Nurse Assaulted at Work? What the Law Says in Your State

This article is part of Nurse Safety Laws, a Nurse.org series on the laws that protect nurses from workplace violence in all 50 states and Washington, DC. This piece covers what the law says after a workplace assault.

Disclosure: The author is the founder and owner of Safe Staff, a healthcare workforce safety and documentation platform that offers paid subscriptions. Nurse.org received no compensation from Safe Staff for this series, and Safe Staff had no role in its research or findings.

The first thing I would say to a nurse after an assault is, “Are you okay?” Before the paperwork, before the policies, before we talk about what to do next, I want to make sure that nurse is safe and supported. What happened to you is not okay, and being a nurse does not make it okay.

Once you’re safe, and when you’re ready, writing down what happened while it is still fresh can help, even if you think you never want to report it. Keep it somewhere private, and leave out patient-identifying or confidential information. You may feel differently tomorrow, next week, or a month from now, and it helps to have your own record of what happened. From there, the reporting options open to you include your hospital’s incident process and, if appropriate, law enforcement, within your employer’s policies and any guidance from your union or counsel. Don’t minimize what happened just because healthcare has taught us to.

If a patient or visitor hurt you at work, you are not overreacting by wanting to know what the law says. In our 2026 nursing survey, more than 1 in 4 nurses said they had been physically assaulted in the past year, and among those who reported it, the most common outcome was that nothing happened. This article explains what the law in your state says about what happened to you, and what can happen next.

Nothing here is legal advice. What we can do is show you what the laws actually provide, so whatever you decide, you start with a clear picture of your state’s protections.

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In most states, yes, and often a more serious one than you might assume. Our review found 43 states with criminal laws that treat assaulting a healthcare worker more seriously than ordinary assault, and in 14 of them the offense is a felony outright. Our companion piece lists every state by penalty and what conditions apply.

Whether the enhanced charge fits your situation usually depends on a few things the statutes spell out: whether your role is covered, whether it happened while you were performing your duties, and in some states, where in the facility it happened. Our state table shows those details for your state.

Some states treat violence differently when it comes from a patient in crisis, and this part deserves care because it involves the people we take care of. New Jersey’s enhanced charge, for example, has a narrow exception for certain patients the facility has classified as having a mental illness or developmental disability, in specific state psychiatric, developmental, and veterans’ facilities. Connecticut provides an affirmative defense when the person has a qualifying disability and the conduct was a clear and direct manifestation of it. These provisions exist because legislatures tried to punish violence without criminalizing illness. They do not make what happened to you acceptable, and they do not prevent reporting. They can affect what charges follow, and knowing that ahead of time spares you a painful surprise.

You have two separate reporting paths, and they do different things:

• Reporting inside your workplace. 22 states require employer violence prevention programs today, and 6 more have narrower requirements or ones still phasing in. Where these laws apply, they typically require your employer to have an incident reporting system, and several spell out what happens after you file: investigation, recordkeeping, and in some states follow-up with you specifically. Kentucky’s law, for example, requires a reporting system with victim follow-up. Where the statutes apply, these steps are legal requirements, not courtesies.
• Reporting to law enforcement. Assault is a crime in every state, and reporting to police is a path that exists independent of any workplace policy. In some states the facility itself has reporting duties: Connecticut, for example, requires hospitals to report certain assaults against staff to law enforcement within 24 hours. As Connecticut’s legislative research office summarizes it: “The report must be made within 24 hours and include the names and addresses of those involved.” In the healthcare-specific workplace-violence laws we reviewed, we did not identify a provision requiring a nurse personally to pursue charges or allowing an employer to block a police report.

In states that require prevention programs, the statutes describe what must be recorded when an incident is reported, typically the date, circumstances, and response. That is a fact about how these systems work, not advice about what you should do.

This is why I tell nurses to document everything as soon as they can after an incident. Write down what happened, when it happened, who was there, who you notified, what injuries you had, and what happened afterward. Keep copies of what you are permitted to keep, such as incident or report numbers, and leave out patient information. Even if you aren’t ready to make a police report or take another step, create a record for yourself while the details are still fresh.

This is also one of the reasons I built Safe Staff. Too many of these experiences disappear when they aren’t formally documented, or they exist only inside systems that healthcare workers themselves may never see again. Safe Staff gives healthcare workers a place to maintain their own history of workplace safety events while also helping us understand the larger patterns happening across healthcare.

Your state does not have to require documentation for documentation to matter. You may never need that record again. But if you do, a record made while the details were fresh may matter later.

Whether the law protects you from retaliation depends on your state, and that protection is rarer than the penalty laws are.

Our review found 26 states with healthcare-specific laws that protect workers from retaliation for reporting workplace violence, unsafe conditions, or violations of law, plus 7 more with partial protection. Only 18 of these laws specifically address reporting workplace violence. In states with full protection, an employer who disciplines, demotes, or fires you for reporting may be violating a law written to cover that situation. The partial protections are narrower, often limited to settings such as nursing homes, and our table notes how.

Source: Nurse.org, Nurse Safety Laws. ° marks protection limited by facility type, role, or timing (for example, nursing homes only, or not yet in effect at our review date). Maine° and Utah° are the two partial protections that specifically address workplace violence. In all other states, our review did not identify a healthcare-specific retaliation law; general whistleblower protections may still apply.

Elsewhere, you are not without options: general whistleblower protections, union contracts, and other employment laws may apply. What we can tell you is which group your state is in, and our state table shows it.

The numbers behind this section come from nurses themselves. In our 2026 survey, most nurses who experienced violence did not report it, and among those who did, the most common outcome was that nothing happened. Fear that reporting changes nothing, or costs something, comes up again and again in what nurses tell us. Whether your state’s law explicitly has your back belongs in that calculation, and you deserve to know it before the decision is in front of you.

If your employer is covered by your state’s prevention law, its obligations did not start when you were hurt. Depending on the state, the law may require a written violence prevention plan, regular risk assessments, training, a safety committee with direct-care nurses on it, and a functioning reporting system.

This is what these laws sound like in the statutes themselves:

Source: Nurse.org, Nurse Safety Laws. Statutory text quoted verbatim from official state sources.

Where these laws apply, the plan, the training, and the committee are not aspirations; they are what the statute requires. What varies by state is how much and what happens when an employer falls short. Some laws attach real enforcement, up to putting a facility’s license on the line. Others, as we found in our review, state no enforcement mechanism at all.

Knowing this is not about blame. “What was supposed to be in place” is a question unions, practice councils, and chains of command can help address. Our state table shows whether your state requires a program and what kind.

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• Your union or professional organization. If you are represented, your contract may provide more than your state’s law does.
• The Emergency Nurses Association and the American Nurses Association both maintain workplace violence resources and advocacy programs. ENA resources | ANA resources
• Your employee assistance program. Not everything about recovering from an assault is legal or procedural. What happened to you is a workplace injury in every sense, including the ways that never show up on an incident form.
• Law enforcement and, where you choose, an attorney. Decisions about charges, claims, and legal rights are best made with officials and legal counsel who know your situation.

If you’re reading this because this happened to you tonight, first: I’m sorry this happened to you and I hope that you are okay. Now, write it down. Even if you’re exhausted. Even if you’re angry. Even if you’re not sure whether you want to report it yet. Write down what happened while you remember it clearly, and keep that record somewhere you can access later.

Tomorrow, learn your rights. Find out what your state requires, what your employer was required to have in place, and what reporting options are available to you. You do not have to decide every next step tonight. But don’t let what happened disappear simply because you’re not ready to make that decision yet.

And keep your own record. Your hospital may have an incident report. Security may have documentation. Law enforcement may have a report. But where is your record?

You may never need that documentation again. I hope you don’t. But if you do, it may matter later.

Tonight, take care of yourself. Tomorrow, know your rights. And whenever you’re ready, make sure what happened to you doesn’t disappear.

More in this series:

Related Nurse.org coverage:

🤔 If you’ve reported a workplace assault, what happened next? Share what you wish you had known in the comments below.

About This Data

The state counts and requirements here come from our review of statutes and rules across all 50 states and Washington, DC, relying on official state sources, closed August 31, 2026. Details, including how to read our findings, are in the About This Data section of our state-by-state guide. Laws change, and we revisit this series as they do.

Update and correction (September 30, 2026): This article, originally published September 28, 2026, has been updated. After publication, we reviewed each state’s retaliation protections and employer prevention requirements in more detail. We clarified how we classify protections that apply only to certain types of facilities, such as nursing homes, or that were enacted but not yet in effect, and we identified additional state provisions our original review had not captured. Several states’ classifications and the related counts in this article changed as a result. The retaliation table above and the linked 51-state table reflect the updated findings.

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