Rhode Island Nurse Turnover & Wage Landscape: A 2026 Guide

The Monday Morning Before the Staffing Committee Meets

A Director of Nursing at a Providence-area hospital pulls up last week's numbers before an 8 a.m. staffing committee meeting. Two resignations on med-surg, one on nights. The question on the agenda isn't just "how many open shifts do we have" — it's whether the unit's turnover looks normal for Rhode Island, or whether something needs an answer before the state's annual staffing plan is due. She searches for a clean, current Rhode Island nurse turnover rate to anchor the conversation and finds mostly national press releases, a few outdated blog posts, and nothing specific to her state.

That gap is common, and it's worth naming plainly: no national survey currently publishes a Rhode Island-specific RN turnover breakout. What follows is what the most current national data actually says, how to use BLS wage data to benchmark Rhode Island pay fairly, what the state's staffing-plan disclosure expectation involves, and how to build a defensible local picture when the state-level number simply doesn't exist yet. By the end, you'll have a framework for filling that gap with your own facility's numbers rather than waiting on a statistic that may never arrive.

What the National Numbers Say About the Rhode Island Nurse Turnover Rate

The honest starting point is this: there is no Rhode Island-specific RN turnover rate in the most recent national retention survey. The 2026 NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report — built on data from 527 hospitals across 40 states, covering 965,886 healthcare workers and 262,405 RNs — reports a national RN turnover rate of 17.6% for calendar year 2025, up from 16.4% the prior year (2025 NSI report, CY2024). That's the figure a Rhode Island facility should use as its external reference point, clearly labeled as national rather than state-specific.

The same report puts the national RN vacancy rate at 8.6%, with the average hospital carrying 43 unfilled RN FTEs and roughly a third of hospitals reporting vacancy rates of 10% or higher. First-year RN turnover nationally runs 22.3% (2025 NSI report) — a reminder that onboarding and the first twelve months are where most of the loss happens, in Rhode Island as elsewhere.

A Rhode Island-specific turnover rate doesn't currently exist in published national data — which makes the facility's own 12-month rolling number, benchmarked against the national figure, the most honest comparison available.

If your facility doesn't already track a rolling 12-month RN turnover figure the way the national survey does, that's the first gap worth closing before anything else — a dashboard pulling from your own HR exports can produce that number without needing to wait on a state association or federal agency to publish one.

Benchmarking Rhode Island Nurse Wages Against BLS Data

Wage benchmarking is where most Rhode Island facilities have more room to act than they realize, because the underlying public data exists even though a tidy Rhode Island number isn't quoted everywhere.

Nationally, the BLS OEWS program (May 2025 release) puts registered nurse (SOC 29-1141) wages at a median of $93,600 per year with a mean of $101,420, and state-level means ranging from roughly $77,000 in lower-cost states like Alabama and South Dakota up to $150,280 in California. The full national percentile spread for RNs is: 10th percentile $68,940, 25th percentile $80,330, median $97,550, 75th percentile $112,350, and 90th percentile $137,470. Rhode Island's specific state mean sits somewhere in that national range, but the precise current figure should be pulled directly from the BLS OEWS state wage page rather than estimated — a number this specific isn't something to guess at.

The more useful lesson from BLS data isn't a single point figure anyway — it's the methodology. BLS publishes wages at the state level and, separately, at the metro-area level, and the two numbers are rarely identical. Ohio is a clean illustration: the statewide RN average is $82,510, while the Columbus, OH metro average is $83,900 (O*NET local wages, May 2025) — a modest but real gap that would mislead a Columbus-area facility relying only on the statewide figure. Rhode Island facilities should run the same comparison: pull both the Rhode Island state figure and the relevant metro figure (Providence-Warwick, for instance) before setting a pay band, since a statewide average can understate or overstate what a specific labor market actually requires. Our guide to state vs. metro wage benchmarking walks through that comparison step by step, and the broader BLS nurse wage benchmarking guide covers how to pull the right SOC code and release for your facility type.

For LPN/LVN roles (SOC 29-2061), the national median is $62,340 per year (about $29.97/hour), with a 10th-percentile figure of $47,960 and a 90th-percentile figure of $80,510 (May 2024 OOH data). LPN/LVN employment is projected to grow 3% from 2024 to 2034, with about 54,400 openings a year nationally — relevant context for Rhode Island's SNF and LTC facilities, where LPN staffing ratios tend to carry more weight than in acute care.

Rhode Island's Staffing Plan Disclosure Requirement

Rhode Island is one of five states identified in a 2024 Chartis Group analysis as requiring public disclosure or reporting of hospital staffing plans, alongside Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Vermont. That puts Rhode Island in a smaller group of states where staffing isn't just an internal HR concern — it's something the facility is expected to document and make available in some form.

The requirement itself is set out in R.I. Gen. Laws § 23-17.17-8, "Annual hospital staffing report": every licensed hospital submits its core-staffing plan, laying out nursing staff by unit and shift, to the Rhode Island Department of Health annually in January. The administrative details — the submission format and how the plan is reviewed or posted — are worth confirming directly with the Department of Health, since those can be updated without much notice. What's safe to say generally is that a disclosure requirement is a different animal than a mandated ratio law: states like California enforce specific numeric ratios on every shift (Title 22 CCR §70217), while disclosure states like Rhode Island are centered on transparency — making the staffing plan or its outcomes visible rather than setting a hard numeric floor. If your facility operates in or hires across multiple states with different requirements, our breakdown of nurse staffing ratios by state lays out how ratio states and disclosure states differ in practice.

For a Rhode Island DON or CNO, the practical takeaway is that whatever gets filed or posted should be backed by real, current numbers — vacancy rates, turnover by unit, recruitment timelines — rather than assembled under deadline pressure from scattered spreadsheets. A structured workbook built around exactly this kind of disclosure requirement removes most of that last-minute scramble; our Committee & Disclosure State Staffing Plan Workbook is built specifically for the states — including Rhode Island — where a staffing committee and public disclosure are both part of the picture.

Why the Gap Between Vacancy and Pay Matters More in a Small State

Rhode Island's labor market is small and dense, which cuts both ways for staffing leaders. On one hand, nurses have fewer employer options within a reasonable commute, which can soften voluntary turnover somewhat. On the other hand, a wage gap of even a few dollars an hour is easier for staff to notice and compare across a handful of nearby systems than it would be in a sprawling state with dozens of disconnected labor markets.

That dynamic is part of why the cost of turnover is worth taking seriously even in a smaller system. Nationally, the 2026 NSI report puts the cost of replacing a single bedside RN at $60,090, with the average hospital losing $4.2 million to $6.2 million a year to RN turnover — and each one-percentage-point change in RN turnover moving the average hospital's costs by roughly $295,000 annually. Those are national hospital-scale figures, not a Rhode Island-specific number, but the arithmetic scales down proportionally for a smaller facility, and the direction of the incentive doesn't change: closing even a small wage gap is frequently cheaper than absorbing the turnover it causes. Our piece on the cost of nurse turnover walks through that math in more detail, including how travel-nurse premiums compound the problem when open positions sit unfilled.

Building Your Own Rhode Island Picture

The honest summary for a Rhode Island facility leader is that the state-specific turnover number you want doesn't exist in published form yet, but the pieces to build your own defensible version of it do: a rolling 12-month turnover calculation benchmarked against the national 17.6% figure, a wage comparison pulled from BLS OEWS at both the state and metro level, and a staffing plan that reflects Rhode Island's disclosure expectations rather than a generic template built for a ratio state.

A dashboard that tracks turnover, flags wage-band gaps against current BLS data, and forecasts six months of FTE need can do most of that work continuously rather than as a once-a-year scramble before a disclosure deadline — and it does so without touching EHR data, payroll systems, or scheduling software. No PHI, no clinical integration, just the workforce numbers a staffing committee needs to answer the question honestly. For facilities focused specifically on retention in smaller community settings, our guide to community hospital nurse retention covers the retention side of this equation in more depth.

If your next staffing committee meeting or disclosure filing is approaching, start with the template built for exactly this requirement — the Committee & Disclosure State Staffing Plan Workbook covers Rhode Island alongside New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Vermont, so the structure is already built for what your state expects.