Nurse Strikes Have Nearly Quadrupled Since 2017. Here’s Why It Keeps Growing

If it feels like nurses are walking out more often than they used to, you are not imagining it. The numbers prove it, and the pace is picking up.

We tracked 102 confirmed registered nurse walkouts from 2017 through 2026. In the three years before the pandemic, the country saw about four nurse strikes a year. In 2025, there were 18. And by the middle of 2026, there had already been 11.

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Two honest notes on that climb. Some of the recent increase comes from the same hospitals striking more than once, often several short walkouts during a single contract fight, which lifts the yearly count. And strikes from the late 2010s are simply harder to document than todays, so the earliest years may be undercounted. Even allowing for both, the direction is unmistakable, and independent trackers see the same thing.

Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker found that health care strikes rose 58 percent in 2025 over the year before, with the number of workers involved more than doubling. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that education and health services accounted for 64 percent of all workers idled by major strikes in 2025, more than any other sector.

The jump follows the staffing crisis nurses have lived with since 2020. When we looked at the reasons behind every walkout, staffing levels were at the heart of 96 of the 102 strikes. Pay and patient safety come up too, but unsafe assignments and being stretched too thin are what push nurses to the picket line.

What Nurses Are Fighting For When They Strike

You can hear it in how nurses describe these fights. When more than 30,000 Kaiser Permanente nurses and other health care workers began an open-ended strike in January 2026, staffing and patient care were front and center. When 15,000 Minnesota nurses staged what their union called a historic three-day walkout in 2022, they framed it as putting patients before profits.

The movement is not spread evenly. The National Nurses United and California Nurses Association family led about half of the confirmed walkouts we tracked. The American Federation of Teachers, which also represents many nurses, led the next biggest share.

Unions Leading the Nurse Strike Walkouts

There is also a shift in tactics. More than 4 in 10 of the strikes we tracked, at least 41 of 102, lasted a single day. A 24-hour walkout costs nurses less in lost pay and is easier to pull off than an open-ended strike, while still drawing attention and putting pressure on management. Recent short walkouts like the one at Sharp HealthCare in San Diego show the pattern in action.

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One thing has stayed remarkably steady through the surge: the size of a typical strike. The median nurse strike has involved somewhere around 700 to 900 nurses in every period we measured, before, during, and after the pandemic. What changed is not how large the average walkout is, but how often nurses are walking out at all. The wave is a story of frequency, of more units in more places deciding to strike, rather than a handful of ever-larger actions.

The strikes are concentrated in a handful of states. California leads by a wide margin, followed by Illinois, then New York, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania.

States With the Most Nurse Strikes

The wave shows no sign of slowing. The week of this report alone saw three separate actions scheduled, headlined by what the Massachusetts Nurses Association calls the largest nurse and health care worker strike in state history: roughly 4,000 nurses at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, plus about 450 clinicians at MGB Home Care.

To follow active and planned actions as they unfold, see our 2026 nurse strikes list. And for more on what is driving nurses to act, review Nurse.org’s reporting on why nurses support strikes.

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