Nurses work in a wide range of settings, from hospital floors to private homes to schools and research labs. The profession spans far more environments than most people realize. Registered nurses held about 3.4 million jobs in the U.S. as of 2024, and while hospitals employ the majority, roughly four in ten nurses work somewhere else entirely.
Hospitals Still Employ Most Nurses
About 59% of registered nurses work in hospitals, making it by far the most common setting. But “hospital nurse” covers dozens of distinct environments, each with its own pace, patient population, and skill set. Emergency departments handle trauma and acute illness around the clock. Intensive care units care for critically ill patients who need constant monitoring. Surgical teams include nurses who assist before, during, and after operations. Labor and delivery units focus on childbirth and newborn care. Medical-surgical floors, often called med-surg, are the generalist wards where patients recover from a wide range of conditions and procedures.
Other specialized hospital units include neonatal intensive care (for premature or critically ill newborns), oncology (cancer treatment), cardiac care, orthopedics, and psychiatric units. Each of these areas typically requires additional training or certification beyond a standard nursing degree, and nurses often move between specialties over the course of a career.
Outpatient and Ambulatory Care
The second largest employment category is ambulatory healthcare services, accounting for 19% of nursing jobs. This broad label covers any setting where patients come in for care and go home the same day. Doctor’s offices, urgent care clinics, same-day surgery centers, dialysis clinics, and cancer treatment centers all fall under this umbrella.
Outpatient nursing tends to follow more predictable schedules than hospital work, with fewer overnight and weekend shifts. Nurses in these settings manage chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease, administer chemotherapy or infusion therapies, assist with minor procedures, and handle a high volume of patient education. Rehabilitation centers, both inpatient and outpatient, also employ nurses who help patients recover from strokes, joint replacements, or spinal injuries.
Nursing and Residential Care Facilities
About 6% of nurses work in nursing homes, assisted living communities, and other residential care facilities. These nurses care for elderly residents and people with disabilities who need ongoing support with daily activities and medical management. The work centers on long-term relationships with patients rather than the quick turnover of a hospital ward. Medication management, wound care, fall prevention, and coordinating with physicians are core daily tasks.
Home Health and Hospice
Home health nurses visit patients in their own residences, providing care that ranges from post-surgical wound management to chronic disease monitoring. This setting offers a level of autonomy that most facility-based jobs don’t. There’s no supervisor down the hall. You assess the patient, make clinical decisions, document your findings, and move on to the next visit. The tradeoff is significant travel time between patients, which can be physically tiring.
Hospice nursing is a specialized branch of home health focused on comfort care for people with terminal illnesses. Hospice teams most often provide care in the patient’s home, though some work in dedicated inpatient facilities. Registered nurses on hospice teams serve as case managers and patient advocates, monitoring symptoms, administering medication, and adjusting the care plan as a patient’s condition changes. The emotional demands are high, but nurses in this field often describe the work as deeply meaningful.
Government and Military Settings
Government agencies employ about 5% of nurses. This includes the Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital system, one of the largest healthcare employers in the country, along with public health departments, federal prisons, and military bases. Nurses in correctional facilities manage chronic conditions, handle emergencies, and conduct health screenings for incarcerated populations. Military nurses serve active-duty service members and their families, sometimes deploying to field hospitals overseas.
Public health nurses working for local or state health departments focus on population-level health: running vaccination clinics, tracking disease outbreaks, conducting community health screenings, and educating the public on prevention.
Schools and Universities
Educational settings employ about 3% of nurses. School nurses in K-12 settings manage everything from asthma and allergies to mental health crises and chronic conditions like epilepsy. They’re often the only healthcare professional in the building, making independent clinical judgment a daily requirement.
At the university level, nurses work in campus health centers seeing students for acute illnesses and preventive care. A separate path exists in nursing education itself, where experienced nurses teach the next generation in classroom and clinical settings. Nurses with doctoral training conduct research at academic medical centers and universities, studying topics from genetics to health disparities. The National Institute of Nursing Research funds training programs and research centers across the country to support this work. About half of nurses who earn a PhD go into clinical or service roles rather than academia, reflecting how many career paths a research-trained nurse can pursue.
Travel and Crisis Nursing
Travel nursing sends nurses to facilities with critical staffing shortages on temporary contracts, typically lasting 13 weeks. Placements can be at urban hospitals, rural clinics, or anywhere demand spikes. The standard requirement is working at least 50 miles from your permanent home. Some travel nurses take international assignments, working in global health settings, disaster response zones, or underserved communities outside the U.S. Per diem travel assignments offer even shorter commitments, sometimes filling shifts at nearby hospitals on short notice.
The appeal is flexibility, higher pay, and exposure to different healthcare systems. The challenge is constantly adapting to new teams, new electronic health records, and new protocols every few months.
Less Obvious Workplaces
Beyond these major categories, nurses work in places many people wouldn’t expect. Insurance companies hire nurses to review claims and authorize treatments. Pharmaceutical and medical device companies employ nurses in clinical research, sales education, and drug safety monitoring. Corporate wellness programs at large employers bring nurses on staff to manage employee health screenings and workplace injury prevention. Cruise ships, summer camps, and sporting events all need nurses on-site. Legal firms hire nurse consultants to review medical records in malpractice and personal injury cases.
Telehealth has also created a growing number of remote nursing positions, where nurses triage symptoms, provide follow-up care, and manage chronic conditions entirely by phone or video from a home office. These roles have expanded significantly since 2020 and show no signs of shrinking.