30 nurse satisfaction survey questions for healthcare HR teams

Nurses rarely quit over one bad shift. They leave when support, recognition, growth, and staffing stop adding up, shift after shift. A nurse satisfaction survey gives healthcare HR and workforce experience teams a direct, nurse-specific way to ask about those four drivers instead of guessing from exit interviews.

In 2026, nurse job satisfaction fell to 47%, down from 55% the year before, and 23% of nurses said they are at least somewhat likely to leave the profession within the next year, according to Nurse.org's 2026 State of Nursing Survey, as reported by Becker's Hospital Review.

This guide gives you a nurse-specific question bank, the strategic purpose behind each category, and guidance on sequencing the survey. It also answers common questions, so you can start listening to your nursing staff this week.

This guide covers satisfaction, not engagement. The two constructs are related but distinct, and the difference is explained in full elsewhere, so it is not repeated here.

A nurse satisfaction survey works best when it is organized by the specific factors that drive whether a nurse stays or starts job hunting. Use the categories below as a starting question bank, then pick the questions that match your unit's biggest open question.

Each question uses a labeled, balanced scale, consistent with best practice for writing clear, single-topic survey questions.

For the broader construct of job satisfaction across every role, not just nursing, see the SurveyMonkey guide to job satisfaction surveys for additional question ideas and context.

Ask these questions to find out whether frontline leaders are a retention asset or a retention risk. Pair each one with a labeled, balanced scale, such as the five-point satisfaction scale shown on question 1, rather than a bare number line:

Ask these questions to find out whether nurses feel seen for clinical work, not just attendance:

Ask these questions to find out whether nurses see a future here or somewhere else:

Ask these questions to find out whether patient load and safety are sustainable:

Close with a few broad questions and, when you need detail in a nurse's own words, one open comment box:

Keep open-ended questions like the two above to one or two per survey, since they take more effort for nurses to answer. AI survey analysis can group open comments into themes and flag sentiment automatically, so a short comment box still turns into specific action items instead of a pile of unread text.

Each category above maps to a decision your organization is already trying to make. The table below connects the question category to the business outcome it informs, so you can prioritize which sections to run first if you need to keep the survey short.

The stakes behind that table are real. National RN turnover reached 17.6% in 2025, and the average cost of replacing one bedside RN was $60,090, according to the NSI National Health Care Retention and RN Staffing Report covered by Becker's Hospital Review.

Once results come in, route them to the people who can act on them. Native SurveyMonkey integrations can push survey alerts into tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams, so a low score on a unit does not sit unread in a spreadsheet for a week.

Order and format affect data quality as much as wording does. Start with one or two overall satisfaction questions, then move into the specific construct sections: support, recognition, development, and working conditions. Place unit, shift, and tenure questions near the end, so nurses answer the content questions before they worry about being identified.

Favor short, separately worded questions over one large matrix for a list this size. A SurveyMonkey matrix-design study found that respondents dropped out less and rated the survey as easier when matrices were limited to 5 rows per page instead of 10 or 20, with 5 rows by 5 columns performing best overall. If you do group a few items into a matrix, keep it that small so nurses do not click through a long grid on autopilot.

Use skip logic so a float-pool nurse or a night-shift nurse only sees the follow-up questions relevant to their unit and schedule. The SurveyMonkey survey platform supports page and question skip logic, so a 30-question bank does not have to mean a 30-question survey for every respondent.

You do not have to build this from a blank page. Copy the categories above into a new survey, or start from an expert-written employee satisfaction survey template and swap in the nurse-specific questions that matter most to your units.

SurveyMonkey also offers a full library of HR templates if you want to pair satisfaction data with other points in the nurse lifecycle, such as onboarding or exit surveys. For general guidance on launching any survey, see the SurveyMonkey guide to conducting surveys, then get started free and launch your first nurse satisfaction survey this week.