How to Read BLS OES Wage Data for Nursing Roles

Why BLS OES Tables Feel Harder Than They Are

You've pulled up the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics page before. Maybe you wanted to know whether your RN pay bands are competitive, or you were preparing a board conversation about travel-nurse premiums versus direct-hire wages. The table loaded, you saw columns labeled "10," "25," "50," "75," "90," a row labeled "29-1141," and possibly a year in the header you weren't sure was current.

Most nurse leaders close the tab and return to their own spreadsheet. That's understandable — BLS OES tables are optimized for economists, not Directors of Nursing. But the underlying data is genuinely useful: it is the most comprehensive, publicly available, nationally consistent wage survey in existence, covering millions of jobs across every state and hundreds of metropolitan areas.

This guide is a plain-English walkthrough of exactly how to read BLS OES wage data for nursing roles — where to find the right table, what each column means, how to choose between national, state, and metro figures, and why the release year matters more than it might seem. By the end, you'll be able to sit down with a BLS OES table, locate your nurses' SOC code, read the percentile columns correctly, and know precisely how current the data is.

Start With the Right SOC Code

The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program organizes every job in the U.S. economy by Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) code. For nursing, two codes cover the vast majority of direct-care roles:

• SOC 29-1141 — Registered Nurses. This is the code for staff RNs, charge nurses, and most clinical nursing roles that require an RN license. Per BLS data (May 2024), this occupation accounts for approximately 3.4 million jobs nationally.
• SOC 29-2061 — Licensed Practical and Licensed Vocational Nurses. This covers LPNs and LVNs across all care settings — hospitals, SNFs, home health, and outpatient. BLS data (May 2024) shows approximately 651,400 jobs nationally in this classification.

When you open a BLS OES table, always verify you are on the correct SOC row before reading any wages. It sounds obvious, but state-level tables list dozens of healthcare occupations in close proximity, and SOC 29-1141 and 29-2061 sit within a longer "Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations" grouping that also includes nurse anesthetists, nurse practitioners, and nursing assistants (SOC 31-1131) — which have substantially different wage profiles.

For a deeper look at how RN and LPN wages differ and what drives the gap, see our guide to RN vs. LPN wage differences.

What the Five Percentile Columns Actually Mean

Once you have the right SOC row, the next thing you'll see is a set of wage columns. BLS OES tables report wages at five percentile points — the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th — in both annual and hourly form. Here is what each position means in plain English:

• 10th percentile — 10% of workers in this occupation earn at or below this wage. It represents the lower tail: newer workers, lower-cost geographies, or settings that rely heavily on agency or part-time staff.
• 25th percentile — one quarter of workers earn at or below this level. Often used as a floor for internal pay-band design: a band that starts below the 25th percentile is in real risk territory in most markets.
• 50th percentile (median) — the midpoint. Half of workers earn more, half earn less. The BLS May 2024 median annual RN wage (SOC 29-1141) was $93,600; the comparable median for LPNs/LVNs (SOC 29-2061) was $62,340 ($29.97/hr). The median is the most-cited figure in BLS OES releases and the one most useful for a quick market check.
• 75th percentile — three-quarters of workers earn at or below this level. Facilities aiming to be a destination employer often target the 75th percentile for senior or hard-to-fill roles.
• 90th percentile — only 10% of workers earn above this level. For RNs nationally, the BLS May 2024 figure was $135,320; the 10th percentile was $66,030. That spread — nearly $70,000 from bottom to top — is a reminder that "the BLS RN wage" is not a single number but a distribution.

The national RN wage spread (BLS May 2024) runs from below $66,030 at the 10th percentile to above $135,320 at the 90th percentile — a range of roughly $70,000. The median alone ($93,600) obscures how wide that distribution is.

Understanding the full distribution matters when you are setting pay bands. A facility targeting only the median may be uncompetitive with a rival 15 miles away that is paying at the 65th percentile — and the BLS table will not tell you that automatically. It requires reading the percentiles as a band, then placing your own pay range within them.

For a more detailed guide on matching your facility's pay bands to the right percentile targets, see our BLS nurse wage benchmarking guide.

Choosing the Right Geographic Level

BLS OES data is published at three geographic levels, and the choice between them matters for how accurately you can benchmark your facility.

National figures are the most widely cited and the easiest to find. They are also the least precise for any specific facility. National medians blend wages from California's high-cost coastal markets with those from rural Appalachia — useful for understanding the occupation's overall distribution, less useful for knowing whether your facility in a mid-sized Midwestern city is paying competitively.

State-level figures narrow the picture considerably. For context, BLS OEWS May 2024 data shows California's mean annual RN wage at approximately $148,330 — nearly $55,000 above the national median. A state-level figure would correctly flag that a California facility paying at the national median is severely below its local market, while a state-level figure from a lower-wage state might show the same national-median wage as fully competitive. For most facilities, the state figure is a reasonable first reference point.

Metropolitan statistical area (MSA) figures are the most precise level BLS publishes. They reflect the actual labor market your nurses can commute within. A nurse manager at a 100-bed community hospital in a mid-size metro should be using MSA-level data, not national data, when setting pay bands — because travel-nurse agencies certainly are. MSA-level data is published in the same BLS OES database; it just requires navigating to the metro-level tables rather than the national or state summary.

How to choose: use national figures for educational context and board-level framing. Use state figures as a baseline check. Use MSA figures for actual pay-band decisions, especially in high-cost metros or in labor markets where your facility competes with large health systems for the same nurse pool.

For a structured comparison of when to use state versus metro figures in nursing wage benchmarking, see state vs. metro wage benchmarking.

How to Read the BLS OES Release Year — and Why It Matters

Every BLS OES release is labeled by the survey year — typically "May [year]" — and this label deserves your attention. The OES program surveys employers over a rolling three-year cycle, then publishes updated estimates annually, usually in the spring following the reference year. That means the figures labeled "May 2024" reflect wages collected through May 2024 and were published in 2025.

In stable wage environments, a one-year lag is minor. In nursing, it is not trivial. From 2020 through 2023, RN wages moved sharply in many markets as health systems competed for staff, travel-nurse rates climbed, and some facilities adjusted base pay to reduce agency dependency. Using a three-year-old BLS OES figure in a market where wages have moved 12–18% is meaningfully different from using last year's release.

Practical guidance:

1. Always note the "May [year]" label before citing any figure. A table that appears at the top of a search result may be two or three releases old if the page hasn't been updated.
2. When presenting wage benchmarks to a board or finance partner, state the vintage explicitly: "BLS May 2024 median RN wage, $93,600." This protects your analysis and invites the right question — "Is this the most current release?" — rather than leaving it implicit.
3. For occupations in active wage movement (RNs in competitive metro markets, LPNs/LVNs in SNF/LTC settings facing CMS minimum-staffing implementation pressures), treat BLS OES data as the floor of your market analysis, not the ceiling. Supplement with current job-posting data or recruiter checks when making individual hiring decisions.

None of this diminishes the value of BLS OES data — it remains the most comprehensive, methodologically consistent wage dataset available for these occupations. It simply means using it with appropriate awareness of its vintage.

Putting It Together: A Practical Reading Sequence

When you sit down to benchmark RN or LPN wages against the BLS OES database, a repeatable sequence saves time:

1. Navigate to the correct geographic level first — national, state, or MSA, depending on your purpose.
2. Locate SOC 29-1141 (RN) or SOC 29-2061 (LPN/LVN) in the occupation table. Confirm you are on the right row, not an adjacent healthcare occupation.
3. Read the median (50th percentile) as your reference point, then note the 25th and 75th percentiles to understand where your pay band sits within the distribution.
4. Check the 10th percentile — if your entry-level band is below it, that is a signal worth investigating.
5. Record the release year and note it in any document or presentation where you use the figure.
6. Compare against your internal pay bands — not just your current midpoint, but the full range from new-hire rate to experienced-RN top-of-band.

That last step is where the analysis becomes actionable. A facility whose top-of-band sits at the 42nd percentile of the MSA distribution — competitive on paper, because it's "above median" — is actually below midpoint for experienced nurses in its own labor market. That gap, held quietly in a spreadsheet, is the kind of structural pay-band problem that surfaces later as a resignation conversation rather than a retention decision.

For a structured look at how wage gaps translate into flight risk, see nurse wage gap and flight risk.

From a Table to a Decision

Learning how to read BLS OES wage data for nursing roles is, in practice, learning to ask a more precise question than "are we paying market?" The data gives you the distribution. Your job is to place your facility within it, at the right geographic level, with the right vintage, and for the right role — and then decide whether the position you occupy is where you want to be.

If you find yourself doing that placement exercise manually each quarter — pulling tables, cross-referencing SOC codes, updating a spreadsheet, tracking whether the latest BLS release has posted — it may be worth exploring tools that keep that data current and tied to your actual headcount. Nursing Workforce Planner surfaces BLS OES wage benchmarks for RNs (SOC 29-1141) and LPNs/LVNs (SOC 29-2061) directly alongside your internal pay bands, with state-level benchmarking on the Essentials plan and metro-level precision on Professional and above — updated when BLS releases new data, without requiring a manual pull.

A 14-day free trial is available. For a full overview of what the platform monitors, see Features — or explore the wage benchmarking resource hub if you'd like to read further before deciding.