Assaulting a Nurse Is a Felony in These States

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 the criminal penalties, state by state.

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.

Somewhere along the way, healthcare normalized behavior that would be considered completely unacceptable in almost any other workplace. Being a nurse means caring for people on some of the worst days of their lives. It does not mean agreeing to be hit, kicked, spit on, threatened, or assaulted. Calling that “part of the job” is exactly how we allowed workplace violence to become part of nursing culture.

In 14 states, assaulting a nurse is a felony. Not a felony if there is an injury, not a felony the second time. A felony.

That sentence became real for two Kentucky behavioral health nurses this March, when the patient who attacked them was charged with assault of a healthcare provider, a Class D felony under Kentucky law. Whether it becomes real for you depends on your state. Here is where the law stands, state by state, as our review found it.

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You may have seen bigger numbers than 14. Some widely shared maps say around 40 states make assaulting a nurse a felony. We believe those maps count every state where a felony charge is possible under some circumstances. We separate the two questions a nurse actually has: is it a felony automatically, or does it become one only if certain things are true? Our review found 14 states in the first group and 22 in the second, which together land in the neighborhood of the numbers you have seen. The difference matters most on the worst day of your career, so we keep it visible.

Source: Nurse.org, Nurse Safety Laws. ° explained in the sections below.

In these 14 states, our review found that assaulting a covered healthcare worker is a felony on its own, with no extra conditions required:

Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin 

Three are worth knowing more about. Kentucky’s law makes intentionally causing or attempting to cause physical injury to a covered healthcare provider a Class D felony, which is why the case above could be charged as one. Washington makes it a Class C felony to assault a nurse performing their duties, and the statute adds no injury requirement. West Virginia’s felony reaches even physical contact of an insulting or provoking nature.

Every state’s law defines who is covered and where, and those definitions differ. Before you rely on any single row here, our state table shows the coverage details and explains why the definitions matter as much as the headline.

In these 22 states, we found a felony charge available when specific conditions are met, most often injury, a repeat offense, or a prior conviction:

Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont

Two examples show how the conditions work. In Ohio, a first offense carries an elevated fine, and the charge becomes a felony for subsequent offenses. In Louisiana, battery of emergency room personnel starts as a misdemeanor with a mandatory minimum jail term, and felony grades attach for repeat offenses or when the attack causes serious injury.

If you work in one of these states, the practical question is which conditions unlock the felony where you are. Our state table carries that detail.

Seven states enhance the consequences for assaulting a healthcare worker without making the base offense a felony:

Alaska, Georgia, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia

New Jersey is here because of terminology, not leniency. Its criminal code does not classify offenses as felonies or misdemeanors; serious crimes are called indictable crimes, and they carry consequences comparable to felonies elsewhere. Assaulting a healthcare worker there has been charged as aggravated assault since a 2010 law took effect. That is the charge a patient faced after throwing a glass bottle of apple juice at a nurse’s head last December, as our News coverage reported. A 2023 law added a separate offense for threats and required warning signs. Different words, real consequences.

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Six jurisdictions have healthcare-specific criminal provisions that our review found limited in an important way, by conduct, setting, or consequence:

District of Columbia, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon

Michigan’s 2024 enhancement raises the maximum fines for assaulting health professionals without changing the offense grade or the maximum jail term. Montana’s healthcare-specific offense addresses attacks involving bodily fluids, and its healthcare-provider coverage applies only in specific custodial and transport settings, a much narrower scope than most. Oregon’s story is the best known: its enhancement covers emergency medical services providers, defined around care in the field, and an Oregon court ruled an ER nurse is not covered. Our state-by-state guide tells that story properly.

Assault is a crime in every state, and nurses everywhere are covered by general assault laws. In two states, South Carolina and Wyoming, our review did not identify a criminal law specific to assaulting healthcare workers as of August 31, 2026. South Carolina’s legislature has considered such measures repeatedly, and none has passed.

If you work in a state without enhanced protections, document it anyway. Report it anyway. Remember it anyway. The absence of a stronger law does not make what happened to you less serious, and it does not mean your experience doesn’t matter. Reports, documented incidents, and nurses willing to speak up can help build the record that shows lawmakers and health systems where protections fall short. Laws can change, but they don’t change because we stay quiet. It’s going to take all of us advocating for one another, especially for nurses working in states where the law hasn’t caught up yet.

Know your rights, too. Know what protections exist in your state, who they cover, and what options you have when something happens. This is exactly why I built Safe Staff: to give healthcare workers a place to document these events for themselves, while also creating greater transparency around what is happening across our healthcare system. One incident can be dismissed as an isolated event. But when we can see the patterns (how often violence is happening, where it is happening, and whether healthcare workers feel supported when they report it), it becomes much harder to ignore. This is happening far too often, and we need the data to prove it.

Several states on these lists are new arrivals or newly strengthened. North Dakota’s hospital worker provision took effect in 2025. Kentucky extended its felony to correctional settings in 2026. New Hampshire added new offenses for emergency personnel effective this summer. And Massachusetts may move soon: a bill pairing new penalties with an employer prevention mandate passed its House unanimously and was in a conference committee as of our review date. We revisit this series as state laws change.

Know where your state stands, but don’t stop at the color of a map or the word “felony.” Read far enough to know whether the law actually covers your role, your setting, and what happened to you. And regardless of what your state law says today, documenting workplace violence matters. These laws are changing, and nurses have an opportunity to help shape what comes next. We cannot advocate for protections we don’t know we’re missing, and we cannot show the scope of this problem if we don’t create the record.

More in this series:

Related Nurse.org coverage:

🤔 Should assaulting a nurse be a felony in every state? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

About This Data

These lists come from our review of statutes and session laws across all 50 states and Washington, DC, relying on official state sources. Our review closed on August 31, 2026. When we report that a state has no nurse-specific penalty, we mean our review did not identify one as of that date; general assault law applies everywhere. Laws change, and we revisit this series as they do.

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