Best Cities for Nurse Practitioners

Specialties NP

Published

Specializes in PICU.

My apologies if this is old news but I don't recall seeing this here before. I thought this was an interesting article on good places for APNs. Admittedly, it doesn't take much into consideration but its still helpful for some.

Best Cities for Nurse Practitioners

The median salary for a nurse practitioner, which ValuePenguin uses as the basis for the rankings, is $88,130 in the United States as of May 2012. The median salaries for nurse practitioners range widely, starting at $19,910 in the San Juan / Caguas / Guaynabo, metropolitan area in Puerto Rico to $124,600 in Monroe, MI.

There are 89,420 nurse practitioners employed in the United States as of May 2012, from 30 in various cities to 4,130 in the New York / White Plains / Wayne metropolitan area. The job outlook is bright: nurse practitioners' jobs are projected to grow 26% from 2010 - 2020, which is twelve percentage points above the national job growth of 14%.

I feel like those "average salary" statistics are almost useless to interpret, especially for new grads. They rely on a person having years of experience, and different specialties vary a lot in their salaries. Also, salaries are far from the whole picture. For me, my salary is pretty mid-range for my city/level of experience, but my benefits make it hard to leave my job: 12% of my salary toward retirement, vested immediately, plus up to $5200/year for tuition if I want to use it in addition to $1000/year CME.

Specializes in ICU, Telemetry, Cardiac/Renal, Ortho,FNP.

Not typical I'm sure but I've had friends start out at $140K in a metropolitan area and I've seen job ads for $60K with exp. So I would say it really depends on the individual but I sure the heck wouldn't take that job in San Juan...

According to this Puerto Rico Salary and Wages the average RN salary is $33,790 in that area of Puerto Rico, so I find the NP salary dubious :) That link won't work for me, though, dunno why.

The government's BLS actually started publishing wage information for nurse practitioners in 2012. See here:

Nurse Practitioners

Mean annual salary is $91k. You can scroll over the map to see average wage by state or metropolitan area.

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