RN Salary in Vermont: What Registered Nurses Actually Earn in 2026

Vermont's median RN salary is $97,460 a year, or $46.86 an hour. Mean pay runs slightly lower at $96,650, which tells you the distribution is not heavily skewed by a handful of extremely high earners. Most Vermont RNs cluster fairly close to that median rather than a few outliers dragging the average up.

The real story is the spread. The 10th percentile earns $77,670 a year, and the 90th percentile earns $126,100, a gap of roughly $48,000. That is the difference between a new graduate working the floor at a small critical access hospital or a long-term care facility in a rural county, and a nurse with a decade of acute-care experience, a specialty certification, and heavy night or weekend differential pay in a larger hospital system.

Nurses at the 25th percentile, $82,210, are typically early-career RNs in general medical-surgical units or lower-acuity settings. Nurses at the 75th percentile, $105,210, have usually spent years building seniority, picked up a specialty, or moved into a higher-paying acute care or specialty unit. The bottom of the range is not a sign that Vermont underpays new nurses. It is what entry-level nursing pay looks like anywhere before differentials and experience stack up.

Vermont's RN salary, at a median of $97,460, is almost identical to the national median of $97,550 found in our national RN salary guide. The gap is $90 a year, which in practical terms is nothing, roughly the value of a single shift differential. Vermont ranks #19 of 51 states and D.C., putting it solidly in the upper-middle of the national pack despite being one of the smallest states in the country by RN headcount.

The neighbors tell a different story. Massachusetts pays a median of $104,550, $7,090 more per year than Vermont. New Hampshire pays $99,700, a smaller but real $2,240 gap. New York pays $109,440, $11,980 more than Vermont, the largest gap of the three.

Is it worth crossing a border? For a Vermont nurse living near the New York or Massachusetts line, the honest answer is that it depends on where you actually live and what you would be commuting into. An $11,980 gap with New York looks compelling on paper, but housing and cost-of-living pressure in much of downstate New York and eastern Massachusetts can erase a real chunk of that premium before you factor in a longer commute or licensing paperwork. The New Hampshire gap of $2,240 is small enough that it rarely justifies uprooting a household on its own. And remember that Vermont taxes wage income, so any raise from moving needs to be measured against take-home pay, not just the sticker number on the median wage. The Massachusetts gap is the one worth running real numbers on, particularly for nurses in southern Vermont already within reasonable driving distance of Massachusetts hospital systems.

The percentile spread in Vermont doubles as a rough career map. A new graduate typically starts somewhere near the 25th percentile, around $82,210, in a general unit at a community or critical access hospital. Reaching the 75th percentile, $105,210, is not automatic, and it does not happen just by logging years. It happens through a specific set of moves.

Night and weekend shift differentials are the most immediate lever. Hospitals pay a premium for the shifts nobody wants, and a nurse who works nights or weekends for several years is earning meaningfully more than a colleague working the same job on day shift, even before any raise. Certifications matter too. A critical care certification like CCRN, an emergency nursing certification, or an OR certification signals specialized skill and often comes with a direct pay bump or opens the door to higher-paying units.

Setting matters as much as tenure. Moving from a small rural hospital to a larger acute-care system, or from a general medical-surgical floor into a specialty unit like the ICU, ED, or OR, tends to push RN pay up the ladder faster than staying in place and waiting for annual raises. Unionized hospital systems also matter. Where nurses bargain collectively, wage scales tend to be more transparent and predictable, with defined steps for experience and shift type rather than case-by-case negotiation.

Getting from the bottom of the range to the top in Vermont is realistic within a working career, but it takes deliberate moves, not just showing up.

If you want more pay, fast, the options rank in a clear order of impact.

The biggest single jump is becoming a nurse practitioner. The median nurse practitioner salary in Vermont is $134,740, which is $37,280 more per year than the Vermont RN median. No certification or shift differential available to a bedside RN comes close to that gap. If you are considering the graduate route, look at nurse practitioner programs that fit your specialty interest and your ability to keep working while you study.

Before that, though, most hospital systems build their internal pay ladders around the BSN. If you came up through an ADN and you are stuck below the pay ceiling your hospital sets for BSN-prepared nurses, finishing a RN-to-BSN program is usually the higher-return, lower-risk move before committing to graduate school. It is shorter, cheaper, and it unlocks the pay tier most Vermont hospitals already have in place.

Below that: specialty and setting switches, moving into ICU, ED, OR, or another higher-paying unit, and picking up a relevant certification both push you up the percentile ladder without a new degree. Travel nursing is the other lever people consider. Travel contracts can pay well above a permanent Vermont staff position, but they trade stability, benefits, and local seniority for higher weekly pay, and contract terms vary constantly by location and season, so treat any specific travel number you see online with caution.

The NP route is not for everyone. If you like direct patient care at the bedside, do not want the added liability and autonomy of diagnosing and prescribing, or are not willing to commit to another one to three years of graduate school while still working, staying an RN and climbing through certification, seniority, and setting changes gets you most of the way up Vermont's RN salary ladder without leaving the bedside.

Vermont employs 7,410 registered nurses, the second-fewest of any state in the country, ranking #50 of 51, compared to 3,379,720 RNs nationally. That is a tiny labor pool by any measure, smaller than the RN workforce in most single mid-sized metro areas elsewhere in the country.

For working nurses, a small statewide workforce cuts both ways. On one hand, there are simply fewer employers to negotiate with, and fewer competing hospital systems means less pressure on any one employer to outbid its neighbor for staff. On the other hand, national RN job growth is projected at 6% through 2032, and a small state with an aging population still needs to fill shifts, which keeps demand for working RNs steady even without dramatic wage competition.

One clear path into that market, or up from an existing LPN role, is the RN license itself. Vermont LPNs earn a median of $69,930, which means RNs in the state earn $27,530 more per year than LPNs doing adjacent work. For an LPN weighing whether an RN bridge program is worth the time and cost, that gap is the plainest possible argument.

If you are new to nursing, moving up from LPN, or relocating into Vermont, start by comparing the best RN programs in Vermont against your schedule and budget, and use the percentile data above to set a realistic expectation for your first few years of pay.