Vermont Nurse Turnover & Wage Landscape: A 2026 Guide

The Staffing Plan Deadline on a Vermont DON's Desk

The director of nursing at a 60-bed critical access hospital in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom has two things open on her desk this week: a draft staffing plan due for submission, and a travel-agency invoice from the med-surg unit's third uncovered shift this month. Two LPNs gave notice in the same pay period, both citing pay in their exit conversations. She needs to know whether the hospital's current wage bands are actually behind the market, or whether the turnover is coming from something else — scheduling, workload, leadership turnover upstream. Vermont is a small state with a small number of hospitals, which means there is no steady stream of state-specific turnover surveys to check her instincts against. What she has is national benchmark data, a wage table from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and a disclosure requirement she needs to satisfy either way. This guide walks through what the national and regional numbers actually say, what Vermont's disclosure rule requires, and how to build a staffing plan without guessing at figures that aren't published for a state this size.

Vermont's Nurse Turnover Rate in National Context

There is no Vermont-specific RN turnover rate published in the national retention surveys that cover this industry, and a facility leader should be skeptical of any site that claims otherwise without a cited source. What does exist is the national benchmark, and it is the right starting point for a Vermont facility's own tracking. The 2026 NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report puts the national RN turnover rate at 17.6% for calendar year 2025, up 1.2 percentage points from 16.4% the prior year. That report is built from 527 hospitals across 40 states, so a 60- or 100-bed Vermont facility is smaller than the average hospital in that sample — proportional interpretation matters more than treating the national figure as a direct match.

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 (33.1%) reporting vacancy rates of 10% or higher. Recruiting an experienced RN takes a reported 78 days on average, ranging from 56 to 102 days depending on specialty. First-year RN turnover — the newest hires leaving within twelve months — sits at 22.3%, a figure worth watching closely in a state where recruiting replacement RNs from out of state is its own long process.

The arithmetic behind each departure is also published and worth sitting with. The 2026 NSI report puts the cost of replacing one bedside RN at $60,090, and estimates that the average hospital loses $4.2 million to $6.2 million a year to RN turnover. Each single percentage-point change in a hospital's RN turnover rate is associated with roughly $295,000 in added or avoided cost annually, per the same report. None of these figures are Vermont-specific, and a facility this size should scale them down proportionally rather than apply them at hospital-average scale — but the direction and the order of magnitude are the point. A vermont nurse turnover rate that looks "a little high" on a monthly glance is not a cosmetic problem; it is a budget line.

Benchmarking Vermont Nurse Wages Against BLS Data

The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not publish a Vermont-specific wage figure in the data set behind this guide, so this section does something a facility leader can actually use: it shows the national anchor points and the exact BLS page to confirm the live Vermont number against, rather than guessing.

Nationally, the median RN wage is $93,600 per year according to the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook (May 2024 data), with a national mean of $101,420 per year in the May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release. State mean RN wages in that same release range from roughly $77,000 in lower-wage states like Alabama and South Dakota up to $150,280 in California — a wide enough spread that no facility leader should assume the national median applies locally without checking. Vermont's actual current figure sits somewhere in that range, but the right source for the exact number is the BLS OEWS Vermont state occupational wage page, not an approximation layered on top of the national mean.

The national percentile breakdown (May 2025) gives a useful distribution to compare a facility's own bands against: 10th percentile $68,940, 25th percentile $80,330, median $97,550, 75th percentile $112,350, and 90th percentile $137,470. For LPN/LVN roles, the national median is $62,340 per year (about $29.97/hour), with a 10th-percentile wage of $47,960 and a 90th-percentile wage of $80,510, per the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook. RN wages are tracked under SOC code 29-1141 and LPN/LVN wages under 29-2061 — the codes to search directly on the BLS OEWS site for the current Vermont figures.

A facility doesn't need a state-specific median to start the comparison — it needs its own current pay bands lined up against the nearest verified anchor, with a plan to swap in the exact state number as soon as it's confirmed.

For the methodology behind comparing a facility's wage bands to state and metro-level BLS data — including how a statewide average can diverge meaningfully from a specific metro area, as it does in several states with large urban centers — see the state vs. metro wage benchmarking guide and the broader BLS nurse wage benchmarking guide.

Rural Vermont and the Nursing Shortage Outlook

Vermont is one of the most rural states in the country by composition, and that matters for how a facility reads national shortage projections. The Health Resources and Services Administration projects a national RN shortage of about 10% in 2027, easing to roughly 6% (207,980 FTE RNs) by 2037 — but the rural and metro figures diverge sharply within that national number: a projected 24% shortage in rural and nonmetro areas in 2027, against 7% in metro areas. For a facility in a small Vermont town, the rural figure is the more relevant planning assumption than the national headline, even though both describe the same national data set.

LPN/LVN supply tells a similar story at a different scale: HRSA projects that supply will meet only about 64% of demand by 2037, a shortage of roughly 302,440 FTEs nationally. Nearly 35% of U.S. community hospitals are classified as rural, and roughly 30% operate independent of a larger health system, according to AHA Fast Facts — a segment that looks a great deal like rural Vermont's hospital landscape, and one that rarely has the recruiting budget or enterprise HR infrastructure of a large urban system.

None of this is a reason for alarm; it's a reason to plan recruiting lead time and wage competitiveness earlier than the resignation letter arrives. A facility that tracks its own vacancy duration against the national 56–102 day recruitment window, and its own wage bands against the nearest confirmed BLS anchor, is working from the same inputs a larger system would use — just without the larger system's headcount to absorb a bad quarter.

Vermont's Staffing Plan Disclosure Requirement

Separate from turnover and wages, Vermont carries its own compliance obligation that a facility leader needs on the calendar regardless of what the wage and turnover data say. According to a 2024 Chartis Group analysis of state staffing laws, Vermont is one of five states — alongside Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island — that require public disclosure or reporting of hospital staffing plans. That is a distinct requirement from the staffing-committee composition rules that a separate group of nine states impose (a list that does not include Vermont in this categorization), so a Vermont facility should not assume the two obligations are identical or confirm one by checking the other.

This piece describes the category Vermont falls into; it does not substitute for the statute itself. A facility's compliance team should confirm the exact filing cadence, the required content of the disclosure, and the state authority it's submitted to directly against the current Vermont statute and Department of Health guidance, since disclosure requirements of this kind are periodically updated. For a broader comparison of how staffing-related statutes vary by state — ratio mandates, committee composition, and disclosure requirements side by side — see nurse staffing ratios by state.

Where the Numbers Come Together

A Vermont facility sitting at the intersection of these three threads — a national turnover benchmark running higher than it did the year before, wage data that needs a live state-level check rather than an assumption, and a disclosure filing due on a fixed calendar — doesn't need an enterprise workforce platform built for a 400-bed system to get ahead of any of it. It needs a repeatable way to track its own rolling turnover rate against the national reference points above, flag wage bands that have drifted behind the current BLS figures, and assemble the disclosure filing from numbers it already has on hand rather than reconstructing them each cycle.

That is the specific gap a workforce dashboard built for mid-size and small facilities is meant to close — tracking unit-level turnover and vacancy duration, flagging wage-gap risk against BLS OES benchmarks, and scoring retention risk from observable inputs like shift patterns and time-to-fill. It holds no patient health information, does not integrate with an EHR, payroll system, or scheduler, and does not take over scheduling in any form — it is a workforce-analytics layer sitting alongside whatever systems a facility already runs. For facilities managing long-term-care or skilled-nursing staffing specifically, the considerations differ somewhat from acute care; see long-term care staffing analytics for that context, and the cost of nurse turnover for the fuller arithmetic behind the NSI figures cited above.

Start With the Disclosure Filing Itself

For a Vermont facility facing a staffing-plan disclosure deadline this cycle, the fastest practical step is a template built for exactly this category of state requirement. The Committee & Disclosure State Staffing Plan Workbook covers New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont — the five states identified above as requiring public disclosure or reporting — with a structure built around the kind of data a facility already tracks internally: unit-level staffing counts, vacancy duration, and wage-band status. It will not replace a legal review of the current statute, but it removes the blank-page problem of assembling a filing from scratch each year.