Nursing Professor Salary by Rank, State, and Institution

How Much Does a Nursing Professor Make?

The median nursing professor salary is $80,250 a year. That figure comes from the May 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics wage survey, which counts 77,960 people under the occupation code for nursing instructors and teachers, postsecondary. Half of nursing faculty earn more than $80,250 and half earn less.

The median hides the range. The bottom 10% of nursing faculty earn $48,800 or less and the top 10% earn $129,500 or more, a 2.65 to 1 ratio inside one occupation. Two people with the same doctorate, teaching the same content, can be $80,700 apart.

The quartiles tell you where the mass sits. A quarter of nursing faculty earn under $63,510. A quarter earn over $101,090. If you want a nursing professor salary in six figures, you are aiming for the top quarter of the occupation, and that takes rank, an institution that pays, and grant money.

How Does Rank Change a Nursing Professor Salary?

The wage survey reports one line for every nursing instructor in the country, from the adjunct who teaches one clinical section to the endowed chair running a research center. Rank is what separates them, and the $37,580 gap between the 25th percentile and the 75th percentile is that ladder measured in dollars.

On the tenure track you start as an assistant professor, go up for tenure and associate around year five or six, and go up for full professor five to seven years later. Most of your raise arrives in one step at each promotion. The annual increase in between is whatever the university budget allows, and at a public school in a bad legislative year that is nothing. Two promotions over a dozen years is what moves someone from the bottom quartile of the nursing professor salary range into the top one.

Clinical-track and teaching-track lines work differently. They carry heavier teaching loads, they are often twelve-month appointments rather than nine, and they frequently start higher than a tenure-track offer at the same school, because the school is competing with a hospital to fill them. The ceiling is lower. Clinical faculty rarely reach the 90th percentile, because the top of this occupation is built on research salary rather than teaching salary. If you are choosing between tracks, read what a nursing PhD actually opens up before you sign.

Rank does not arrive on schedule either. Promotion is a dossier, external letters, and a committee vote, and faculty who teach beautifully but publish nothing sit at the same salary for years.

Do Nursing Professors Earn More at Universities or Community Colleges?

Institution type is the second biggest lever on a nursing professor salary. Research universities with doctoral programs pay the top of the range, because those faculty bring in grants and the university competes nationally to hire them. Community colleges running associate degree nursing programs pay the bottom, because they hire against a local market on budgets set by county and state formulas. Private colleges without endowments sit low too.

Contract length matters as much as the headline number. Most tenure-track nursing faculty are on nine-month contracts, so a nine-month offer of $80,000 and a twelve-month offer of $80,000 are not the same salary. The nine-month appointment leaves three months open, either unpaid or filled with summer salary, and that difference is worth about a third of your pay.

Hawaii shows what a fixed pay schedule does to the distribution. The 10th percentile there is $103,160 and the 90th is $129,640, a spread of $26,480 where the national spread is $80,700. That is the shape of a published salary schedule rather than individually negotiated offers. Where private universities dominate nursing education the spread is enormous: California runs from $47,840 at the 10th percentile to $164,450 at the 90th.

The 140 programs in the campus nursing PhD ranking sit almost entirely at research universities, where the higher end of faculty pay lives. If you plan to teach where you train, that matters. Our scoring methodology explains how those institutions were assessed.

What Does a Nursing Professor Earn in Your State?

Hawaii pays the highest median nursing professor salary in the country at $129,530, across 1,890 faculty, which is a real workforce rather than a rounding error. The District of Columbia looks strong at $107,770, but that median rests on 110 people, and a number built on 110 jobs moves when a handful of senior faculty retire. Treat it as a signal about a few well-paid positions, not about a market you would be entering.

Read the employment column next to every median. Texas employs the most nursing faculty at 6,830, then New York at 6,340, California at 5,610, Illinois at 4,940, and Florida at 4,320. Those five states hold the jobs, and all five sit within a few thousand dollars of the national median. At the bottom, West Virginia at $62,210, Kansas at $62,870, and Arkansas at $63,090 pay less than the 25th percentile nationally.

Cost of living is doing work here that the table cannot show you. California pays a median of $81,960, $1,710 above the national figure, and nobody would call that a premium once rent is paid. Idaho at $90,890 and Nevada at $96,500 buy far more. If you are willing to move for a first faculty job, the state table is the single largest one-time raise available to you: West Virginia to Connecticut is a $33,290 swing at the median.

You can see which states also have programs to train in on the state-by-state ranking index, which covers the 46 states with a nursing PhD program.

Do Nursing Professors Earn Less Than the Nurses They Teach?

Yes. This is the central economic fact of the career, and every honest account of a nursing PhD starts with it. The median registered nurse earns $97,550 across 3,379,720 jobs. The median nursing professor salary is $80,250 across 77,960 jobs. Nursing faculty earn about 18% less than the staff nurses sitting in their classrooms.

It gets sharper when you line up the percentiles. The 25th percentile registered nurse salary is $80,330. The median nursing professor salary is $80,250. A nurse in the bottom quarter of bedside pay out-earns the median nursing professor by $80 a year. The 75th percentile RN, at $112,350, earns more than the 75th percentile nursing professor at $101,090.

Nurse practitioners widen it further. The NP median is $132,300 across 323,040 jobs, which is $52,050 above the median nursing professor salary and higher than the 90th percentile for nursing faculty. An NP at the middle of that field out-earns a nursing professor in the top 10% of this one. If you already hold an NP license and you are weighing a research doctorate, this is the number that governs the decision.

So say it plainly: a nursing PhD is not a pay rise. For most nurses who earn one, lifetime earnings go down, and they go down further if you paid tuition and gave up four to six years of clinical salary to do it. The reasons to do it are the work, the autonomy, the schedule, and the research. The salary is not one of them. What a nursing PhD pays across every role it opens covers the alternatives to faculty work.

Why Is Nursing Faculty Pay Lower Than Bedside Pay?

Because the money comes from somewhere else. A hospital pays a nurse out of billed clinical revenue, and it pays more for short staffing, night shifts, holidays, and per diem contracts. A university pays a professor out of tuition and state appropriations, and it sets that salary inside a pay band shared with the history department. Your nursing professor salary is benchmarked against other professors, not against the hospital across the street.

That explains part of the raw gap too. The $97,550 registered nurse median includes overtime, shift differentials, and holiday premiums. Academia has none of those, there is no time and a half for grading, and the nine-month contract covers three quarters of the year.

Nursing schools know all of this. It is why doctoral faculty positions stay open, why schools cap enrollment they could otherwise fill, and why a new PhD with a clear research record gets taken seriously at the offer stage. The shortage does not fix the salary, but it does give you room on start-up funds, course release, summer support, and rank at hire. Ask for all four.

How Do You Raise a Nursing Professor Salary?

The faculty who clear $129,500 did not get there on cost-of-living increases. They stacked income sources on top of a base salary that sits near the middle of the range. Here is what moves the number, in order of size.

1. 1

   Get promoted, and treat the clock as a deadline

   Promotion to associate and then to full professor is the largest single change to your base nursing professor salary, and each one is a step increase you keep for the rest of your career. Track the dossier requirements from your first week. Publish on a schedule rather than in bursts, and cultivate external letter writers early.

2. 2

   Bring in grant money

   Federal and foundation grants buy two things: course release, which returns the time to publish, and summer salary, which pays for the months a nine-month contract does not cover. Funded faculty populate the top quartile of this occupation and unfunded faculty rarely do. This is also the road to nurse scientist work outside academia, where medical scientists have a median of $103,410.

3. 3

   Take summer teaching and overload sections

   Summer courses and overloads are paid per section on top of base salary. They are the most reliable extra money available to a nursing professor and the most exhausting, because they eat the time you meant to spend writing. Use them as a bridge before your first grant, not as a plan.

4. 4

   Move into administration

   Program directors, associate deans, and deans are counted as postsecondary education administrators, an occupation with a median of $104,590 and a 90th percentile of $215,620. That is $24,340 above the faculty median at the middle and $86,120 above it at the top. The tradeoff is that administrative work replaces research, and going back is hard.

5. 5

   Keep a clinical practice

   Most nursing schools allow faculty practice, and one or two clinical days a week at nurse practitioner rates, where the median is $132,300, adds real money to a faculty income while keeping your license current and your teaching credible. It costs you the hours that would otherwise become publications.

6. 6

   Change institutions or states

   Internal raises are capped by university policy. Outside offers are not. The state table above is the cleanest illustration: the same credentials pay $62,210 at the median in West Virginia and $95,500 in Connecticut. Faculty who move once or twice early end up well ahead of faculty who stay put, and a competing offer is the only reliable way to reset a base salary mid-career.

Is a Nursing PhD Worth It if the Salary Is Lower?

It can be, and the variable that decides it is what you paid. A nursing PhD that cost you tuition is a bad financial decision on these numbers. One that came with a full tuition waiver and a stipend is a different calculation, because you traded four to six years of clinical salary for a credential and walked out owing nothing. Twenty of the 140 programs tracked here are fully funded, and those are worth applying to first. The funding guide covers assistantships, traineeships, and employer support for everyone else.

The non-salary payoffs are real and they are why people stay. You control your calendar. No night shifts, no weekend rotations, no mandatory holidays, nobody calling you in. You choose your own research questions, and the nine-month contract that costs you money also gives you summers. For a nurse at 38 who has done fifteen years of twelve-hour shifts, that is worth a lot.

If the goal is more money and more clinical autonomy rather than research, a DNP is the shorter and cheaper answer, and the PhD versus DNP comparison lays out which one fits which career. If the research is the point, apply to funded programs, and note that 103 of the 140 programs admit students straight from a BSN and 68 have dropped the GRE. Go in with your eyes open about the nursing professor salary you are heading toward, and the decision holds up.