General Practice Registered Nurse: how many are there, and how many are in private practice?

National totals

Reading the sole-proprietor share

For this specialty, 2,323 of 5,637 active records, or 41.2%, are marked as sole proprietors in NPPES. That flag is a self-reported NPPES field and an imperfect proxy for private practice because it does not by itself establish ownership, employment arrangement, or independence from a larger organization. Use the share to describe how records are classified, not as a precise count of nurses working in private practice.

By state

New NPI registrations by year

Counts reflect the year each NPI was first issued, among records still active today. The final year is partial: this data covers through 2026-01-11.

Data notes

• The sole-proprietor field is self-reported by the provider in NPPES and is an imperfect proxy for private practice.
• A sole-proprietor count shown as <11 is suppressed: the true value is below 11, which could include zero.
• These are active NPI records with 163WG0000X as the primary taxonomy, not necessarily a complete headcount of people currently practicing in this field.
• NPPES taxonomy and sole-proprietor information may be incomplete, outdated, or inconsistently applied; sole-proprietor status is not the same as private-practice status.
• NPI enumeration year indicates when an NPI was issued, not when clinical practice began or how long the provider has worked in this specialty.
• Providers are counted once, by their primary taxonomy code only.

Source: CMS National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES) Data Dissemination file, FOIA-disclosable public data under CMS-6060-N. Aggregated by Hero EMR on 2026-08-03; deactivated NPIs excluded; specialty assigned from the primary taxonomy code (NUCC 25.1). Counts below 11 are suppressed. Individual providers are never published. All provider data pages.

Common questions