Nurse

What the Numbers Say About Nurse

As of the March 2025 reporting window, 109,716 people work in the Nurse occupation (OPM code 610) across federal agencies, 4.8% of the 2,289,472-strong federal civilian workforce. Headcount moved down by -1.0% from the prior period, a workforce-scale shift government watchers track closely, since swings this large move federal staffing totals meaningfully.

Nurse pays $128,375 per year on average, 16.8% above the $109,869 federal civilian average, after moving up 3.0% from the prior period (a broad shift as locality pay tables and grade-level adjustments moved through the workforce). Employees in this role stay an average of 9.2 years, a mid-length average tenure, reflecting a mix of career employees and those who transfer or exit mid-career.

The Medical, Hospital, Dental, and Public Health Group family (code 6) groups Nurse together with 44 other related occupations across the federal government. Candidates browsing USAJOBS for Nurse postings should also review these sibling occupations, since federal hiring managers often cross-post positions across closely related codes when recruitment is difficult. All figures here come directly from OPM FedScope Employment Cubes, the same official source referenced in federal workforce planning, budget justifications, and GAO reports.

Inside the Medical, Hospital, Dental, and Public Health Group family (45 occupations, 356,984 employees combined), Nurse holds the #1 spot by headcount, a 30.7% share of the family total.

Nurse is one of just 5 federal occupation series with 50,000 or more employees, out of 634 tracked in OPM FedScope for the March 2025 reporting window -- a scale that makes it a defining occupation for how the Medical, Hospital, Dental, and Public Health Group family is staffed federal-wide, with an average salary that ranks in the top half (76th percentile) of pay among Medical, Hospital, Dental, and Public Health Group occupations. Within the family, the largest occupations by headcount are Nurse at 109,716, Medical Support Assistance at 40,723, and Medical Officer at 37,766, ahead of 42 smaller occupations in the same family. Together, these top 3 occupations account for 52.7% of the Medical, Hospital, Dental, and Public Health Group family's 356,984 total employees. Nationally, Nurse's average salary of $128,375 sits at the 83rd percentile among all 634 federal occupation series tracked in FedScope, above the federal-wide median for occupation-level average pay -- headcount and pay rank independently of each other, so a large occupation series is not guaranteed to also rank high on the pay scale. Among this same group of 5 occupation series at 50,000-plus employees, headcount changed by an average of 0.5% from the prior period, versus Nurse's own 1.0% decrease. Average tenure across these 5 large occupation series runs 11.7 years; Nurse's own 9.2-year average is shorter than that peer-group average.