Virginia’s Nursing Shortage Persists, but Targeted Strategies Have Brought Growth

In 2021, then-gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin said he wanted to vastly revitalize Virginia’s nursing community to address a desperate shortage of nurses in the commonwealth. So, now that it’s 2025, is Virginia for Nursing Lovers?

According to analysis from the National Council of State Boards of Nursing on the number of registered nurses in each state, Virginia has 70,000 registered nurses in 2025, or 1,677 nurses for each 100,000 residents.

While that places the commonwealth with the ninth-lowest number of nurses per capita in the nation, in 2020, Virginia only had 47,000 registered nurses. So, targeted efforts from Youngkin and others in recent years have made some great headway.

First, regulatory reforms like having Virginia participate in the multistate Nurse Licensure Compact brought an immediate increase in nurses moving to the state. The compact allows for licensed nurses who move to Virginia to have their credentials from other states recognized here.

Second, a greater budgetary emphasis on attracting people to the nursing profession, especially at the state’s community colleges, has started to generate more “homegrown” nurses. For example, $4.5 million was allocated last year to the Earn to Learn program, and Virginia Commonwealth University committed to double its current enrollment of nursing students to 1,400 and to offer an accelerated bachelor’s program to Brightpoint Community College’s nursing students.

The future for attracting nurses to health care has improved dramatically from the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Virginia’s nursing population registered a 32% shortfall—or roughly 22,000 unfilled nursing positions.

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That being said, whoever the next governor is must keep the “pedal to the metal,” because, according to data from the Virginia Healthcare Workforce Data Center, Virginia will need 87,130 registered nurses by 2030 to adequately handle the state’s population.

Neither Democrat nominee for governor Abigail Spanberger nor Republican nominee Winsome Earle-Sears has made specific campaign statements regarding efforts they would undertake to increase the nursing population as Youngkin did in 2021. But it’s still young in the campaign season.

However, Sears frequently says that she wants to build on the “successes of the past four years” at campaign events. Spanberger has said that she wants to legislate lower prescription drug costs, but she has not specifically addressed the nursing shortage.

This matters because Virginia’s population is getting older, and a patient spends 86% of her medical visit with a nurse versus just 13% with a doctor. So, there is work to be done, or—at the very least—not undone from the past four years.