Family nurse practitioners or FNPs account for just over half of all nurse practitioners and is one of the highest paying nursing positions available
Family nurse practitioners or FNPs are in high demand; they account for just over half of all nurse practitioners. It is one of the highest paying nursing positions available, rivaling nurse anesthetists in average pay. How much can I expect to make as a family nurse practitioner? The answer is: it depends. We’ll discuss the factors that determine your pay as a family nurse practitioner.
Family nurse practitioner is one of the highest paying nursing positions available.Click To Tweet
Experience
As with many jobs, your pay rate depends on experience. The average reported salary for newly minted nurse practitioners was around $80,000, with salaries for those with some experience hitting $90,000 nationwide. For someone with five to ten years of experience, it was about $100,000 a year. Salaries stayed in this range until someone had 15 to 20 years of experience; then their average pay was around $105,000 a year. For those with 20 or more years of experience, pay was just a touch higher at $107,000 a year. But this is just salary.
When you factor in bonuses and other incentive pay, nurse practitioners with zero to five years of experience earn about a hundred thousand dollars a year. Those with five to ten years of experience, when you include bonuses, hit $110,000 a year. If you had ten to 15 years of experience, the pay rate averaged out at $115,000. Those with 15 to 20 years of experience earned more at an average of $120,000 a year.
Those with more than 20 years of experience saw average pay drop down to $117,000 a year. However, this could be due to personal decisions like not working long hours or choosing lower stress positions that don’t pay as much as one approaches retirement or physical health declines. For the average FNP, employers’ bonuses and profit sharing averaged about 5,000 dollars a year.
Expertise
One’s pay can vary based on expertise. According to the self-reported salaries in 2014, of nurse practitioners on the site Payscale, general nurse practitioners earned around $86,000 a year. Family nurse practitioners earned around $85,000. This was several thousand dollars more than women’s health nurse practitioners and several thousand less than if they were working in acute care.
Location
There is significant variation in FNP salary by state. States with the highest nurse practitioner salaries include those with the highest overall cost of living: Hawaii, California, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey. Of the five most expensive areas in the United States (including DC), three also hit the list as the top paying states for Family Nurse Practitioners. The western United States had an average salary of FPNs of $105,000, skewed upward by California’s high pay rates.
Not all of the highest paying localities for nurse practitioners are in the highest paying states since some areas have to pay FNPs a lot of money to attract them. This is why nurse practitioners in southern Texas near the Rio Grande earned around $136,000 in 2014 while those working in San Francisco, California earned around $127,000. Honolulu’s high pay of $126,000 is due to cost of living, while Texarkana, Texas pays them more due to the shortage of doctors.
Nurse practitioners in Oklahoma, Kansas, and South Carolina earned between $82,000 and $86,000 a year due to the low cost of living in those states. (Oklahoma is one of the cheapest states to live in.) Some of the lowest paying municipalities included cities in Puerto Rico often being paid less than $50,000 a year, while nurse practitioners in Springfield, Illinois were paid around $60,000. Nurse practitioners in rural west central Pennsylvania were paid about $70,000 a year; this is about $30,000 less than the average pay for nurse practitioners in the Northeast. In the Midwestern United States, average pay for FNPs was around $96,000.
Employer
The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that nurse practitioners had a very wide range of salaries. Those in the bottom 10th percentile earned around $70,000 a year. Those in the 90th percentile earned around $130,000 in 2014. Hourly rates ranged from $33 an hour at the low end to $63 an hour at the high end. And one reason for the variation is demand by different employers. For example, a nurse practitioner working in personal care services earned around $118,000 a year. Those working in specialty hospitals like cardiac rehab centers earned around $114,000.
If someone did physical exams for employers or insurers, they earned around $108,000 on average. Nurse practitioners working in VA facilities earned the same rate. Retail clinics paid an average of $110,000 a year in 2015. Urgent care centers paid around $100,000 base pay per year, but overtime and holiday bonuses can significantly increase this. Conversely, a nurse practitioner in a family practice clinic earns, on average, eighty to ninety thousand dollars a year.
Conclusion
If you are a family nurse practitioner, pay can vary from $70,000 to $130,000 a year. Working in a retail clinic or concierge care pays more than if you’re working in a doctor’s office. You’ll be paid a little more as you gain experience, but wage growth slows after you have a few years of experience. The locations with the highest pay for nurse practitioners include very expensive areas and places where they pay a fortune to attract FNPs because of the lack of medical services in the area.
