Two figures answer this question and they point different ways. In NAV’s employer survey the estimated nurse shortage fell between 2025 and 2026, while the shortage of healthcare workers (helsefagarbeidere) rose to become the largest of any occupation in Norway. In the long-range projection, nurses and healthcare workers together still account for roughly 40,600 of the 42,400 full-time equivalents Norway is expected to be short of by 2040. Both can be true: a short-term easing does not undo a demographic trend.
Sources: NAV — Bedriftsundersøkelsen 2026, figurer og tabeller (table V2); NAV — Navs bedriftsundersøkelse 2025; Meld. St. 11 (2025–2026) Helsepersonellplan 2040; SSB — arbeidsmarkedet for helsepersonell fram mot 2040, Rapporter 2023/2.
The short-term number
NAV’s annual survey asks employers how many people they tried and failed to recruit with the competence required. In 2026 it ran from 26 January to 6 March, reached 13,119 businesses with a 77 per cent response rate, and reports results in increments of 50.
The nurse figures, as NAV’s own table gives them:
| 2025 | 2026 | 95% CI (2026) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sykepleiere | 2,100 | 1,850 | 1,550–2,400 |
| Spesialsykepleiere | — | 350 | 250–550 |
| Helsefagarbeidere | 3,000 | 3,650 | 2,850–4,450 |
Two things to take from that. The nurse shortage fell by 250, and over the same period the helsefagarbeider shortage rose by 650 — overtaking nursing to become the largest reported shortage of any occupation in Norway.
That reordering is the most useful single fact here. The health profession Norwegian employers most struggle to recruit is not nursing.
One caution on the numbers you will see elsewhere. NAV records sykepleiere and spesialsykepleiere as separate occupational categories, so summaries that aggregate them — or aggregate them differently — produce nurse totals that do not match NAV’s table. Figures in the 2,300 range circulate for exactly this reason. If you need the number, take it from the table.
Note also how wide the confidence interval is: 1,550 to 2,400. The fall from 2,100 to 1,850 is real as a point estimate, but it sits inside a band that overlaps last year’s. Treat the direction as the signal and the exact figure as an estimate.
The long-term number
The projection tells a different story, because it measures something else — not what employers failed to fill this year, but the gap between projected supply and projected demand.
The shortfall across the modelled personnel groups is put at roughly 9,900 full-time equivalents in 2025, rising to about 42,400 by 2040. Sykepleiere and helsefagarbeidere together make up around 40,600 of that.
Demand growth is expected to be strongest in municipal care services — nursing homes and home-based care rather than hospitals — which is where an ageing population puts pressure first.
One point of perspective on the trend itself: an earlier SSB projection, the one used in the 2023 Helsepersonellkommisjonen report, put the 2040 shortfall at nearly 70,000 full-time equivalents with over 54,000 of those in these two groups. The current figure is materially lower. Projections are revised as assumptions change, which is a reason to treat any single number as an estimate rather than a fact about the future.
What the projection assumes — and what it leaves out
The gap figures rest on the reference path’s assumptions: population development from SSB’s main alternative, and 2024 as the base year for how services are used and staffed, assumed to carry forward.
Change the division of tasks between professions, the competence mix, the organisation of services or the technology, and the numbers change. A projected nurse shortage partly reflects an assumption that nurses will keep doing the work nurses did in 2024.
The more important caveat is that 42,400 is not a projection for every person the services employ. Helsemod covers 14 personnel groups. The services also depend on other health-educated workers, employees without relevant health education, and administrative and service staff. The government projects demand for those other groups but not their future supply, so it cannot calculate whether they will have a shortage or surplus. The 42,400 figure is therefore incomplete as a picture of total staffing needs, but the available model does not prove that the true shortfall must be higher.
The context that gets omitted
Norway is not thinly staffed. It has one of the highest nurse coverage rates in Europe, and official comparisons place Norway at or near the top of the EU/EEA for the share of workers employed in health and care. Exact percentages vary by year and statistical definition, so the comparison is more reliable than quoting a single timeless figure.
The shortage is therefore a shortage against rising demand, not evidence of a system running on skeleton staffing. It also has an awkward arithmetic to it: the same demographic change that raises demand shrinks the working-age population available to meet it.
That shapes the policy response. Helsepersonellplan 2040 contains over a hundred measures, and one of the central ones is not recruitment but full-time work — getting a far higher share of health employees into full-time posts. Average agreed working time for nurses has run below full time, so there is real capacity in that.
For anyone weighing a move, that is worth understanding: part of Norway’s answer to the nurse shortage is to get more hours from the nurses it already has.
What this means if you trained abroad
Demand is genuine, durable and concentrated in municipal care. It does not shorten the route.
Sykepleier is a protected title. Working as one, or using the title, requires authorisation from Helsedirektoratet — a separate process with a published 23-month timeframe for ordinary applications based on education outside the EU/EEA, and one no employer can waive because a post is hard to fill. The starting route normally depends on where you trained rather than your nationality. One important exception is that at least three years of work with full professional rights in another EEA country can move an application based on outside-EEA education into assessment under the EEA rules. The EU/EEA route distinction is worth settling first; the hub article covers the process.
Nursing is also one of only three professions where the additional requirements from outside the EEA include a fagprøve, alongside the language test and the national-subjects course.
If pay rather than demand is the question, the nurse salary article covers what the collective agreements actually produce — including the point that which agreement covers you matters more than the job title.
On the ordinary outside-EU/EEA route, the language requirement is CEFR B2 in Norwegian, or equivalent documented skills in Norwegian, Swedish or Danish. A shortage or job offer does not waive it, although a different recognition route may change which rules apply to the case. What the CEFR levels describe is where to start.