Nurse Safety Laws: How Every State Protects Nurses From Violence (Or Doesn’t)

Introducing Nurse Safety Laws, a new Nurse.org series on the laws that protect nurses from workplace violence in all 50 states and Washington, DC.

Updated September 30, 2026: An expanded review of retaliation protections and employer prevention requirements changed several states’ classifications and the related counts. Details in the note at the bottom of this article.

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.

Early in my emergency nursing career, I cared for a critically ill patient who desperately wanted to leave the hospital. She had delivered a baby only hours earlier, left the hospital against medical advice, and later arrived in our emergency department in flash pulmonary edema. She was extremely agitated and repeatedly insisted she wanted to leave. I knew how dangerous that decision could be, and while I was trying to convince her to stay, she punched me in the face.

My hospital did what I wish every hospital would do. My coworkers took over my assignment. I was given time to step away and collect myself. Security documented my injury, and when I decided I wanted to report the assault, they supported me.

What happened next stayed with me.

When law enforcement arrived, I felt like I was being talked out of making a report. I insisted. I later learned that the report I thought I had made was never actually filed.

And I remember thinking: What if I had been wearing a badge instead of scrubs?

If someone punched a law enforcement officer in the face while they were doing their job, would we shrug it off as an unfortunate occupational hazard? Would we discourage the officer from documenting it? Of course not. Yet violence against nurses has been normalized for so long that being hit, kicked, spit on, threatened, or assaulted can still be treated as something we signed up for.

That experience was one of the first times I started asking a bigger question: What does the law actually say when someone assaults a nurse? As I would eventually learn, the answer depends in large part on where that nurse happens to work.

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More than 1 in 4 nurses were physically assaulted at work in the past year. That number comes from our 2026 nursing survey, and if you are a nurse, it probably does not surprise you. What might surprise you is this: what the law does about it depends almost entirely on the state where you work.

There is no federal law today that specifically protects nurses from workplace violence. A bill that would change that, the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act, has passed the US House twice without becoming law. The federal OSHA rule for healthcare workplace violence sits in the agency’s long-term plans, which means no action is expected any time soon. Until that changes, the healthcare-specific protections you have are the ones your state legislature wrote.

This article maps what is actually on the books in all 50 states and Washington, DC. Two companion pieces go deeper: The felony list covers the criminal side, and the service guide walks you through what applies after an incident.

Assault is a crime in every state, and nurses everywhere are covered by the same general assault laws as everyone else. What we measured is whether a state has gone further and enacted protections specific to healthcare workers. When we say a state has “none,” we mean our review did not identify a healthcare-specific law, not that nurses there have no legal protection at all.

State nurse-protection laws come in layers. A criminal penalty layer that punishes assaults on healthcare workers more harshly. A prevention layer that requires employers to have violence prevention programs. A retaliation layer that protects nurses who report violence from losing their jobs over it. Sorting all 51 jurisdictions by which layers our review found, four groups emerge:

• Full protection states (21). In these states, our review found all three layers: a criminal penalty specific to healthcare workers, an employer prevention requirement, and retaliation protection for nurses who report. Texas, Illinois, Kentucky, and Vermont are among them. A ° mark means one layer is narrower or was enacted but not yet in effect at our review date, and the table says which.
• Penalty and prevention states (6). These states punish assaults on healthcare workers and require employer prevention programs, but we did not find a healthcare-specific law protecting nurses from retaliation for reporting. North Carolina and Washington are examples.
• Penalty-only states (22). The largest group. These states enhanced the criminal consequences for assaulting a nurse but do not require employers to do anything to prevent violence.
• Gap states (2). In Wyoming and South Carolina, our review did not identify any healthcare-specific penalty or prevention law. South Carolina’s legislature has considered such measures repeatedly, and none has passed. General assault law applies in both states, as it does everywhere.

I was fortunate that when I was assaulted, my hospital supported me. My coworkers stepped in, security documented what happened, and I was given the time I needed to recover before returning to my assignment. But I also know that is not every nurse’s experience.

Criminal penalties matter, but they only tell us what can happen to an offender after a nurse has already been harmed. They don’t tell the next nurse whether violence is happening repeatedly inside that facility, whether nurses feel safe reporting it, how management responds when they do, or whether anything changes afterward.

That lack of transparency is part of what led me to create Safe Staff. I wanted healthcare workers themselves to have a way to document unsafe conditions and workplace violence and, just as importantly, to see what other nurses were experiencing. If a nurse is considering leaving one hospital for another, shouldn’t safety culture be information they can consider alongside pay, benefits, commute, and staffing?

I believe serious workplace violence should also be tracked in a way that allows patterns to be identified beyond the walls of an individual hospital. Nurses and patients do not need identifying details about the people involved in an incident. But there is a meaningful difference between protecting someone’s privacy and keeping the existence of a serious safety event invisible.

Punishing someone after an assault may deliver accountability for one incident. Prevention requires us to learn from the incidents that came before it. If those events are never consistently captured, aggregated, and examined, we lose the opportunity to recognize patterns before another healthcare worker gets hurt.

How Many States Have Nurse Assault and Safety Laws?

Across all 51 jurisdictions:

• Our review found 43 states with a criminal law that treats assaulting a healthcare worker more seriously than ordinary assault. 6 more have a partial version, limited to certain conduct, settings, or consequences. In 2, our review found no healthcare-specific criminal provision.
• 22 states require employer violence prevention programs today, and 6 more have narrower requirements or ones still phasing in. These laws vary a lot, from full programs with committees, training, and risk assessments to reporting-only duties.
• We found 26 states with healthcare-specific laws that protect workers from retaliation for reporting workplace violence, safety concerns, or violations of law, plus 7 with partial protection. Only 18 of them specifically address reporting workplace violence. In much of the country, the law that punishes your attacker says nothing about protecting your job if you speak up.
• We identified 10 states that require facilities to post warning signs telling patients and visitors that assaulting a healthcare worker is a crime. Two more allow it without requiring it.

Why our numbers may look different from ones you have seen. Some widely shared maps say around 40 states “make it a felony” to assault a nurse. We believe those maps count every state where a felony charge is possible under some circumstances. We count differently. In 14 states, our review found the felony applies to the base offense, full stop. In 22 more, we found it applies under certain conditions, such as injury or a repeat offense. Add those together and you get 36 states where a felony is possible, which is in the neighborhood of the numbers you have seen. We separate them because if you are the nurse, the difference between “always a felony” and “a felony if” is not a technicality.

Whether a law protects you often comes down to a few words deep in the statute, words that decide which nurses count.

Oregon is the clearest example, and it is worth understanding because it is not a weak-law state. Its employer prevention requirements are among the stronger ones our review found, with more on the way. But its criminal assault enhancement covers “emergency medical services providers,” which the statute defines as people formally trained in “prehospital and emergency care,” language built around ambulance crews, medics, and first responders in the field. In a 2017 case, State v. Bales, an Oregon appeals court ruled that an emergency room nurse does not fit that definition. The ruling turned on the statute’s definition, which centers on care before the hospital.

Oregon is not alone in this. In several states we reviewed, the enhanced penalty applies only in the emergency department, so the same assault in the ICU is treated as ordinary assault. In other states, it applies only in hospitals, leaving home health and clinic nurses outside it. 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. North Dakota makes simple assault on hospital workers a felony. As we read the statute, the healthcare provision appears at the simple assault level but not in the state’s more serious assault offense. That may not be what lawmakers intended, but it is how the law reads today.

The lesson for every nurse reading this: the question is not just “does my state have a law.” It is “does my state’s law cover someone in my role, in my setting, for what happened.” Our state-by-state table below helps answer that, and the service guide walks through it step by step.

As nurses, we’re trained to pay attention to the details because a few words can completely change what an order means and how we act on it. The same is true of legislation. A law may sound like it protects “healthcare workers,” but definitions buried deeper in the statute can determine whether that actually includes an emergency nurse, a home health nurse, a clinic nurse, or even a nurse working on a different floor of the same hospital. For nurses, those aren’t technicalities. They’re the difference between assuming a law covers you and knowing whether it actually applies to your role and setting.

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New Nurse Safety Laws in 2025 and 2026

Since 2024, Arkansas, Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Vermont have all enacted new protections, several taking effect only weeks before our review closed. New York has passed an employer mandate that is still phasing in through 2027, and Maine’s existing hospital safety law is being updated effective January 2027. Oregon’s workplace safety agency expects to adopt a dedicated healthcare violence rule this fall, effective January 2027.

The biggest one to watch is Massachusetts. A bill combining an employer prevention mandate with new criminal penalties passed the Massachusetts House 158 to 0 and was in a conference committee as of our review date. If it becomes law, it would add an employer prevention mandate to Massachusetts’ existing penalty law. We will revisit this series when it resolves.

Violence against nurses has been in the news constantly while lawmakers debate. In one two-week stretch, four nurses were attacked at Minnesota hospitals, weeks before Minnesota’s newest protection took effect. Nurses have been telling us they do not feel safe at work for years. The laws in this table are what legislatures have done about it so far.

The table below summarizes what our review found in each state. The criminal penalty column uses three main labels: “Felony-always” means the base offense is a felony, “Felony-conditional” means it becomes one under conditions such as injury or a repeat offense, and “Enhanced-not-felony” means a tougher penalty that stops short of a felony. Our separate felony list explains those conditions state by state, and our service guide covers what these protections mean after an incident.

Source: Nurse.org, Nurse Safety Laws. States listed alphabetically. ° marks a protection our review found limited by role, setting, conduct, or consequence. A partial prevention or retaliation protection that applies only outside hospitals, such as in nursing homes, is shown in its column but does not count toward a state’s protection group. “None identified°” means our review found no healthcare-specific law as of August 31, 2026; general assault law applies in every state. “Pending legislation” means a bill active at our review date that would add or change these protections.

Knowing what protections exist in your state is a start. Using them matters just as much. Nurses should know their rights, document incidents of workplace violence, report them, and understand what protections apply to them before they ever need to use them.

But after looking at how dramatically these laws vary from state to state, I don’t think knowing our individual state laws is enough. A nurse should not have fundamentally different protections from workplace violence simply because they crossed a state line. We need nurses speaking to their legislators, professional organizations, employers, and policymakers about where these gaps still exist, and asking why.

I am currently supporting federal legislation aimed at strengthening workplace violence protections for healthcare workers, and I created a Change.org petition so nurses and supporters can add their voices to that effort. Change.org invited me to start it, the writing is mine, and I have no financial stake in it. I encourage nurses to sign it, share it, and use it as a starting point for a larger conversation about what meaningful protection should look like.

Is the legislation currently being considered everything I would ultimately like to see? No. I believe we can go further, particularly when it comes to transparency, standardized reporting, and making workplace violence data available in a way that actually helps prevent future incidents. But progress does not have to be perfect before it is worth supporting.

Ultimately, I would like to see a federal baseline for healthcare workplace violence prevention: a minimum standard of protection that does not disappear when a nurse crosses a state border. States could always choose to go further, but where you live should not determine whether your employer is required to take reasonable steps to protect you.

We have spent too many years treating violence as an unfortunate part of nursing. It isn’t part of the job. And the more nurses understand the laws that protect us, and the places where those laws fall short, the harder it becomes for anyone to tell us that it is.

More in this series:

Related Nurse.org coverage:

🤔 Does your state’s law cover nurses in your role and setting? Tell us what protections you’ve seen work, or not, where you practice in the comments below.

We reviewed statutes, session laws, and administrative rules across all 50 states and Washington, DC, relying on official state sources. Our review closed on August 31, 2026. In September 2026, we re-verified every state’s criminal penalty classification and reviewed each state’s retaliation protections and employer prevention requirements in more detail, including whether each protection covers hospitals. 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 state table reflects the updated findings.

Two notes on how to read our findings. First, when we report that a state has no healthcare-specific law, we mean our review did not identify one as of August 31, 2026. We searched thoroughly, but no review can rule out everything, and laws outside our categories, local ordinances, and general criminal law all still exist. Second, an observation from the data: every state that requires employers to prevent violence also has some criminal penalty on the books. The reverse is not true: 22 states have penalties but no prevention requirement.

Nurse.org Analysis