Washington, D.C. — The country is on track to run short by nearly a quarter million licensed practical nurses within the next dozen years — and the facilities most exposed to that shortfall are the nation’s nursing homes.
New federal workforce projections released in December 2025 by the Health Resources and Services Administration show the U.S. will have roughly 565,690 LPNs available by 2038, against an expected demand of 811,640. That’s a gap of nearly 246,000 nurses — a 30% shortage — according to data highlighted by the nation’s largest long-term care trade group.
The numbers land particularly hard on skilled nursing. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about four in 10 LPNs and licensed vocational nurses already work in skilled nursing facilities and residential care settings. That means the coming shortage won’t be distributed evenly across healthcare — nursing homes will absorb a disproportionate share of the pain.
A Workforce Crisis Already in Motion
The projection isn’t a distant warning. Nursing homes are already navigating one of the most difficult staffing environments in recent memory, with rising acuity levels, tightening margins, and new state and federal staffing mandates bearing down at once. States have been fining facilities for not staffing up fast enough, even as the pipeline of available workers grows thinner.
LPNs sit at the center of that tension. They’re cheaper to employ than registered nurses, often fill the bulk of bedside care hours, and handle much of the routine clinical work that keeps facilities running — medication administration, wound care, resident monitoring. Losing access to a meaningful portion of that workforce wouldn’t just be a staffing headache. It would fundamentally reshape what nursing homes can and can’t do.
The Pipeline Problem
HRSA’s projections were generated using data that includes pandemic-era patterns, so they carry some uncertainty. But the trend line is consistent with what the industry has been warning about for years: there aren’t enough people entering long-term care careers to meet the needs of an aging population.
The number of Americans 65 and older is expected to grow dramatically over the next two decades, and nursing homes are near the end of the care continuum — the place that absorbs patients when everything else has run out of options. A shrinking LPN workforce arriving alongside a growing elderly population is a collision the sector hasn’t found a way around yet.
Industry groups are pushing for policy changes meant to attract new workers and support the ones already in the field — including efforts to expand training pathways, raise wages, and reduce turnover. But workforce policy moves slowly, and 2038 is closer than it sounds.
The federal data is publicly available through HRSA’s National Center for Health Workforce Analysis dashboard, with projections running through 2038.
