New Graduate Nurse Turnover: What the Numbers Actually Measure

You will hear that about a third of new nurses quit within their first year.

It is one of the most repeated statistics in nursing, and it does not survive being checked. Not because turnover is low — it is not — but because the number usually arrives without the two things that make a statistic mean anything: a defined denominator and a stated reference period. A third of whom, measured how, in which year?

The best available figure is smaller and more specific: 22.7% of newly hired registered nurses left within a year. That is still roughly one in four and a half. But it is not a third, and what it counts is not quite what the headline implies.

This article is about what the number measures — and why that distinction matters more than the number itself.

Where the "one in three" claim breaks down

Turnover statistics fail in a predictable way: the numerator gets quoted and the denominator disappears.

"New nurses" can mean new graduates, nurses in their first year of practice, nurses new to a hospital, or nurses new to a specialty. Those are four different populations with four different rates. "Quit" can mean leaving the employer, leaving the bedside, or leaving nursing entirely — and only the first is usually measured.

Without those definitions, a turnover figure is not a fact about nursing. It is a sentence that sounds like one.

What the strongest figure actually is

The most widely cited turnover data for US hospitals comes from NSI Nursing Solutions, which surveys acute-care hospitals annually. Its 2026 report covers 527 hospitals in 40 states — 965,886 healthcare workers and 262,405 registered nurses — reporting calendar year 2025.

Its finding on early exits is specific:

"Over twenty-two percent (22.7%) of all newly hired RNs left within a year, with first-year turnover accounting for twenty-nine percent (29.0%) of all RN separations."

The median was 28.1% and the mode 25.0%, so individual hospitals vary widely around the average. But 22.7% is the national figure.

For context on the whole workforce: hospital RN turnover overall was 17.6% in 2025, up 1.2 points from 16.4% the year before.

Measure	2025 figure	What it counts
Hospital RN turnover	17.6%	All RN separations ÷ average RN headcount
First-year RN turnover	22.7%	Newly hired RNs who left within 12 months
First-year share of all RN separations	29.0%	How much of total churn is early churn
Range across hospitals	5.6% – 40.0%	The spread behind the average

The distinction the headline loses

Read that 22.7% definition again: newly hired RNs.

Not new graduates. Newly hired — a group that includes an experienced nurse with fifteen years behind her who changed employers in March. She counts in the denominator exactly the same as a graduate in her first month.

That matters for two reasons.

First, it means 22.7% is a statement about hiring, not about nursing education or the transition from student to practitioner. If you want to know how new graduates specifically fare, this data cannot tell you — it does not separate them out.

Second, it makes the figure more useful to you than a new-graduate statistic would be. You are about to become a newly hired RN. Whatever your experience level, the first year at a new employer is the risk window this measures.

Why the average is less useful than the range

RN turnover across the responding hospitals ran from 5.6% to 40.0%. The gap between the best and worst employer is larger than the gap between the average and zero.

That is the most actionable thing in the dataset. A profession-wide average tells you what nursing is like on average. A range tells you that which employer you choose moves the number more than which profession you chose — and that is a decision you actually control.

Magnet-recognized hospitals averaged 17.4% turnover and a 7.3% vacancy rate, both slightly better than the national figures. That is a correlation worth noticing, not a guarantee attached to a credential.

What the exits get attributed to

NSI asked hospitals why staff RNs voluntarily resigned, offering a list of twenty reasons. The top five were:

1. Personal issues
2. Relocation
3. Retirement
4. Career advancement
5. Scheduling conflict

The rest of the top ten: education, salary, commute, working conditions, and workload/staffing ratios.

Two things about that list are worth sitting with.

Retirement is third, and rising. A large share of nursing turnover is people leaving the workforce at the end of careers, not new nurses leaving at the start. Any "nursing has a retention crisis among the young" narrative has to account for that.

Salary is seventh. Not first. That does not mean pay is unimportant — it means that in this dataset, most people who resign are not primarily resigning over the hourly rate. Scheduling conflict, in the top five, is closer to the lived experience of a first-year nurse than the pay scale is.

One caveat matters here: these are employers' attributions, not nurses' own accounts. A hospital checking "personal issues" is guessing at a reason. Treat the ordering as informative, not definitive.

Why employers care so much about this number

The cost figures explain why every hospital has a retention strategy and why your first year is watched.

NSI puts the average cost of turnover for a bedside RN at $60,090, with the average hospital losing between $4.2m and $6.2m a year — $5.19m in 2025. Each one-point change in RN turnover costs or saves about $295,000 annually.

This is an employer-side cost, and it is worth understanding as one: it is the reason a hospital will spend money on a residency program, a preceptor, or a sign-on bonus. It is also the reason a first-year nurse who is struggling may get more support than they expect — replacing them is expensive.

What appears to help

The same report gives a view of what hospitals are doing. 80.8% have a strategy specifically to protect newly hired nurses, and 74% have a formal retention strategy. Nurse residency programs scored 3.9 out of 5 on an effectiveness scale.

That last number needs a caveat: it is hospitals rating their own programs. It is not an outcome measure, and a program rated effective by its operator is not independent evidence that it works.

None of this tells you which interventions actually reduce early exits. The report describes practice, not causal effect.

What this means for your first job

The 22.7% is a base rate, not a prophecy. It describes what happens across a large sample of hospitals. It does not tell you what will happen to you, and it says nothing about your ability.

What it does is justify some questions worth asking before you accept a role — and the first-year risk window makes them reasonable rather than presumptuous:

• Does this unit run a structured residency or extended orientation, and how long is it?
• Who precepts a new nurse here, and is that protected time or an extra assignment?
• What proportion of this unit's nurses have been here less than two years?
• How many nurses on this unit left in the last year, and why does the manager think so?
• What does support look like at month six, when orientation is over?

That last question is the one most people forget. Orientation is a scheduled event; month six is not.

Asking these is not suspicion. Given a 22.7% first-year figure and a 5.6%-to-40% spread between employers, it is the same diligence you would apply to the salary.

If you are preparing the pay conversation itself, your first salary conversation covers what to ask and how to ask it. And if you are still choosing between directions rather than employers, compare your nursing career options first — the first job matters more than the first title.

More on surviving and steering the first two years is in the new graduate nursing career guides.

A note on the number you will keep seeing

There is a traceable origin, and it is not quite the claim.

Authors affiliated with the American Nurses Credentialing Center, writing in American Nurse Journal, cite Kovner and colleagues' study of nurse turnover as finding that "as many as one-third of all new nurses leave an organization within the first 2 years."

Read that again. Two years, not one.

So the figure is not invented. It appears to have been compressed in retelling, which changes what it means substantially: a third of new nurses leaving across twenty-four months is a different phenomenon from a third leaving inside twelve. It also counts leaving the organization, not leaving nursing.

That is not pedantry. The difference between 22.7% at one year and a third at two years is the difference between "this is a real risk worth preparing for" and "this is close to a coin flip." They support different decisions about which job to take.

The honest summary: early turnover in nursing is high enough to take seriously, the most-quoted number is probably a two-year figure quoted as a one-year one, and turnover varies so much between employers that the employer is the variable worth investigating.

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Sources and review

All turnover figures come from the 2026 NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report, published by NSI Nursing Solutions, and were read from the report itself rather than from a secondary summary.

What kind of evidence this is. An industry survey of 527 self-selected acute-care hospitals, reporting calendar year 2025. It is Tier 2: not a government statistical series, and not peer-reviewed. Hospitals volunteer their data, so the sample is not a random draw of US hospitals. Percentages are hospital-reported.

What it does not measure. NSI's first-year figure counts newly hired RNs, not new graduates. It does not separate a graduate in her first month from an experienced nurse who changed employers. No figure here describes new-graduate turnover specifically, and this article does not claim one.

The "one third" claim. The widely repeated claim that a third of new nurses leave in year one was not used as a one-year figure, because it does not appear to be one. The closest documented origin is Kovner et al. (2014), cited by ANCC-affiliated authors in American Nurse Journal (May 2020) as finding that "as many as one-third of all new nurses leave an organization within the first 2 years" — a two-year measure of leaving the organization, not a one-year measure of leaving nursing. The 22.7% figure measures a different population and a different window, so the two cannot be swapped for one another.

Author: Peter Scaffo, RN Last substantively updated: 17 October 2026 Data reference period: NSI survey, calendar year 2025; report published 2026 Next scheduled review: April 2027, or earlier when NSI publishes its next annual report Corrections: pscaffo@nurseroot.com