New grad RN jobs and nurse residency programs in Delaware

A quarter of Delaware RNs earn less than $41.30 an hour ($85,900 a year) and half earn more than $47.85. First-year offers tend to sit near the lower figure, since hospital pay scales usually rise with experience.

That puts Delaware 17th of the 50 states and DC for median RN pay.

$6.55 an hour separates the 25th percentile from the median here, close to the typical gap across the states.

The largest RN job market touching Delaware is the Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington area, with 73,790 RNs; that count includes nurses in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland.

The Delaware Board of Nursing licenses RNs in Delaware.

Delaware is in the Nurse Licensure Compact. If Delaware 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 Delaware 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.

Yes, with conditions. After applying for your license by exam, you can apply for a graduate nurse (GN) temporary permit with a job offer from a Delaware employer and a start date before your exam. It expires 90 days after graduation, or at once if you fail, and you may not start orientation until the permit number is assigned.

Source: Delaware Division of Professional Regulation, temporary permits, read October 2026. The permit makes it legal; whether you can use it depends on the employer, since not every hospital starts graduate nurses before they are licensed. Ask the recruiter.

29 of the 50 states and DC allow something like this, each with its own limits. See every state's rule.

Delaware had one of the highest first-time NCLEX-RN pass rates in the country in 2025: 90.6% of the 489 U.S.-educated candidates who tested for a Delaware license passed, 3.9 points above the national rate of 86.7%.

Set against the 9 new-grad programs we track here, that is about 54 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.

Among its neighboring states, New Jersey pays RNs the most, a median of $106,500. Pennsylvania has the most new-grad programs on our list (62).