Nurse Practitioners: The Fastest-Growing Career in Healthcare

• NP employment is projected to grow 40% from 2024 to 2034, the fastest of any healthcare occupation.
• That growth adds about 128,400 jobs, moving the workforce from roughly 320,400 to 448,800.
• NPs are also the best-paid job on the fastest-growing list, with a 2024 median wage of $129,210.

If you want a career with room to grow, look at the nurse practitioner. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects NP employment to climb 40% from 2024 to 2034, faster than any other healthcare occupation and third-fastest in the entire economy, behind only wind turbine technicians and solar installers.

That works out to roughly 128,400 new NP jobs over the decade, lifting the workforce from about 320,400 to 448,800. Pay tracks the demand: nurse practitioners earned a median annual wage of $129,210 in 2024, the highest of any job on the fastest-growing list.

NPs are not the only health career on the rise. Of the 20 fastest-growing occupations, six sit in healthcare or the health sciences, including medical and health services managers (23%), physician assistants (20%), and epidemiologists (16%).

Why Demand Stays High

A few forces keep pushing demand. NPs are practicing with more autonomy, which lets them fill gaps left by the nursing and physician shortage, especially in provider shortage areas. That independence means NPs now diagnose illnesses, prescribe medications, and manage treatment plans that once routed through a physician.

The numbers back this up. A study in the British Medical Journal tracked about 276 million visits and found NPs and physician assistants delivered nearly 26% of them in 2019, up from 14% in 2013. Over the same span, primary care physician visits fell from roughly 42% to 33%. NPs are taking on more of the frontline workload, particularly in primary care.

Meeting that demand starts with the pipeline. Recruiting and educating registered nurses is the only way to produce more NPs, and the trend is moving the right direction: the 2022 National Nursing Workforce Survey found 21% of nurses held a master's degree or higher, up from 19% in 2017.