5 Nursing Career Trends to Look for in 2025

• Nursing career trends can give you an idea of what the professional will look like in the years ahead. 
• Retirements, salary increases, and evolving curriculum are among the trends heading in 2025. 
• Understanding and embracing these trends can help you succeed as you progress in your nursing career. 

Nursing is one of the most important careers for society and is a leader in the U.S. workforce with more than 4 million licensed nurses. Looking at trends can help forecast the future in the industry.  

Here are five top nursing trends to keep an eye on. 

Nurse Retirements

According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, more than one-fourth of licensed registered nurses (RNs) plan to retire in the next five years and more than 40% of licensed nurses are qualified to retire in four or more years. This will affect nursing shortages immensely for the next decade.  

Workforce projections through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, show a continuous increase in demand for nurses, while the supply of nurses will decline until 2033, then slowly tick upwards through 2037. Supply projections will have a bit of reprieve starting in 2037, reducing our nation’s current shortage of 10% down to 6% over the next 15 years. 

But nurse retirement is about more than just numbers. It’s about a loss of experience, specialty, leadership, and culture. Nurses at retirement age joined the workforce in the late 1950s through early 1960s. Nurses coming up on retirement wore hats and dresses as their uniforms, saw the start of Medicare in 1965, have witnessed vaccine advancements as well as a surge in technology. And many hospitals had fewer than 100 patient beds. Their generation learned to adapt through it all, and the nursing workforce will lose those workers who showed continuous adaptation and resilience throughout their career. 

Increased Salaries

When a workforce as vital as nursing is in a supply and demand battle, nurses will have fighting power to support increased wages. As mentioned above, the nursing supply has been declining fairly rapidly while the demand for nursing continues to increase. This leads to situations where nurses will benefit from higher wages, sign-on bonuses, retention bonuses, and even referral bonuses. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of 2023 the median annual salary for nurses was $86,000. Due to the demand, nurses also have the flexibility to look for open positions with more lucrative salaries. Travel nursing continues to provide a financial bump for practitioners who can travel to areas with the greatest need. The National Society of Health Coaches estimates that as of 2024 travel nursing still pays on average 20% more than the median nurse salary.   

Evolving Nursing Curriculum  

Nursing curriculum has had quite the evolution in the past five to 10 years. It can be attributed to the demand for nurses, the increased need for specialty trained nurses, and the use of virtual nursing programs.  

Historically, four-year university programs were the most common route, but now the popularity of fast-track programs, online, and advanced nursing programs are really catching stride. Nurses who have completed at least some of their nursing curriculum online skyrocketed from less than 20% prior to 2015 to more than 46% in the past eight years.  

Today, there are nursing programs that offer a 16-month fast track degree. Once a nurse has an associate degree, they can complete their Bachelor of Science in Nursing in months. Advanced degrees are also on the rise, and as of 2024, 17% of nurses went on to obtain a master’s degree and 3% obtained a doctorate, according to the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis.  

Certifications along with advanced nursing degrees are increasingly common. More than 28% of nurses obtain a second degree that qualifies them as an advanced practice registered nurse (APRN), most commonly nurse practitioner. The most common skill-based certifications nurses are currently obtaining include basic life support (70%), resuscitation (37%), trauma nursing (7%), and critical care (4%).  

Artificial Intelligence

Nursing will see a major evolution in decision making, diagnostic tools, education resources, and nursing-related tasks driven by computer systems in the coming years. Already healthcare systems are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help their technology service resources, education and learning components, and automatic protocols, such as sepsis prevention.  

Further development of AI technology will soon affect the relationship between nurses and patients even more. The next areas that will see AI technology use in healthcare will likely be documentation, coding, lab, and prescription ordering. Embracing the new technology will be important due to the ethical use of AI within patient care. 

Nursing Demands

There’s more demand for the number of nurses in the field, along with extra emphasis on skills, training, and workloads. Nurses are expected to complete more tasks, care for more (and often sicker) patients, be more knowledgeable, and the list goes on!  

Unfortunately, the more nurses are forced into multitasking the less their work is performed at the highest quality. Hopefully the increase of technology automation will help with the increasing task-related demands. Otherwise, the work overload will drive patient care quality down.  

The nurse’s role is so dynamic, even looking at the 2024 Hospital National Patient Safety Goals required by The Joint Commission, we can see the expanding nursing role demands and what those entail. The National Patient Safety Goals (NPSG) include correct patient identification, improvement of staff communication, medication use safety, alarm use safety, infection prevention, and improving health care equity. Even in that short list nurses have to be aware of patients, equitable care, safety, medication and alarm use and infectious disease process and prevention. 

The Bottom Line

Keeping an eye on how these top nursing trends including the increase of nursing retirements, salary compensation, expanding nursing curriculum, the use of AI and the overall nursing demands will help paint the picture of nursing for the years to come.  

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