Long Island nursing employment drops amid shortages
The Trump administration is pulling back minimum staffing requirements at nursing homes across the country, a move that has worried those who need such care and their families. New York already has such staffing standards. Long Island, however, struggles to maintain that required level of care amid a shortage of skilled staff for its growing aging population.
The staffing challenge is likely to get even more difficult. The Point’s analysis of workforce data shows that over the last five years, Long Island has employed fewer nurses in privately owned nursing homes. Assisted living facilities are not immune from the workforce woes. In the same period, the increase in hiring of skilled nurses in privately owned assisted living facilities was insufficient to meet the state’s staffing requirements.
Skilled nursing facilities include nursing homes, short-term inpatient rehab centers, and hospice care, where patients likely require 24/7 nursing assistance. Around 18,300 nurses were employed across Long Island in such facilities in the first quarter of 2020, the earliest available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics before the full onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic. 7,954 of them were employed in Nassau County at 53 established facilities, and 10,340 worked in 42 similar facilities in Suffolk. By 2025, only around 16,303 skilled nurses were employed on Long Island, with a 14.6% drop in Suffolk alone.
Assisted living facilities on Long Island, which don’t necessarily provide 24/7 nursing assistance but are increasingly in demand by Long Islanders, employed 4,714 nurses in the first quarter of 2025. This was only slightly higher than the 4,480 nurses who held positions in the region in 2020. The average employed nurses in the first three months of the year was 2,390 nurses working at Nassau’s 38 assisted living facilities, while an average of 2,320 were employed by the 45 facilities in Suffolk in 2025.
Given that the largest growth in any population age group on Long Island has been that of seniors 65 or older, the paltry 4.9% increase in hiring is indicative of a snowballing labor crisis. And the data is indicative of just how difficult it is for the region to meet state requirements. State legislation passed in 2021 mandates that every nursing home provides 3.5 hours of care per resident per day, including 2.2 hours of care by a certified nurse aide, or CNA, and 1.1 hours by a licensed nurse. It’s unclear how many Long Island nursing homes are failing to meet that mandate.
Long Island’s high cost of living makes it harder to attract people for a job that is both difficult to do and requires expertise, with data indicating that establishments in the region pay higher than the state average to retain staff. The average weekly wage in the first quarter of 2025 for skilled nurses on Long Island was $1,250, while that of the entire state was $1,134.
Experts say the United States' nursing shortage will likely be exacerbated by some of the Trump administration’s policies, namely limiting access to federally supported student loans for nursing and other health care-related programs, and its campaign to reduce immigration.
An estimated 12.8% of health care workers in New York State are noncitizens, many without legal status, according to a report published in JAMA. While those individuals are mostly off the books, or working in private settings, deportations and the fear that comes with them exacerbate the staffing crisis Long Island likely will continue to experience.
— Karthika Namboothiri karthika.namboothiri@newsday.com
This originally appeared in The Point newsletter. Subscribe to The Point here and browse past editions of The Point here.
