Healthcare Worker Burnout Statistics: What the CDC Data Shows

Burnout among health workers moved from a quiet professional concern to a national alarm during the pandemic years, and the government’s own numbers now show why. In 2022, 46% of U.S. health workers reported feeling burned out often or very often — up sharply from 32% just four years earlier, in 2018 (CDC, 2023). Over that same span, harassment on the job more than doubled and the share of workers eyeing the exit climbed by double digits.

It helps to be precise about what burnout is. The World Health Organization classifies burn-out in its International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as “an occupational phenomenon” resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed — and it is explicitly “not classified as a medical condition” (WHO, 2019). It is defined by three dimensions: energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance or cynicism about one’s job, and reduced professional efficacy. In other words, burnout is a workplace problem with mental health consequences, not a diagnosis in itself.

This article walks through the federal and peer-reviewed data on health care worker burnout: the CDC’s 2018-to-2022 comparison, the mental health toll of workplace harassment, the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2022 warning, and the latest physician and nurse figures — including how many are considering leaving the field altogether.

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What the CDC Found: Burnout Jumped From 32% to 46%

The clearest national snapshot comes from the CDC’s Vital Signs report, published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report using the Quality of Worklife Survey (Nigam et al., MMWR, 2023). It compared health workers’ self-reported working conditions and mental health in 2018 and 2022.

The headline finding: the share of health workers who felt burned out often or very often rose from 32% to 46% in four years. The most severe category climbed too — those reporting burnout “very often” nearly doubled, from 11.6% to 19.0%. Health workers also reported more days of poor mental health, from an average of 3.3 to 4.5 in the prior 30 days.

These are government figures drawn from a repeated national survey, which makes the trend more reliable than a single-year snapshot. They align with the broader picture of rising mental illness burden across the workforce, but the increases among health workers outpaced what most other occupations reported over the same period.

How Working Conditions Changed, 2018 to 2022

Burnout did not rise in isolation. The CDC data shows several working-condition and mental-health indicators moving in the wrong direction at once.

Two shifts stand out. Reported harassment — which the CDC defines to include threats, bullying, verbal abuse, and other actions from patients or coworkers that create a hostile work environment — more than doubled, from 6% to 13% (CDC, 2023). And turnover intention rose from 33% to 44%, meaning nearly half of health workers were considering a job change by 2022. For a workforce already stretched thin, a rising intent to leave is both a symptom and a warning.

Harassment and Its Mental Health Toll

The harassment finding matters because of how tightly it tracked with poor mental health. Among health workers who reported being harassed at work, the CDC calculated sharply elevated adjusted odds of symptoms of common mental health conditions compared with those who were not harassed (Nigam et al., MMWR, 2023).

Health workers who were harassed had nearly six times the odds of burnout, five times the odds of anxiety symptoms, and more than three times the odds of depression symptoms. These are associations rather than proof of cause, but the size of the effect is striking — and it points to workplace culture and safety, not just workload, as central to the burnout problem. For a workforce routinely exposed to trauma, the strain can also contribute to conditions like PTSD.

The Surgeon General’s 2022 Warning

The scale of the problem was serious enough that the U.S. Surgeon General issued a formal advisory, Addressing Health Worker Burnout, in 2022. It concluded that even before COVID-19, burnout had reached “crisis levels,” with an estimated 35% to 54% of nurses and physicians and 45% to 60% of medical students and residents reporting burnout (US Surgeon General, 2022). The wide range reflects differences across specialties, settings, and measurement methods rather than a single agreed-upon figure.

The advisory also put a price on the churn. It estimated annual burnout-related turnover costs at roughly $9 billion for nurses and $2.6 billion for physicians (US Surgeon General, 2022). Those figures capture recruiting, onboarding, and lost productivity when experienced clinicians leave — a reminder that burnout is expensive as well as harmful. The connection between workplace conditions and retention is a recurring theme in our guide to mental health in the workplace.

Physician Burnout: A Record Spike, Then a Partial Retreat

For physicians specifically, the best long-running measure comes from a national study led by Tait Shanafelt and colleagues, published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings and reported by the American Medical Association. It has tracked physician burnout across more than a decade, so it captures both the pandemic surge and what came after.

In 2023, 45.2% of physicians reported at least one symptom of burnout — down from a record high of 62.8% in 2021, and closer to the 38.2% recorded in 2020 (Shanafelt et al., Mayo Clin Proc, 2025; AMA, 2025). The drop below 50% was the first time the rate had fallen under that mark since before the pandemic, which the AMA framed as encouraging but still far from a resolution. Roughly two in five physicians reporting a burnout symptom is not a return to normal so much as a step back from an emergency.

Nurse Burnout and Why Nurses Leave

Nurses make up the largest segment of the health workforce, and burnout is a leading reason they walk away. A study by Shah and colleagues in JAMA Network Open, using 2018 survey data, examined why nurses left or considered leaving their jobs. Among nurses who had actually left their position, 31.5% cited burnout as a reason; among those considering leaving, 43.4% pointed to burnout (Shah et al., JAMA Netw Open, 2021).

It is worth labeling the vintage clearly: these figures rest on 2018 data, gathered before the pandemic intensified the pressures on nursing. They establish that burnout was already a top driver of nurse turnover well before 2020 — which makes the subsequent CDC increases all the more concerning.

Intent to Leave the Field

Beyond leaving a single job, a substantial share of clinicians say they intend to leave practice entirely. A study by Sinsky and colleagues in Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Innovations, Quality & Outcomes, drawing on 2020 data, estimated that about 1 in 5 physicians and 2 in 5 nurses intended to leave their current practice within two years (Sinsky et al., 2021).

More recent survey data echoes the concern. The National Council of State Boards of Nursing — a survey and research organization for nursing regulators, not a government agency — reported in 2024 that 39.9% of registered nurses expressed an intent to leave or retire within five years (NCSBN, 2024). Read alongside the CDC’s rising turnover intention, these numbers describe a workforce where a large minority is actively contemplating the exit. That has direct consequences for patient access and for the colleagues who remain to cover the gaps. Burnout is not unique to medicine, of course — our overview of burnout statistics across the wider workforce puts the health care figures in context.

Frequently Asked Questions

What percentage of healthcare workers are burned out?

In 2022, 46% of U.S. health workers reported feeling burned out often or very often, up from 32% in 2018, according to the CDC’s Quality of Worklife Survey (CDC, 2023). Among physicians specifically, 45.2% reported at least one burnout symptom in 2023 (AMA, 2025).

Is burnout a mental illness?

No. The World Health Organization classifies burn-out as “an occupational phenomenon” resulting from chronic workplace stress and states it is “not classified as a medical condition” (WHO, 2019). It is associated with mental health symptoms such as anxiety and depression, but is not itself a diagnosis.

Has physician burnout gotten better or worse?

Physician burnout peaked at a record 62.8% in 2021, then fell to 45.2% by 2023 — the first time it dropped below 50% since before the pandemic (Shanafelt et al., 2025; AMA, 2025). It remains higher than many pre-pandemic years, so the improvement is partial rather than a full recovery.

How does workplace harassment affect healthcare workers’ mental health?

Health workers who reported being harassed at work had roughly 5.8 times the adjusted odds of burnout, 5.0 times the odds of anxiety symptoms, and 3.4 times the odds of depression symptoms compared with those who were not harassed (CDC, 2023). Reported harassment itself more than doubled between 2018 and 2022.

How much does healthcare worker burnout cost?

The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2022 advisory estimated annual burnout-related turnover costs at roughly $9 billion for nurses and $2.6 billion for physicians (US Surgeon General, 2022). These figures reflect recruiting, training, and lost productivity when clinicians leave.

How many nurses plan to leave the profession?

A survey by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, a research organization for nursing regulators, found that 39.9% of registered nurses intended to leave or retire within five years as of 2024 (NCSBN, 2024). Earlier peer-reviewed data estimated about 2 in 5 nurses intended to leave their practice within two years (Sinsky et al., 2021).

Sources

1. World Health Organization. Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon”: International Classification of Diseases. WHO; 2019. https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases

2. Nigam JAS, Barker RM, Cunningham TR, et al. Vital Signs: Health Worker-Perceived Working Conditions and Symptoms of Poor Mental Health — Quality of Worklife Survey, United States, 2018-2022. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2023;72(44):1197-1205. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7244e1.htm

3. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Vital Signs: Health Worker Mental Health. CDC; 2023. https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/health-worker-mental-health/index.html

4. Office of the U.S. Surgeon General. Addressing Health Worker Burnout: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on Building a Thriving Health Workforce. HHS; 2022. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/health-worker-wellbeing-advisory.pdf

5. Shanafelt TD, Dyrbye LN, West CP, et al. Changes in Burnout and Satisfaction With Work-Life Integration in Physicians, 2011-2023. Mayo Clin Proc. 2025. https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(24)00668-2/fulltext

6. American Medical Association. Physician burnout rate drops below 50% for first time in 4 years. AMA; 2025. https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/physician-health/national-physician-burnout-survey

7. Shah MK, Gandrakota N, Cimiotti JP, et al. Prevalence of and Factors Associated With Nurse Burnout in the US. JAMA Netw Open. 2021;4(2):e2036469. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7862989/

8. Sinsky CA, Brown RL, Stillman MJ, Linzer M. COVID-Related Stress and Work Intentions in a Sample of US Health Care Workers. Mayo Clin Proc Innov Qual Outcomes. 2021. https://www.mcpiqojournal.org/article/S2542-4548(21)00126-0/fulltext

9. National Council of State Boards of Nursing. NCSBN Research Highlights Small Steps Toward Nursing Workforce Recovery. NCSBN; 2024. https://www.ncsbn.org/news/ncsbn-research-highlights-small-steps-toward-nursing-workforce-recovery-burnout-and-staffing-challenges-persist