A doctorate in nursing is the highest degree you can earn in the nursing profession, and it comes in two distinct forms: one focused on clinical practice and leadership, and another focused on research. The practice version is called a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP), while the research version is a PhD in Nursing. Which one a nurse pursues depends entirely on whether they want to lead in clinical settings or generate new scientific knowledge.
Understanding the difference matters because these two degrees prepare nurses for very different careers, even though both carry the “doctorate” title.
Two Types of Nursing Doctorates
The DNP is a practice doctorate. It prepares nurses for leadership and administration across healthcare settings, from hospitals to policy organizations. DNP students learn to take existing research and apply it to real-world patient care. They develop skills in quality improvement, organizational leadership, and evidence-based decision-making. Their final requirement is a scholarly project, typically focused on improving a specific aspect of healthcare delivery.
The PhD in Nursing is a research doctorate. It prepares nurses to become scientists who generate new knowledge through original research. PhD students study statistics, research methods, philosophy of science, and measurement. Their coursework trains them to design studies, lead research teams, and publish findings that shape the profession. They complete a traditional dissertation defending original research.
A simple way to think about it: PhD nurses create the evidence, and DNP nurses put it into practice.
What DNP Graduates Actually Do
DNP graduates work as nurse practitioners, healthcare administrators, and executive leaders. They’re trained to look at an entire healthcare system and find ways to improve it. That means assessing how organizational policies affect patient populations, creating sustainable quality improvement initiatives, and navigating the political and economic realities of healthcare delivery.
The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) voted in 2004 to endorse moving the entry-level preparation for advanced practice nursing from a master’s degree to the DNP. While master’s-prepared nurse practitioners still practice across the country, the profession has been trending toward the DNP as the standard for advanced practice roles. A 2022 AACN report continued to recommend the DNP for entry into advanced practice nursing.
DNP capstone projects offer a window into what these graduates are trained to do. Published examples include implementing diabetic group visits at a rural clinic (which improved more than half of the clinical indicators tracked and lowered blood sugar levels in all participants), creating a resilience program that reduced secondary traumatic stress among emergency nurses by 19%, and shifting hypertension management to a group model that resulted in lower blood pressure, an average four-pound weight loss, and no increase in medication dosages.
What PhD Graduates Actually Do
PhD-prepared nurses most commonly become faculty members at nursing schools, where teaching is their primary responsibility. But the role extends well beyond the classroom. They conduct research, mentor the next generation of nurse scientists, develop nursing theory, and translate their findings into recommendations that influence clinical practice and health policy.
The goal of a nursing PhD program is not just to produce a dissertation. It’s to build a career-long capacity for conducting and critiquing research. Programs vary in structure, with differences in required coursework, exam formats, and whether additional teaching or research experience is built in. But every program shares the same core aim: preparing nurses to advance scientific knowledge that improves health at the individual, community, and population level.
How Long It Takes and What’s Required
For nurses who already hold a master’s degree, a post-master’s DNP program typically requires a minimum of 33 credit hours and 1,000 hours of advanced practice clinical experience, plus completion of a scholarly project. The timeline varies, but many programs are designed for working nurses and can be completed in two to three years of part-time study.
PhD programs generally take longer, often four to six years, because of the depth of research training and the time needed to design, conduct, and defend a dissertation. Some programs admit students with a bachelor’s degree directly, while others expect a master’s degree first.
Salary Differences
Earning a doctorate does come with a financial return, though the gap between a master’s and a doctorate is more modest than some expect. Nurses with a DNP earn a median salary of roughly $117,900 per year, compared to about $108,000 for those with a master’s degree. DNP-prepared family nurse practitioners earn a median of around $126,800.
For context, a bachelor’s-prepared nurse earns a median of about $98,000. So the jump from a BSN to a DNP represents roughly $20,000 in additional annual earnings, though individual salaries vary widely by specialty, region, and role.
Does a Doctorate Improve Patient Care?
This is a reasonable question, and the honest answer is that the evidence is still limited. A large study linking survey data from over 1,000 primary care nurse practitioners across six states to Medicare claims found no statistically significant differences in emergency department visits or hospitalizations between patients cared for by master’s-prepared and DNP-prepared nurse practitioners. After adjusting for other variables, patient outcomes were essentially the same regardless of the provider’s degree level.
That doesn’t mean the DNP is without value. The degree prepares nurses for systems-level work: redesigning care delivery, leading organizations, shaping policy. These contributions are harder to measure in a study tracking individual patient outcomes but can ripple across entire institutions. The capstone projects described above illustrate the kind of organizational change DNP graduates are trained to lead. The degree’s impact may be less about what happens in a single patient encounter and more about how care is structured for thousands of patients at once.