If you happen to have a copy of ADVANCE for Nurse Practitioners from the end of 1997 lying around, take a look at the salary survey questionnaire.

OK, we'll summarize it for you.

Ten years ago, the first National Salary Survey of Nurse Practitioners included only half the number of questions contained in our 2007 survey. Besides neglecting to ask for an e-mail address (how many NPs used e-mail in 1997?), it mentioned nothing about education, on-call pay or intent to own. Retail clinics and aesthetics practices weren't even on the radar.

The National Salary and Workplace Survey of Nurse Practitioners has changed along with the profession. Responses to the survey have nearly tripled, from a respectable 2,150 faxed or mailed responses in 1997 to 6,162 this year. Below you'll find our analysis of NP compensation, prescribing habits, office hierarchy, opportunity perceptions and job satisfaction.

The tables accompanying this article compare NP pay over time and across master's-level professions. They lay out salaries by practice setting, experience, education and gender. Geographic differences are reflected in tables that indicate pay rates by state and patient population setting. Average salaries for select cities are included to illustrate that compensation can vary even across cities within the same state. Table 11 (click here) reproduces the original questionnaire with the addition of the percentage of responses for each answer choice; monetary values indicate the average of all responses.

The Big Payoff
Survey data show that the average nurse practitioner salary rose 8.8% over the past 2 years, from $74,812 in 2005 to $81,397 in 2007. The increase is an impressive 55% over the decade (Table 1). For the sake of comparison, physician assistant salaries increased by 35% over the same period, according to numbers available online from the American Academy of Physician Assistants.

These big pay gains reflect big public relations gains, says Margaret Fitzgerald, NP, president of Fitzgerald Health Education Associates. "We have made great headway in establishing ourselves in the marketplace, from marginalized providers who practiced in relative anonymity to a professional group that is increasingly being recognized for our contributions to health care," Fitzgerald told ADVANCE.

Jill Olmstead, NP, president-elect of the California Association for Nurse Practitioners, seconds Fitzgerald. "An 8.8% wage increase reflects a combination of nurse practitioners' capabilities combined with their overall importance to the health care system," she said.

NPs who worked part time made headway, too. The average part-time hourly wage for NPs in 2007 was $40.32, a 9.5% increase from the 2005 rate (Table 2). And NP salaries continued to compare favorably with those of other professionals with master's degrees (Table 3).