A report has revealed there are at least 1,481 registered nurse vacancies in the NHS in Wales.

The numbers are revealed in Royal College of Nursing (RCN) 2025 Nursing in Numbers report, and the RCN said that “despite this serious gap in the nursing workforce, some health boards are freezing vacancies and even graduating student nurses are finding it difficult to secure full time substantive posts.”

The vacancies increase NHS Wales’s reliance on temporary agency staff, which cost £88.7m in 2024-25 and is enough to pay the salaries of 2,815 full-time newly registered nurses.

The report sets out 13 steps to fix Wales’s nursing crisis, starting with protecting registered nurse role and improving the data needed to plan the workforce properly.