New Jersey Nurse Turnover & Wage Landscape: A 2026 Guide

The Invoice That Lands on a New Jersey CFO's Desk in February

A med-surg unit in a 180-bed New Jersey hospital loses three RNs in six weeks. Two resign for better pay at a system twenty minutes down the turnpike. One leaves the profession. The nurse manager fills the gaps with agency staff while recruiting drags on, and by the time the February invoices land, the CFO is asking a question the HR department can't answer with precision: is this a pay problem, a burnout problem, or just bad luck on one unit?

That question is answerable — not with a single New Jersey number pulled from a database that doesn't exist, but with a disciplined combination of national retention benchmarks, public wage data, and the facility's own numbers tracked consistently over time. This guide walks through what's actually known about nurse turnover and wages as they apply to New Jersey facilities, what isn't published at the state level and has to be sourced locally, and what the state's staffing-plan disclosure rule requires of hospital leaders. You'll leave with a framework for building your own New Jersey-specific benchmark rather than waiting for one to appear in a national report.

What the New Jersey Nurse Turnover Rate Actually Looks Like

Here's the first honest point: there is no separately published New Jersey nurse turnover rate in the national retention surveys that most workforce teams rely on. The NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report — the industry's most-cited source on this topic — reports at the national level, drawing on 527 hospitals across 40 states, 965,886 healthcare workers, and 262,405 RNs for its 2026 edition. It doesn't break results out by state.

What it does give New Jersey facility leaders is a benchmark to measure against. The 2026 report puts national RN turnover at 17.6% for calendar year 2025, up 1.2 percentage points from 16.4% the year before. First-year RN turnover, a figure that should concern any New Jersey nurse manager running a new-grad residency, sits at 22.3% nationally per the 2025 report. National RN vacancy rate is 8.6%, with the average hospital carrying 43 unfilled RN FTEs, and a third of hospitals reporting vacancy rates above 10%.

If your facility's own turnover rate is tracked consistently, these national figures become useful — not because New Jersey is identical to the national average, but because they give you a line to compare against. A facility running above 17.6% has a problem worth investigating regardless of what the state average might be. One running meaningfully below it is doing something right and should document what.

This is exactly the kind of comparison a workforce dashboard is built to automate: plotting your facility's rolling 12-month turnover rate against the current national reference line, flagging the delta, and updating automatically as new national figures publish. It holds no patient data — no PHI, no EHR connection, no scheduling takeover — it's a workforce-and-wage layer, not a clinical system.

Benchmarking New Jersey RN and LPN Wages Against BLS Data

New Jersey wages are not listed with a standalone state median in the data referenced for this piece. What is published, and useful as a starting frame, is the national picture: BLS puts the RN (SOC 29-1141) national median at $93,600/year as of the May 2024 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release, with a national mean of $101,420/year in the May 2025 update. State means nationally range from roughly $77,000 in lower-cost states like Alabama and South Dakota up to $150,280 in California — a spread wide enough that pulling a national number and applying it to a New Jersey pay band would misprice nearly every role.

National percentile data gives a shape to work from: 10th percentile $68,940, 25th percentile $80,330, median $97,550, 75th percentile $112,350, and 90th percentile $137,470 (May 2025, national). For LPNs and LVNs (SOC 29-2061), the national median is $62,340/year (about $29.97/hour), with a 10th percentile of $47,960 and 90th percentile of $80,510.

For an exact New Jersey figure, the right move is to pull the current state-level number directly from the BLS OEWS state wage pages rather than estimating from the national spread — New Jersey's cost of living and hospital density put it in a different tier than the Alabama-to-South-Dakota low end, but the precise figure changes with each annual release and shouldn't be guessed. Our guide to BLS wage benchmarking walks through exactly how to pull and apply that figure to a pay-band calculation.

No black box: a pay band is built from a public percentile spread — set the floor near the 25th percentile, the midpoint near the median, and the ceiling near the 75th, then adjust for shift differentials and specialty premiums locally.

Why State Averages Undersell New Jersey's Metro Density

New Jersey's hospital workforce is concentrated in a handful of dense metro corridors — northern New Jersey inside the New York metro commuting radius, the Philadelphia-adjacent southern counties, and the central corridor around Trenton and New Brunswick. A statewide average wage figure, even once you have the exact current one, tends to blur these markets together in a way that misleads recruiting decisions.

The clearest illustration of this effect in the public data comes from Ohio, where the statewide RN average sits at $82,510 but the Columbus metro average runs higher at $83,900 (O*NET local wages, May 2025). The gap is modest there, but in states with sharper rural-urban splits, or metro areas that compete directly across a state line — as northern New Jersey does with New York City — the divergence between a state figure and a local metro figure can be the difference between a competitive offer and a quietly losing one. Our state-vs-metro wage benchmarking guide covers how to pull both figures and decide which one should actually anchor your pay bands.

This matters doubly for New Jersey facilities competing against New York employers for the same commuting-distance nurse pool. A pay band built only on a New Jersey statewide figure can look reasonable on paper and still lose candidates to a facility twenty minutes away under a different state's wage ceiling.

New Jersey's Staffing Plan Disclosure Requirement

New Jersey is one of five states identified by the Chartis Group's 2024 analysis as requiring public disclosure or reporting of hospital staffing plans, alongside Illinois, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont. This places New Jersey in a different regulatory category than states with fixed nurse-to-patient ratio laws — California's Title 22 ratios, for instance, or Oregon's HB 2697 — and closer to New York's staffing-committee-and-annual-plan model.

What this means in practice: New Jersey facilities should expect to maintain a documented staffing plan, likely tied to a committee structure and a reporting or posting obligation, though the exact statute citation, submission deadline, and enforcement mechanism should be confirmed directly with the New Jersey Department of Health before being treated as settled for compliance purposes — disclosure requirements and their administrative detail can shift between legislative sessions. New Jersey does not appear in the cited data as having a fixed numeric ratio law comparable to California's or Oregon's; if ratio legislation is under active consideration in Trenton, that's a separate tracking item from the disclosure requirement discussed here.

For facility leaders managing this obligation across multiple committee structures and disclosure formats — particularly regional systems that also operate in New York, Illinois, Rhode Island, or Vermont — the Committee & Disclosure State Staffing Plan Workbook is built specifically around these five states' documentation requirements, so a staffing committee can track committee composition, reporting cadence, and plan content in one place rather than rebuilding the format for each facility in a regional system. See our broader nurse staffing ratios by state reference for how New Jersey's disclosure model compares to ratio-law states.

The Travel-Nurse Premium New Jersey Facilities Are Paying To Avoid

The gap between staff and travel pay is national data, not New Jersey-specific, but it's directly relevant to the February-invoice scenario that opens this piece. NSI-surveyed hospitals report an average travel-nurse bill rate of $91.23/hour against a loaded staff RN rate of $59.46/hour (2026 NSI report). Staffing Industry Analysts and NATHO put the aggregate 2025 bill rate at roughly $90.54/hour, with a single 13-week assignment running $42,400 to $56,500 before bonuses or overtime.

As a worked illustration — not a universal constant — a 13-week contract at the NSI-reported rates (468 hours at $91.23 versus $59.46 loaded) carries a premium of roughly $14,868 on that single contract alone. Multiply that across several open positions on a unit experiencing a resignation cluster, and the arithmetic behind "fix the vacancy before it becomes a travel contract" becomes straightforward. Our cost of nurse turnover guide breaks down the full NSI cost model, including the $295,000 per 1-percentage-point swing in RN turnover that the average hospital absorbs or saves annually.

Building a New Jersey-Specific View Without Waiting for One

The honest summary: New Jersey doesn't have its own published turnover rate or its own cleanly listed BLS wage median in the sources available here, but it does have a specific, documented disclosure obligation and a metro-density wage problem that a national average will consistently understate. The path forward is to track your own facility's turnover against the national 17.6% line, pull the current New Jersey figure directly from BLS OEWS rather than estimating it, and treat the staffing-plan disclosure requirement as a standing documentation task rather than an annual scramble.

For regional systems managing this across multiple New Jersey facilities — or facilities in New Jersey alongside New York, Illinois, Rhode Island, or Vermont — our regional health system workforce planning guide covers how to roll facility-level dashboards into a system-wide view without losing the local wage and disclosure nuance each state requires.