Nurse workforce shortages are not new, yet concerns about a shortfall of nurses intensified across health care settings during the COVID-19 pandemic. To understand how a health care crisis such as COVID-19 can impact nurse turnover at national and regional levels, documentation of a baseline national turnover metric is needed for comparing future registered nurse (RN) workforce changes.

This article aims to provide a baseline understanding of national RN turnover using a cross-sectional analysis of the most recent data from the 2018 National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses (NSSRN).