Salary by Specialty

• This is probably the category that most separates salaries among RNs. The highest paid RNs in the United States are mostly nurse practitioners, meaning that they're RNs who have received additional training and education--usually a master's degree. The RN position with the highest national average salary is a certified nurse anesthetist at $135,000, according to Nursing Link. The median salary of a chief nurse anesthetist in San Jose, California, is nearly $210,000. Other highly paid specialty RN jobs include nurse researchers and psychiatric nurse practitioners--$95,000, certified nurse mid-wives--$84,000, pediatric endocrinology nurses and orthopedic nurses--$81,000 and nurse practitioners--$78,000. The lowest-paying RN positions are located almost entirely within the home care and nursing home fields with median salaries in the low to mid 50s.
  
  

Salary by City

• Large metropolitan areas and university medical centers top the list of nursing salaries in all areas of employment, from starting salaries for staff RNs to highly specialized jobs. The metropolitan area centered in San Jose, California, just south of San Francisco, features the nation's highest median salary for RNs at $111,000, or more than $53 an hour, or more than $2,100 per week. The Boston area---with the Boston Medical Center, Tufts Medical Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which is affiliated with Harvard, Harvard Medical School, Boston University Medical Campus and St. Elizabeth Medical Center--has a median salary of $85,000 for all nursing positions. Sioux City, Iowa, is among the lowest paying cities in the United States, with a median salary of only $47,000, or about $900 per week.
  
  

Salary by State

• California leads all states in RN salaries, with an annual salary of $85,000, or more than $40 per hour, or $1,600 a week. Hawaii is near $80,000 per year and Maryland tops $75,000 annually. Iowa, at $51,648, has the country's lowest average salary behind even Guam and ahead of only Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands among U.S. states/territories, while Oklahoma ($52,850) and West Virginia ($53,319) are just ahead of Iowa. California also leads the nation is annual nursing job openings at about 11,000 each year, while Wyoming needs only about 200 new RNs annually.
  
  

Salary by Experience

• As already mentioned, it's difficult to generalize about nursing salaries due to the variety and diversity within the profession, but reliable data can be yielded by examining nursing salaries linked to experience. The bottom line is that, as RNs gain experience--no matter the field or specialty--they make more money. According to Pay Scale, a job compensation database, RNs with one to four years experience average $38,280 to $52,510 annually. Those figures steadily increase year by year, topping out at nearly $74,000 (about $1,400 per week) for RNs with more than 20 years experience.