30 nurse exit interview questions

A departing nurse will tell you things a stay interview never surfaces: the shift that broke them, the manager they stopped trusting, the raise they never got.

The questions below are written for that exact moment, covering reasons for leaving, workload, leadership, and whether they would ever come back.

This guide covers nurse-specific exit questions across six areas: reasons for leaving, schedule and workload, leadership and support, professional development, what would have kept them, and whether they would return or recommend the unit.

It also covers how to run these questions as an interview, a survey, or both, and how to spot a recurring theme across dozens of exits without exposing any single nurse's answers.

The questions below work as an interview guide, a survey, or both. Each one targets a single idea, so answers stay easy to compare across nurses, units, and quarters.

Start here, since the answer shapes how you read everything else.

Personal issues, relocation, retirement, career advancement, and scheduling conflicts topped the list of reasons staff RNs voluntarily resigned nationally in 2025, according to the 2026 NSI National Health Care Retention and RN Staffing Report.

Retirement has climbed steadily in that same report's ranking, so expect it to show up more often as your tenured nurses age out.

Ask these questions to pin down the real reason a nurse is leaving:

Workload and staffing ratios also rank among the top ten reasons nurses voluntarily resign nationally, per the same NSI survey. These questions carry extra weight on units already running short-staffed, where one departure can cascade into the next.

These questions isolate whether the schedule, the patient load, or both drove the decision:

A nurse's relationship with their direct manager shows up again and again in exit data as a reason people stay or go. A strong manager can offset a difficult schedule for a while; a weak one rarely survives even a good one.

Use these questions to separate a leadership problem from a systemic one:

Career stagnation is one of the most common, and most fixable, reasons a nurse starts job hunting. It is also one of the easiest to miss, since a nurse rarely names it as the single reason on the way out.

These questions find out whether growth, or the lack of it, played a role:

This is the one direct question every exit conversation should include, since it turns a complaint into a fixable action. Ask it even when the other categories already point to an obvious answer, since the specifics matter more than the category.

Ask directly, then follow up with specifics:

How a departing nurse talks about your organization afterward affects both your rehire pool and your employer brand. A nurse who leaves on good terms is also a nurse you may be able to hire back once a schedule or a life circumstance changes.

Close with these forward-looking questions:

Each category above maps to a specific retention decision. Use the table below to decide which categories to prioritize when time with a departing nurse is short.

If you can only keep two categories on a short, five-minute version of this survey, keep reasons for leaving and what would have kept them. Together they name the problem and the fix in a nurse's own words, which gives leadership something concrete to act on instead of a satisfaction score alone.

An exit interview and an exit interview survey ask largely the same questions, but they serve different purposes.

Most organizations run both.

Send the survey within 48 hours of the resignation, while the nurse is still engaged and before a new role pulls their attention elsewhere. Reserve the live conversation for departures where leadership wants more context, such as a high performer leaving or a pattern forming on one unit.

Either format only works if nurses believe their answers are confidential. State plainly that individual responses will not be shared with their manager, collect unit and tenure fields separately from open-text answers where possible, and route the interview through HR or a neutral third party rather than the departing nurse's own supervisor.

Whichever format you use, write down the answers the same way every time. A conversation that gets summarized in a paragraph of notes one month and a rating scale the next makes it nearly impossible to combine that record with your survey data later, so standardize the same question set and the same answer options across both formats from the start.

A single exit interview is one data point. A pattern across ten exits on the same unit is a signal, and finding that signal without exposing any one nurse is the real skill in this process.

Tell nurses up front, in the survey invitation and at the start of the conversation, exactly how their answers will and will not be used: aggregated into unit-level themes, never attributed to them by name, and never shared word for word with their manager. Confirm this approach with HR and legal before you launch, since the exact threshold and reporting language should match your organization's existing confidentiality policy.

Before you report results by unit, set a minimum reporting threshold, commonly five or more respondents, so no individual answer can be reverse-engineered from a small group's results. A department with two or three exits in a quarter gets rolled into a broader unit or held until more data accumulates, not reported on its own.

To find themes across many exits: tag every open-ended response by topic as it comes in, filter and compare tagged themes by unit, shift, and tenure, and track the same categories over at least two quarters before concluding a pattern is real rather than noise. SurveyMonkey's guide to tagging responses covers how to set up that workflow.

Turnover is not evenly distributed by specialty, so segment by unit before you draw conclusions. Behavioral health, emergency, and telemetry nurses posted the highest turnover nationally in 2025, while pediatric and surgical services nurses posted the lowest, according to the 2026 NSI National Health Care Retention and RN Staffing Report. A theme that looks organization-wide may actually be concentrated in one or two units.

Treat exit data as one input, not a complete explanation. It reflects only the view of people who already decided to leave, so pair it with engagement survey data from nurses who stayed before you act on a single theme.

Reading a list of questions is the easy part. Turning them into a consistent, confidential survey that every exiting nurse completes is what actually produces usable data.

SurveyMonkey's exit interview survey templates give you a pre-built starting point you can customize with the nursing-specific questions above. For the best practices behind the full process, from scheduling the conversation to reviewing results, see SurveyMonkey's guide to running an exit interview.

The "would you return or recommend" questions above are worth revisiting on their own each year, separate from any single exit, since they double as an early read on your rehire pipeline and your reputation among the nurses who already know what it is like to work for you.

Add the questions above to a survey, set a minimum reporting threshold, and start tracking themes from your very next resignation.