Labor Matters: The Misleading Math Behind "Stop Saying There's a Nursing Shortage"
Last week Time ran a piece headlined "Stop Saying There's a Nursing Shortage." https://time.com/article/2026/07/30/stop-saying-theres-a-nursing-shortage/
Its key evidence: 7 million registered and practical nurses hold an active license, while there are only about 4 million nursing jobs, suggesting "well over two million licensed nurses are not currently working as nurses for patients." The article got a lot of attention, but I think its key numbers are misleading.
The article gets a lot right about why bedside nursing has become a harder job, and its reporting on working conditions is worth your time. But the two numbers behind the headline don't show what they seem to. There are three problems with them.
The 7 million counts licenses, not people. The figure comes from the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, whose table is titled "Number of Active RN and PN Licenses by State" (7,046,231 as of July 31, 2026). A nurse licensed in both New York and Florida shows up twice. NCSBN itself makes the distinction: its 2020 workforce report counted 4.95 million active RN licenses but, "after adjusting for nurses with multiple licenses," only 4.2 million actual RNs, a 15 percent difference. Using that adjustment as a rough guide, today's 7 million licenses belong to roughly six million people.
The 4 million counts the wrong jobs. The BLS figure covers two occupation codes: registered nurses and licensed practical nurses. But nurse practitioners, nurse anesthetists, nurse midwives, and nursing professors sit in separate codes, even though all of them must hold an active RN license, and many nurses working as administrators, researchers, or consultants are likely classified elsewhere too. Subtracting these jobs from the licensed population doesn't measure nurses on the sidelines. It measures the distance between two definitions.
Many people with a nursing license have always worked in non-nursing jobs. Is the current number unusually large?
The source's own survey answers the question more directly. NCSBN also runs the biennial National Nursing Workforce Survey, which asks license-holders whether they're working in nursing. In 2024, 87.7 percent of RNs and 88.4 percent of practical nurses said yes, at or near the highest rates the survey has recorded. So no: the share of license-holders not practicing is near its record low.
The question of whether there is a nursing shortage depends on the gap between the number of people working in nursing jobs and the number of nursing positions demanded by employers. I don't think the article answers or even tries to answer this question. I don't know the answer to that, but the decline in retention the article documents works in the direction of creating shortages.
None of this weakens the article's real argument, that pay, staffing, and working conditions are driving nurses away from the hardest jobs. Improved working conditions will help. The pipeline is growing too — NCLEX passers are up 34 percent since 2016 — but if there is a real shortage, it may need to grow faster still. Either way, these numbers are a reason to take the shortage seriously, not a reason to stop saying it exists.
Data notes: License counts from NCSBN's National Nursing Database tables (July 31, 2026). License-to-person adjustment applies rates from NCSBN's 2020 National Nursing Workforce Survey (Journal of Nursing Regulation, April 2021); treat the six million as approximate. Employment rates from the 2024 survey (Journal of Nursing Regulation, April 2025); NCSBN's press release cites the practical-nurse full-time share (70.6 percent); the survey's Table 71 puts their total employment in nursing at 88.4 percent. Job counts (BLS) and NCLEX pass counts as reported by Time.