Nurse Practitioner Salary in Colorado 2026,
$132,930 Median | BLS Data by City

Colorado nurse practitioners earn a median $132,930 a year, $63.91 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $118,410 and $150,990 and a full range of $87,770 to $170,310. That is level with the $132,300 national median.

Yes. The Colorado State Board of Nursing certifies advanced practice registered nurses to practise without a supervision or collaboration agreement, and prescriptive authority becomes independent after a mentored period of practice the board specifies. Once that is complete, a Colorado APRN may practise and prescribe autonomously and may own a practice.

Boulder at $138,820, then Denver-Aurora-Centennial at $134,040, Greeley at $130,950, Pueblo at $130,650 and Fort Collins-Loveland at $130,330. The spread is under nine thousand dollars, which is tight — in Colorado the specialty and the setting matter far more than the Front Range city.

A location quotient of 0.72 means Colorado employs roughly seventy per cent as many nurse practitioners per worker as the national average, which is low for a full practice authority state with well-documented rural access gaps. The likeliest explanation is supply rather than demand: Colorado's in-state graduate pipeline is modest relative to its geography, and the mountain and eastern plains communities that need clinicians most are the hardest to recruit to.

A flat 4.4% state income tax that does not rise with income, so locum, telehealth and independent practice income is taxed at the same rate as salary. Denver, Aurora, Greenwood Village, Glendale and Sheridan add a small flat monthly occupational privilege tax on people working in the city — dollars a month, not a percentage.

More than it does in a compact one. Colorado has communities hours from the nearest physician, and an APRN who can practise and prescribe independently can be the entire primary care presence in one — running a clinic, contracting with payers, coordinating with distant specialists by telehealth. That is a genuinely different professional proposition from being an employed clinician in a Denver health system, and it is where the $150,990 seventy-fifth percentile and the $170,310 ninetieth become reachable.

The tenth percentile of $87,770 is unusually low for this profession and almost certainly reflects part-time and variable-hour practice rather than a full-time entry salary. The occupation code also covers primary care, psychiatric, acute care and specialty practice as one job, and most of the spread is that mix. And practice ownership income is imperfectly captured by a wage survey, so in a full practice authority state the top of the market is understated.

Specialty and scarcity, then independence. Psychiatric mental health practice commands the clearest premium given Colorado's behavioural health access problems, followed by acute and critical care. Geography works backwards from expectation: the eastern plains, San Luis valley and western slope pay above their cost of living because they cannot recruit. And beyond employment, full practice authority makes an owned practice, direct payer contracting and telehealth across the state's underserved areas all available — which is where the flat 4.4% tax treatment of incremental income becomes genuinely useful.