RN Salary in Wyoming: What Registered Nurses Really Earn in 2026

The median rn salary in Wyoming is $83,760 a year, or $40.27 an hour. The mean, or average, is higher at $88,600, which tells you a small group of high earners is pulling the average up above the median, typical of any pay distribution with overtime and shift differentials mixed in.

The real story is the spread. The bottom 10 percent of Wyoming RNs earn $65,770 or less. The 25th percentile sits at $77,890. Climb to the 75th percentile and pay reaches $101,100, and the top 10 percent clear $107,350. That's a $41,580 gap between the bottom and top deciles, more than the entire national RN median. If you're a new grad, working in long-term care, or based in one of Wyoming's rural counties, expect to land closer to that $65,770 to $77,890 range. If you're a nurse with a decade in an acute-care hospital, working nights and weekends with a specialty certification, the $101,100 to $107,350 range is realistic.

Hourly, that median works out to $40.27. See the national RN salary guide for how Wyoming's hourly rate and annual pay stack up against every other state.

Wyoming's median rn salary of $83,760 is $13,790 below the national median of $97,550, and the state ranks 35th of 51 states and D.C. for RN pay. That's not a crisis. It's a state solidly in the bottom third, but well ahead of the truly low-paying states.

The neighbor comparison is more useful than the national one, because it's the actual decision most Wyoming RNs weigh. Colorado pays a median of $100,260, a $16,500 gap over Wyoming, the biggest of any bordering state. Idaho pays $92,460, $8,700 more. Montana pays $85,280, just $1,520 more. Nebraska pays $84,730, only $970 more. Utah pays $84,600, $840 more. South Dakota is the one neighbor that pays less, $78,060, a full $5,700 below Wyoming.

Here's the honest verdict: a move to Colorado is the only border crossing with a gap large enough to plausibly outrun a higher cost of living, and even then it depends on which Colorado market you're comparing to, since Denver runs expensive. Montana, Nebraska, and Utah pay close enough to Wyoming, within about $1,500, that relocating for pay alone rarely makes sense once you factor in moving costs, new licensure fees, and Wyoming's lack of a state income tax, which narrows every one of these gaps on your actual paycheck. South Dakota nurses, meanwhile, have real reason to look at Wyoming.

Think of the percentile ladder as a career arc rather than a snapshot. A new graduate in Wyoming typically starts near the 25th percentile, $77,890, especially in a hospital's general medical-surgical unit or a long-term care facility. The jump from there to the 75th percentile, $101,100, a difference of $23,210 a year, doesn't happen through raises alone. It happens through a combination of tenure, shift work, and credentials.

Years on the unit matter, but they're not the biggest lever. Night and weekend shift differentials add real dollars to a base rate, and hospitals that run acute-care units around the clock lean on them to staff off-hours. Specialty certifications, CCRN for critical care, CEN for emergency nursing, OCN for oncology, signal to an employer that you can be trusted with the sickest patients and the most complex assignments, and they typically carry pay bumps of their own even before you touch a promotion track. Unionized hospital systems bargain fixed wage scales that reward tenure and certification predictably, where non-union facilities may negotiate case by case.

Setting matters as much as tenure. A nurse who moves from a rural critical access hospital to a larger regional medical center, or from med-surg into a specialty unit like the ICU or the OR, is often on the fastest route up the ladder, faster than waiting for annual raises in the same role. If you're early in your career and building toward the top of that range, look at the best RN programs in Wyoming for a sense of which programs feed into the state's larger hospital systems.

If your goal is simply the biggest number, nothing on this list beats becoming a nurse practitioner. The median NP salary in Wyoming is $132,200, which is $48,440 a year above the Wyoming RN median. That's roughly a 58 percent raise in the same state, at the same cost of living, with no relocation required. It's the single largest lever on this page, and it's why so many Wyoming RNs eventually look at nurse practitioner programs. Read the full numbers at our nurse practitioner salary page before committing.

But the NP route isn't for everyone. It typically means two to three more years of graduate school, clinical hours stacked on top of a working schedule, and a career shift away from bedside nursing into diagnosing and prescribing. If you like the floor, don't want to manage a patient panel, or are within five or so years of retirement, the return on that investment shrinks fast. It's not a decision to make just because the dollar gap looks big on paper. You have to want the job an NP actually does.

For RNs who want to stay at the bedside, the next best lever is finishing a BSN if you started with an associate degree. Hospital pay ladders and magnet-status systems increasingly tie promotion and top-tier pay to a bachelor's degree, and RN-to-BSN programs are built for working nurses who don't want to stop a paycheck to go back to school. After that, a setting or specialty switch, moving from a lower-paying unit into critical care, the OR, or a larger regional hospital, tends to move pay faster than staying put and waiting for annual raises. Travel nursing contracts are the wildcard: pay varies enormously by contract, location, and season, and assignments can pay well above Wyoming's staff rates for a limited stretch, but the trade-off is no benefits continuity and no guarantee the next contract matches the last one.

Wyoming employs 5,330 registered nurses, the smallest RN workforce of any state in the country. Nationally, 3,379,720 RNs are employed, so Wyoming accounts for a sliver of the national total. For working nurses, a small labor pool cuts both ways: fewer total job openings at any given time, but also less competition for the openings that do exist, and hospitals in a thin labor market often have to compete harder to keep the RNs they already have.

For LPNs weighing the jump to RN, the Wyoming numbers make the case clearly. The median LPN salary in Wyoming is $63,460, and the median RN salary is $20,300 higher. That gap, plus a national RN job growth projection of 6 percent through 2032, means the RN license pays for itself in Wyoming even without moving states or chasing a specialty.

The bottom line for anyone using this page to make a real decision: Wyoming's rn salary is solid but not exceptional, the biggest raise available to you is the nurse practitioner track, the biggest single credential upgrade is a BSN if you don't already have one, and the state's tiny RN workforce means your leverage as an employee is better than the median number alone suggests. Start with the best RN programs in Wyoming if you're building toward any of these next.