We Counted All 1,073 Nurse Practitioner Programs. 81% Are Online.

Nurse practitioner programs have gone mostly online, and the number is more one-sided than most applicants assume: 81%. The NP Club’s database tracks 1,073 distinct NP program tracks across 76 schools, and 4 out of 5 of them run online or hybrid. If you’ve been picturing a campus with a cadaver lab and a parking permit, update the picture — that’s now the minority path into this profession.

That shift matters because the job on the other side of these programs is growing faster than almost anything else in the labor market. Here’s what the numbers actually say, without the recruiter spin.

How Many Nurse Practitioner Programs Are There in 2026?

There are 1,073 NP program tracks spread across 76 schools, according to The NP Club’s database. That count includes every specialty track a school offers as a separate entry point — FNP, PMHNP, AGACNP, PNP, and the rest — not just a headline “we have an NP program” tally that hides how many actual on-ramps exist.

This is the part applicants skip past: a single university can show up in your search once but hold ten separate tracks inside that one listing. Counting tracks instead of schools is the only way to see the real shape of the market, and it’s why a simple Google count of “nursing schools” undersells how many actual decision points you’re choosing between. When you’re comparing programs, you’re not comparing 76 options. You’re comparing 1,073.

What Percentage of Nurse Practitioner Programs Are Online?

81% of the 1,073 tracks in The NP Club’s database are offered online or in a hybrid format, per The NP Club’s data. That means fully in-person, no-exceptions NP programs are now the exception, not the default — roughly 1 in 5 tracks.

This didn’t happen overnight, and it isn’t a pandemic leftover that snapped back. Schools built out clinical placement infrastructure, added dedicated placement coordinators, and kept the online format after 2020 because it worked for both sides: schools filled more seats without expanding campus square footage, and working nurses could stay employed while finishing a degree that used to require relocating. The 81% figure is the current snapshot in The NP Club’s database, and the direction has been one-way for years.

The catch is that “online” doesn’t mean “no in-person requirement.” Every track in this data still requires supervised clinical hours in a physical setting — the online part covers coursework, not the entire degree. A program marketed as “100% online” and a program that says “hybrid” often land in the same place once you look at clinical placement requirements. Read the fine print before you assume “online” means “from your couch.”

What Do Nurse Practitioner Programs Pay After Graduation?

The median annual wage for nurse practitioners is $129,210, according to the BLS’s May 2024 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. That’s a single all-NP figure — the BLS does not break this number out by specialty, so any FNP-specific, PMHNP-specific, or AGACNP-specific salary number you see elsewhere is an aggregator’s estimate, not a BLS statistic. Treat specialty salary claims accordingly, and ask what’s actually behind them.

One number that gets flattened into this conversation and shouldn’t be: Certified Nurse-Midwife. CNM is tracked by the BLS as its own occupation, separate from NP, with its own median wage of roughly $128,790 and its own projected growth of about 11% from 2024 to 2034. That growth rate belongs to CNM alone — the 40% figure below is NP-specific and does not apply to CNM roles, even though the two credentials get lumped together in casual conversation.

Is a Nurse Practitioner Program Still Worth It in 2026?

Yes, and the labor data is the reason: NP employment is projected to grow about 40% from 2024 to 2034, the fastest projected growth of any occupation the BLS tracks, according to the Occupational Outlook Handbook. That’s the NP-specific figure — not the 35% number that shows up in some headlines, which describes the broader combined APRN grouping (NPs, CNMs, and CRNAs together) and understates what’s happening to NP roles specifically.

A 40% growth projection over a decade isn’t a rounding error. It’s the kind of number that shows up once in a generation for a single occupation, and it’s the backdrop against which the 81% online shift makes sense: schools aren’t going online because standards slipped, they’re going online because demand for seats outpaced the supply of campus classrooms.

The Numbers, Side by Side

Two numbers in this table look similar and mean completely different things: NP wage and CNM wage sit within about $400 of each other, but their growth trajectories are nowhere close. Don’t let the wage similarity trick you into assuming the roles track the same demand curve.

What This Means If You’re Choosing a Program Right Now

The practical takeaway isn’t “go online” or “stay in person” — it’s that you now have 1,073 tracks to actually compare instead of a handful of local options, and the format question (online vs. hybrid vs. in-person) is a smaller filter than most applicants treat it as. The bigger filters are the ones that don’t show up in a marketing email: clinical placement support, specialty track accreditation, and whether the program’s growth projections match the specialty you’re actually training for.

Conflating NP and CNM growth rates, or treating an aggregator’s specialty salary guess as a BLS number, are the two fastest ways to walk into a program with the wrong expectations. The data above is the version without either mistake baked in.

If you want to see where your specific specialty and format preference land inside those 1,073 tracks, The NP Club’s school database lets you filter by all of it — specialty, format, and school — in one place.

Browse the full NP program database →