Executives Made Retention Priority One. Nurses Never Got the Message.

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Incredible Health’s new State of Nursing report, a companion to its 2026 Executive Report, shows leaders and nurses chasing the same goal from opposite ends of a widening gap.

Ask a hospital executive to name the workforce priority that will define 2026 and the answer comes back fast: keep the nurses we have. Ask the nurses themselves what their employer is doing to keep them, and most cannot point to anything at all. The two groups want the same outcome, yet they describe workplaces that scarcely resemble each other.

That gap sits at the heart of Incredible Health’s seventh annual State of Nursing report, which the company recently released as a companion to its 2026 Executive Report. The nurse study pairs a national survey of 2,240 nurses and technicians with platform data drawn from a network of 1.5 million U.S. healthcare professionals. In the Executive Report, 67% of healthcare leaders named retention their single greatest priority. Set the two documents beside each other and an unwelcome pattern emerges, which is that the effort leaders believe they are making rarely reaches the people it is built for.

The retention nurses never see

The nurses’ own answers are sobering. Forty-two percent say their organization is not visibly investing in keeping them at all. Ninety percent report that retention support has not shifted in any meaningful way over the past year, and close to a quarter say it has actually deteriorated.

Some of that reflects genuine underinvestment, and some of it reflects a message that never travels from the executive suite to the floor. A program described in a benefits deck means little on a short-staffed unit when nobody connects it to the nurses working there. The evidence sits in the space between what nurses want and what they can actually see happening around them. Forty-six percent are hoping for a substantial raise, yet only 10% say they have seen one materialize. Fifteen percent want more hands on their shift, and only 8% report getting them. Good intentions may be real, but they are not registering where the work happens.

Why a bigger paycheck will not fix this

When nurses are unhappy, the instinct is to reach for salary, and the survey lends that instinct only partial support. Sixty-three percent of nurses feel they are underpaid, and among them, 54% say nothing short of a raise above 15% would make the figure feel fair. Increases at that scale are simply out of reach for most health systems trying to apply them across an entire workforce.

The deeper finding is that pay is not the hinge most nurses turn on. Only 20% rank compensation as the single most important factor when they consider a new job. For everyone else, salary shares the stage with adequate staffing, schedules built around a real life, room to grow, and leaders worth following. Those levers happen to be friendlier to a constrained budget, since most cost less and move faster than a broad pay increase, and each one already sits inside an employer’s control. A system that cannot outbid its competitors on salary can still win nurses by improving those conditions, provided it does the work and then makes sure the work is seen.

Nurses embraced AI while their employers stalled

The same divide between good intentions and lived reality surfaces in the report’s findings on artificial intelligence, only wider here. Forty-four percent of nurses have folded AI into their daily work, while just 8% report that leadership has ever spelled out how the technology is meant to fit their role. The tools took hold organically, carried in by the people using them rather than arriving through any plan from leadership.

Hiring tells the same story. Thirty-nine percent of nurses now lean on AI to hunt for a job, while the employers on the other side of the table put it to work in screening or hiring barely 4% of the time. Candidates have adapted to the tools in front of them, and the hiring process has largely stood still. Left without direction or training, that self-directed adoption delivers a fraction of what it could, and a technology capable of handing nurses their time back instead becomes one more thing they manage on their own.

What 2026 actually asks of leaders

The lesson common to the retention numbers and the AI numbers is one and the same. Leaders and nurses are not divided over what they want; they are divided over what the floor actually feels, and narrowing that divide is the real task ahead. It calls less for new money than for execution and visibility. Invest in the conditions nurses keep naming, pair any AI rollout with proper training and a plan people can understand, bring the staff who will use the tools into the decision, and make certain every bit of that effort is plain to the people it serves.

The encouraging part is that a gap like this is fixable, and fixable without a fortune. The organizations that treat 2026 as a problem of execution, investing in the conditions nurses keep naming and making the effort visible, will hold on to their best people. The ones that mistake a slide for a change felt on the ward will spend another year puzzled by numbers that never match the effort behind them.