New grad RN jobs and nurse residency programs in Colorado

A quarter of Colorado RNs earn less than $40.67 an hour ($84,590 a year) and half earn more than $48.20. First-year offers tend to sit near the lower figure, since hospital pay scales usually rise with experience.

That puts Colorado 14th of the 50 states and DC for median RN pay.

Pay is spread out in Colorado: $7.53 an hour separates the 25th percentile from the median, a wider gap than in most states.

Denver-Aurora-Centennial employs 30,380 RNs, 56% of the state's total, so most RN jobs in Colorado are there.

When people search for new grad RN jobs in Colorado, the places they name most often are Denver and Colorado Springs.

The Colorado Board of Nursing licenses RNs in Colorado.

Colorado is in the Nurse Licensure Compact. If Colorado is your primary state of residence, the license you earn after the NCLEX can be multistate, valid in every compact state. Nurses who live in another compact state can work in Colorado on their home state's multistate license.

Every one of its neighboring states is in the compact too, so one license covers the whole region.

No. The board says a graduate may not work as a nurse until issued a Colorado license, so you wait for your NCLEX result.

Source: Colorado Board of Nursing, FAQs, read October 2026.

Of its neighboring states, New Mexico and Wyoming do let new graduates work on a permit before passing. See every state's rule.

1,943 of the 2,214 first-time, U.S.-educated candidates who took the NCLEX-RN for Colorado in 2025 passed: 87.8%, 1.1 points above the national rate of 86.7%.

Set against the 30 new-grad programs we track here, that is about 74 new test takers per program, fewer than the national figure of about 114.

The exam is the same everywhere; the rate tells you about the graduates who tested here, not about your own chances. See pass rates in every state.

Colorado pays RNs more than any of its neighboring states. Arizona has the most new-grad programs on our list (37).