Pennsylvania Nurse Turnover & Wage Landscape: A 2026 Guide

The Challenge of Benchmarking Pennsylvania Nursing Wages

A Director of Nursing at a 180-bed community hospital in Altoona and a nurse manager at a Philadelphia academic medical center both track RN turnover and pay bands — but the labor market they are competing in looks almost nothing alike. Philadelphia's hospital corridor draws from a dense metro talent pool; rural central Pennsylvania facilities compete for a thinner candidate pipeline while still being measured against the same national benchmarks their boards cite in budget conversations.

That gap between metro and rural reality is the defining feature of Pennsylvania nursing workforce planning. The state has two substantial metro markets — Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — separated by a wide belt of smaller cities, community hospitals, and long-term care facilities that operate with narrower margins and higher sensitivity to even modest wage drift. For any nursing leader in Pennsylvania, the practical question is not only "how does our turnover compare to the national average?" but "how does our pay band compare to the regional median our nurses can actually see when they search job boards?"

This guide lays out what the national data tells us, where Pennsylvania-specific BLS OES figures fit in (with source guidance for verifying current state and metro figures), and how nurse leaders across the state's varied facility landscape can use benchmarking to catch retention risk early — before it becomes a resignation letter.

Pennsylvania Nurse Turnover in National Context

Pennsylvania nursing workforce planning begins with the same national baseline that affects every state. The 2026 NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report — drawn from 527 hospitals, 40 states, and 262,405 RNs — placed the national staff RN turnover rate at 17.6% in 2025, a rise of 1.2 percentage points that reversed the prior year's decline (NSI 2026, via Becker's Hospital Review, 2026). The year before, the 2025 NSI report recorded a 16.4% national rate for 2024 following a 2.4-point improvement (NSI 2025, via Becker's, 2025).

What that headline rate obscures is the range underneath it. The same 2026 NSI dataset shows RN turnover running from 5.6% to 40.0% depending on hospital bed count (NSI 2026, via Becker's, 2026). A large urban system and a 60-bed rural critical-access hospital are both generating a "hospital RN turnover" statistic, but they are describing fundamentally different operational problems. Pennsylvania, with its mix of large urban health systems and smaller rural facilities, spans nearly that full range.

The cost consequence is equally wide. The NSI 2026 report pegs the average cost of a single RN departure at $60,090 — down slightly from $61,110 the prior year but still the product's default assumption — and places the total annual RN-turnover loss per hospital at $4.2M–$6.2M, averaging $5.19M (NSI 2026, via Becker's, 2026). At $295,000 per percentage point of turnover per average hospital per year (NSI 2026), even a one-point improvement in a Pennsylvania facility's annual rate represents meaningful, calculable savings. Pennsylvania-specific turnover rates by facility type are not maintained in this guide's sourced data library; nurse leaders should benchmark against both the NSI national range and any Pennsylvania Hospital Association or state-specific survey data available to them.

Pennsylvania RN and LPN Wages: What BLS OES Tells Us

The national BLS picture provides the frame. The BLS May 2024 national median annual RN wage is $93,600, with the 10th percentile below $66,030 and the 90th percentile above $135,320 (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, Registered Nurses, May 2024). For LPN/LVNs, the BLS May 2024 national median is $62,340 ($29.97/hr), ranging from below $47,960 at the 10th percentile to above $80,510 at the 90th (BLS OOH, LPN/LVN, May 2024).

Pennsylvania-specific RN and LPN/LVN wages — at both the state level and for the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh metro areas — must be drawn from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) State and Area Data release (May 2024 vintage) before publishing. Those figures are not reproduced here; verify them at bls.gov/oes and insert them in place of this note. The national medians above serve as the baseline for comparison.

Why do state and metro figures matter for Pennsylvania specifically? Because BLS OES metro-level data — available on the Professional tier of Nursing Workforce Planner and above — allows a nurse leader in Pittsburgh to benchmark their RN pay bands not against California's $148,330 mean (BLS OEWS May 2024, via Sunbelt Staffing analysis, 2024) or the national $93,600 median, but against what comparable Pittsburgh-area hospitals are actually paying. A pay band that appears competitive nationally can still sit below the regional median nurses see when they open a job-search app on a Tuesday afternoon.

For Pennsylvania facilities, this distinction matters in two directions. Philadelphia metro wages tend to track closer to — or above — the national median given the market density and the presence of large academic medical centers. Pittsburgh metro wages occupy a different position. Rural Pennsylvania facilities face a third dynamic: a thinner local candidate pool means that even modest wage gaps can produce outsized retention risk because the replacement cost of a departure — and the time to fill — is longer. The NSI 2026 report places the average time-to-fill for an experienced RN at 78 days (NSI 2026, via Kahuna Workforce, 2026). In a rural market, that figure can run longer, and the bench of interim candidates is shallower.

Understanding how to read BLS wage percentiles and apply them to internal pay bands is the practical skill that turns a published state median into an operational decision.

Long-Term Care and SNF Staffing in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania has a substantial long-term care and skilled nursing facility sector. The national SNF staffing picture is not encouraging as a baseline: 46% of SNFs nationwide were limiting admissions and 20% had closed entire units by 2024 due to workforce constraints, while 94% of nursing homes reported difficulty recruiting and 90% had raised wages in the prior six months (AHCA 2024 State of the Sector Report, March 2024). CNA turnover nationwide averages 44.2%, with CNAs, LPNs, and RNs collectively named the hardest roles to recruit and retain (Ziegler CFO Hotline survey, via Skilled Nursing News, July 2025).

For Pennsylvania's SNF and LTC operators, these national pressures are compounded by geography. Facilities in lower-population counties compete for LPN and CNA talent in markets where wages at a nearby hospital, a home health agency, or even a non-healthcare employer may be the margin between a retained employee and a departure. The national nursing assistant median of $39,530 (BLS OOH, May 2024) is a floor, but what a CNA can earn at a neighboring hospital or clinic in their specific county is the benchmark that actually governs their decision-making.

Pennsylvania's LTC operators should also be tracking the evolving CMS minimum staffing rule — the April 2024 final rule established 0.55 RN HPRD and a 3.48 total HPRD minimum — and monitoring its current implementation status directly with CMS, given ongoing legal and legislative activity. As of May 2024, only 50% of nursing homes nationwide met the 0.55 RN HPRD minimum (HHS ASPE, May 2024). Pennsylvania facilities should verify their current compliance posture with CMS and legal counsel, not with this guide.

Connecting pennsylvania nurse turnover to Preventable Cost

The link between wage-gap awareness and turnover prevention is clearest when it is expressed as arithmetic rather than abstraction. A Pennsylvania community hospital with 120 employed RNs running at the 17.6% national turnover rate would see approximately 21 departures per year. At $60,090 per departure (NSI 2026), that is roughly $1.26M in modeled annual turnover cost — before accounting for any travel or agency premium on coverage gaps. This is a worked example built on national NSI figures; a facility's actual cost will depend on its own role mix, tenure distribution, and recruitment experience.

The $295,000-per-percentage-point figure (NSI 2026) translates that into a planning lever: a facility that can reduce its RN turnover rate by two percentage points — not an extraordinary outcome for a team that begins monitoring leading indicators rather than lagging ones — models $590,000 in reduced annual turnover cost. The question is whether those leading indicators — wage gaps, risk concentration by unit, vacancy accumulation — are visible before the resignation letter arrives or only after.

Nursing workforce analytics answers that question structurally: rolling 12-month turnover by unit, BLS-benchmarked wage comparisons, and a retention risk score that surfaces pressure at the unit level before it becomes a departure. For Pennsylvania facilities that want to understand how state-level and metro-level benchmarking differ in practice, the distinction between a Philadelphia and a Johnstown RN market is exactly the kind of nuance a metro-level benchmark makes visible.

The Rural–Metro Divide and What It Means for Benchmarking

The operational gap between Pennsylvania's metro and rural nursing markets deserves direct attention. Rural and small-community facilities in Pennsylvania often benchmark their pay bands against the state median — which is pulled upward by Philadelphia and Pittsburgh wages — and conclude that their compensation is competitive. When a nurse in Clarion or Erie County compares their offer to what a Pittsburgh system is advertising, the state-level median may be the wrong reference point entirely.

This is not a reason to avoid benchmarking; it is a reason to benchmark at the right geographic level. BLS OES metro data — including the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia Metropolitan Statistical Areas — is publicly available and allows facility-level compensation teams to compare against the market their employees are actually choosing between. How those metro comparisons differ from state averages is worth understanding before setting pay bands for the next fiscal year.

The same logic applies to turnover benchmarking. The NSI national 17.6% is a useful peer-group reference, but a 50-bed Pennsylvania critical-access hospital's most relevant peer group is not the average 527-hospital NSI dataset — it is the 5.6%–40.0% range the NSI reports by bed count, oriented toward the smaller end. Ohio's similar mix of urban systems and rural community hospitals presents parallel planning challenges; the Ohio nurse staffing landscape covers that comparison for leaders working across state lines.

Stay Current on Pennsylvania Nursing Workforce Data

Pennsylvania nursing workforce data — BLS OES state and metro wage releases, NSI annual benchmarks, and CMS staffing rule developments — updates on its own cadence. The most useful thing a nurse leader or workforce analyst can do is track those releases systematically rather than re-reading last year's benchmark at budget time.

If you want Pennsylvania-specific BLS OES wage updates, NSI benchmark releases, and practical nursing workforce analysis delivered when they publish, the Nursing Workforce Planner newsletter covers those releases with context for nurse leaders at 50–300-bed hospitals and long-term care facilities. Subscribe below — no sales cadence, just sourced updates when the data moves.

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