A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the 2025 Nurse Practitioner Count
Discover the challenges of developing the nurse practitioner count and what takeaways we can glean from this powerful statistic.
The American Association of Nurse Practitioners® (AANP) provides research reports and resources about nurse practitioners (NPs) — including the AANP Practice Report and the AANP Compensation Report — to keep members and the public up to date on NPs’ evolving role in health care. Another research project AANP undertakes is a national count of NPs with active licenses in the United States.
Released in time for the 2025 National NP Week celebration, the latest count shows that there are more than 461,000 NPs across the U.S. AANP’s vice president of research, Kate Bradley, along with researcher David Wittkower, speak about the methodology for constructing this count and what their work means for the NP role.
Q: How big of an increase is the new NP count compared to 2023 — both as a whole number and as a percentage — compared to previous years?
Kate Bradley: The number is about 30,000 more NPs than our last count, which is a 7% increase. The last count used 2023 data, and the new count uses 2025 data. But this is not quite a full two-year difference, due to the timing of data acquisition — it was later in 2023 and earlier in 2025.
Q: You discuss NP counts from two different organizations in your new research snapshot — AANP and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Could you talk about how both organizations make their estimates, and why the two counts don’t match up?
Bradley: They do get compared sometimes, but they're not measuring exactly the same thing. AANP is counting all licensed NPs based on licensure data. We include NPs working in patient care and doing other things like teaching, administration or research. Our number does not include retired NPs or any others with inactive licenses, so it's the total number of active licenses, no matter the role. We get licensure data from the boards of nursing in all 50 States and Washington, D.C., and we deduplicate licensed NPs within and across states.
The BLS is estimating something different. They are estimating the number of employed NPs delivering patient care, so that is a narrower group. They make their estimate using employer surveys and employers’ estimates of their employees, and they use a rolling average of surveys from the last three years. They exclude any non-employed NPs, like those who are contractors or practice owners, and they also exclude NPs not working in patient care. All this helps to explain why our number is bigger than their estimate in any given year.
Q: Let’s dig a little deeper into AANP count methodology. When it comes to making these sorts of counts, there is a major analytic challenge. Could you tell us about that challenge, and what you did to overcome it?
David Wittkower: We collect board of nursing data from every state board. Our biggest challenge is that NPs can be licensed in multiple states. If you added up every license that we got, you'd have well over 650,000 licenses. We avoided overcounting NPs with licenses in multiple states by deduplicating them based on state address from the boards of nursing. For example, a person who is licensed in Texas but reports an address in Miami, FL, would be excluded from the Texas count. However, people with an address in Texas would be kept.
Q: Even after working to overcome these challenges, you were left with two other methodological challenges. Could you tell us about those, and why you developed an Application Programming Interface (API) to assist you?
Wittkower: Right — with one difficulty comes another. Unfortunately, not every board of nursing provides the state information that a person resides in, and a few don’t specify whether someone's an NP or not. We'll get a list of APRNs, but we don't know among that list who's an NP. Not having data on either one of these makes deduplicating by state and removing non-NPs pretty difficult, so we developed two methods to address these issues using APIs.
First, we used a data set maintained by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) with all their providers’ National Provider Identification (NPI) numbers. This data set is called the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES). We created an API that searched the NPPES to determine NP status or state residency. However, not every NP is in this data, and if we did not find an exact match where someone's first name, last name and license number all lined up with the data we had, we didn't feel comfortable deciding on a person's state or NP status. So, we used a second API where we scanned Google results to identify NP or state status. This API went through Google results and scraped instances of a person being mentioned as an NP or instances of them living in that state.
Q: AANP and the BLS are not the only organizations who provide NP counts. Could you tell us about some of the other organizations who do NP counts, and their processes?
Wittkower: We already mentioned the NPPES, which provides a count of NPs based on their registry of the NPIs, and this is another source for making a count. However, not all NPs have an NPI and there are inactive NPs on there. There’s also a count based on the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses (NSSRN). The NSSRN is a nationally representative sample of nurses and NPs from the Health Resources and Services Administration. In 2022 they actually estimated about 350,000 NPs, and this is closer to AANP’s count than the BLS estimate.
Q: Finally, aside from the numbers, what does the NP Count tell us about the growth of the NP role? Why do we even conduct this count?
Bradley: The count tells us the role is growing, for sure, and it also helps us understand where NPs are growing more quickly than other places and in what states they're growing more slowly. That's really important information for workforce planning, for understanding access to care and for understanding the effects of different state policy environments that might affect the evolving workforce.
Explore More Research Opportunities for NPs
Interested in even more research-related information for NPs? View AANP’s discussion papers on the quality of NP practice and NP cost effectiveness, which pull together dozens of published studies. AANP also has several research opportunities available for NPs who conduct research and others who want to learn about NP perspectives and experiences.