the charge nurse's huddle. The cost of covering those vacancies with agency or travel staff compounds quickly: the NSI 2026 data notes travel RN rates as high as $160/hour, with the modeled saving from replacing 20 travel nurses with employed staff reaching $1.32M (NSI 2026 / Kahuna Workforce, 2026).

Illinois-specific vacancy rates are not separately available in this sourced library. For state-level vacancy and hard-to-fill data, the Illinois Department of Public Health and the Illinois Health and Hospital Association periodically publish workforce survey results; those are the appropriate primary sources for state-specific figures.

The broader national demand picture provides useful context regardless: BLS projects RN employment to grow 5% from 2024 to 2034, generating approximately 189,100 annual openings, against a current base of 3.4 million RN jobs nationally (BLS OOH, Registered Nurses, 2024–2034 projection). In a metro like Chicago — with large academic medical centers, a dense community hospital network, and a substantial SNF/LTC sector — the competition for experienced RNs at every experience level is persistent.

Wage-Gap Risk in Illinois: What to Watch

The wage-gap risk specific to chicago nurse staffing and the broader Illinois market is structural: when a facility's internal pay band sits meaningfully below the prevailing MSA-level wage, experienced staff have a visible, quantifiable reason to leave — and newer staff have a reason not to stay long enough to develop unit expertise.

The mechanism is straightforward. An RN offered a position at a competing system in the same metro has access to the same BLS percentile data their manager does, often through their professional association, a recruiter, or a simple wage-transparency search. If the gap between what your facility pays and what the market pays is large and sustained, it shows up eventually in resignation letters — or, earlier, in reduced engagement and external job applications that don't yet appear in any spreadsheet.

The nursing workforce analytics guide on this site covers how facilities can build a structured process for monitoring this gap continuously rather than discovering it at exit. The key mechanics — rolling 12-month turnover by unit, BLS OES wage percentile comparison against the relevant MSA, and pay-band gap flagging — are described in detail there and in the features overview for how they work within a structured analytics tool.

For Illinois facilities operating outside the Chicago metro — Peoria, Rockford, Champaign, the Quad Cities MSA, or downstate rural markets — the same logic applies, but the relevant comparison is the local or regional MSA wage, not the Chicago figure. Using Chicago metro wages to benchmark a Carbondale-area hospital would systematically overstate the gap; using a statewide average would understate it for a Naperville facility. Our state vs. metro wage benchmarking guide addresses this directly.

Illinois Nursing Workforce: The Long-Range View

The longer-range workforce picture for RN illinois provides some reassurance alongside its complexity. Total FTE RNs nationally rebounded to 3.35 million in 2022–23, 6% above 2019's 3.16 million, with projections reaching approximately 4.56 million by 2035 (Auerbach et al., published via PMC/HealthExec, 2024). Graduate nurse supply has been robust in Illinois — the state has a strong nursing school infrastructure across its university and community college systems — but supply growth does not automatically translate into retention, especially when new graduates leave for metro competitors or travel assignments before building sustained tenure at a first employer.

HRSA's updated nursing workforce projections (2023–2038 Factsheet, 2024) project an 8% national RN shortage in 2028 narrowing to 3% / approximately 108,960 FTE by 2038, with nonmetropolitan markets facing an 11% shortage by 2038. That last figure is relevant for Illinois facilities outside the Chicago corridor: downstate and rural Illinois hospitals face a structurally tighter supply pipeline than their suburban counterparts, even as aggregate state-level numbers look more balanced.

83% of CNOs nationally cite recruitment and retention as a top success metric in their organizations (Wolters Kluwer / Lippincott FutureCare Nursing 2026 report, 2026) — a figure that confirms what Illinois nurse leaders already feel in their planning cycles. The question is not whether turnover and wage benchmarking matter; it is whether the measurement infrastructure in place is sensitive enough to surface a problem before it becomes a departure.

For a parallel view of how another large state labor market approaches this same challenge, the North Carolina nurse turnover landscape guide covers a state with its own metro-concentration dynamics in Charlotte and the Research Triangle.

Stay Current on Illinois Workforce Data

Illinois RN wages, vacancy rates, and turnover benchmarks shift with each BLS OEWS release and each NSI annual report. The May 2024 BLS state and MSA wage figures for Illinois are available directly at bls.gov/oes — search for SOC 29-1141 (RN) and SOC 29-2061 (LPN/LVN) filtered to Illinois or the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin MSA for the most current published figures.

If you'd like a concise summary of new BLS and NSI releases as they publish — with Illinois-relevant highlights and plain-English context — sign up for the Nursing Workforce Planner newsletter below. Each issue covers the data that moves the needle for nurse leaders managing turnover, wages, and vacancy in real time.