The 2024 National Nursing Workforce Survey, conducted every two years by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, found that the median age of U.S. registered nurses is now 50 — up from 46 just two years earlier. That’s not a gradual drift; it’s a sharp jump in a single survey cycle.
The age distribution has pulled apart at both ends. One in five RNs nationally is now 65 or older, while the share of RNs under 30 fell to 7.9% — a 10-year low in the NCSBN survey series. Nearly 40% of RNs say they intend to leave the workforce or retire within the next five years, and more than 138,000 nurses have already left since 2022, citing stress, burnout, and retirement as the leading reasons. This is the backdrop most healthcare employers nationwide are recruiting against right now: an experienced workforce aging toward the exit, and a thinner pipeline of younger nurses behind them than the profession has had in a decade.
Montana’s own workforce data, tracked by the state’s Department of Labor and Industry, shows almost the inverse pattern. The number of licensed RNs in Montana grew from 18,000 in 2020 to 23,000 in 2024 — more than a 25% increase in four years. Over the same period, the median age of Montana RNs fell from 48.5 in 2015 to 43.9 in 2024, moving steadily younger while the national median was climbing toward 50. Wages grew 20% between 2020 and 2022 alone, outpacing both the national nursing wage growth rate and wage growth across all Montana jobs.
That’s not a small anomaly buried in the data. It’s a state whose nursing workforce is simultaneously growing, getting younger, and getting better paid, at the exact moment the national conversation is dominated by shortage and retirement anxiety.
The explanation isn’t specific to nursing — it’s part of a broader migration pattern the state has been tracking closely. Montana’s population grew 5.2% between 2020 and 2024 due to migration alone, and the state currently ranks 8th nationally for its rate of net in-migration. The state’s real GDP grew 16.1% from 2021 to 2025, outpacing the national average, and professional services wages have climbed to among the highest of any industry in the state.
What’s notable is that this isn’t just a general working-age migration story — it’s specifically young people moving in. Data from the Montana Department of Labor and the U.S. Census Bureau shows young adults aged 18 to 24 are leading in-migration into the state, driven by economic growth and expanding job opportunities — with Great Falls named specifically as one of the areas driving that trend. Cascade County, where Great Falls sits, has a youth labor force participation rate of 71%, meaningfully above the statewide average of 67%.
That’s a direct, county-level tie between the broader “Montana is getting younger” pattern and the exact geography where the CVICU, PACU, and PCU roles actually are. This isn’t a statewide trend that happens to include Great Falls incidentally — Great Falls is one of the places actively driving it.
It’s worth being straightforward about a complication here. Montana’s broader population growth has been slowing since 2022, as the remote-work migration wave that boosted the state during and after the pandemic has cooled — some housing market data out of Gallatin County shows growth dropping from 1.5% in 2022 to just 0.52% in 2024, as employers increasingly pull workers back toward in-office and hybrid arrangements.
That pullback matters more for remote-work-driven migration than it does for nursing specifically, since nursing isn’t a profession that migrated to Montana because it could be done from a laptop — the job growth pulling young workers into places like Great Falls is in-person, healthcare, and other on-the-ground industries. Still, the honest position is that the data confirming this youth-and-nursing trend runs through 2024, not a guarantee that the pattern holds indefinitely. It’s a real, current, well-documented advantage — not a permanent one that can be assumed without checking again in a few years.
If you’re weighing a CVICU, PACU, or PCU role in Great Falls, this connects directly to something else worth knowing about the local nursing workforce: Malmstrom Air Force Base’s presence nearby means a portion of the nursing candidate pool is shaped by military spouse employment cycles, not just general in-migration. Those are two structurally different mechanisms — one driven by military PCS cycles, the other by young workers relocating for civilian job growth — but they’re pushing in the same direction at the same time, which is part of why Montana’s numbers look the way they do rather than resembling the national aging pattern.
Practically, that means a nurse joining a Montana unit right now is less likely to be joining a team clustered near a retirement wave than the national data would suggest, and more likely to be working alongside colleagues who arrived recently, for reasons that have little to do with desperation on either side. That’s a meaningfully different starting picture than “rural hospital, isolated, hard to staff” — and it’s one backed by the state’s own labor data, not just a recruiting pitch.
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