Fact-checked against primary sources: Iran’s Ministry of Health (Deputy Ministry for Nursing Affairs), peer-reviewed systematic reviews and meta-analyses published in BMC Nursing and the International Nursing Review, and a qualitative workforce study from Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS). Last verified August 2026.

In June 2026, Iran’s own Deputy Minister of Health for Nursing Affairs, Abbas Abadi, went on state-affiliated media to disclose the government’s internal numbers: 1,800 nurses left the profession in the past year, another 800 resigned, 380 emigrated abroad, and 1,600 retired — while 2,400 newly graduated nurses had their mandatory service start dates postponed. That’s a government official publicly quantifying his own retention crisis, not an outside estimate.

The peer-reviewed research backs up why. A 2025 meta-analysis pooling 42 studies and nearly 13,000 Iranian nurses found turnover intention sitting at a consistently moderate-to-high level regardless of whether it was measured before or after Iran’s major 2016 health reform, or before or after COVID-19 — meaning this isn’t a pandemic-era spike that’s fading, it’s a structural baseline. Below are the 20 nurse retention statistics for Iran that matter most in 2026, sourced directly from the Ministry of Health and peer-reviewed nursing workforce research, not secondary aggregators.

Nurse Retention Statistics Iran at a Glance

  1. 1,800 — nurses who left the nursing profession entirely in the past year, per the Deputy Minister of Health for Nursing Affairs

  2. 800 — additional nurses who resigned from their positions in the same period

  3. 380 — nurses who emigrated from Iran in the past year seeking work abroad

  4. 1,600 — nurses who retired in the same period

  5. 2,400 — newly graduated nurses whose mandatory service start dates were postponed

  6. 12.3% — actual (not intention-based) nurse turnover rate at Tehran University of Medical Sciences hospitals, 2021–2024

  7. 36% — pooled prevalence of burnout among Iranian nurses, meta-analysis of 21 studies and 4,180 nurses

  8. 12,898 — nurses studied across 42 pooled studies in the most comprehensive Iranian turnover-intention meta-analysis to date

  9. 40 billion rials — estimated annual training-investment loss per nurse who emigrates, per Ministry of Health figures

  10. 12,000 — additional nurses the Ministry of Health authorized for recruitment in the past year, in direct response to the shortage

Nurse Retention Statistics Iran: What the Government Itself Discloses

  1. Iran’s Deputy Minister of Health for Nursing Affairs disclosed in June 2026 that 1,800 nurses left the profession, 800 resigned, 380 emigrated, and 1,600 retired within a single year — a rare instance of a government health official publicly quantifying nurse attrition across five distinct exit categories in one statement.

  2. The same disclosure revealed that 2,400 nursing graduates had their mandatory service obligations postponed, meaning even Iran’s forced-service pipeline — designed to guarantee new graduates fill vacant posts — is currently running behind schedule.

  3. The Ministry of Health explicitly identified nursing staff shortage as the sector’s most significant challenge, with the Deputy Minister directly linking inadequate staffing to burnout, resignations, and emigration in a single causal chain — a government-level acknowledgment that these are connected symptoms of one problem, not separate issues.

  4. Iran’s government calculates a direct financial cost to emigration: an estimated 40 billion rials in lost training and education investment per nurse who leaves the country — a figure the Ministry uses to frame emigration not just as a staffing problem but as a quantified loss of public capital.

  5. In response, the Ministry of Health authorized recruitment of 12,000 additional nurses in the past year — but Abadi himself acknowledged that recruitment alone will not resolve the crisis, since new hires require years to reach the experience level of the veteran nurses currently leaving.

Nurse Retention Statistics Iran: What Actual Turnover Data Shows

  1. A rare study measuring actual (not intention-based) turnover found 590 of 4,793 nurses — 12.3% — left Tehran University of Medical Sciences hospitals between 2021 and 2024. This is one of the only Iranian studies to document real departures rather than surveyed willingness to leave, and the researchers explicitly note that most other Iranian research only measures turnover intention, not confirmed departures.

  2. Voluntary resignations were the most common form of turnover in the TUMS study and increased steadily from 2022 onward, with a more abrupt pattern of “quitting” (as opposed to formal resignation) emerging specifically in 2023.

  3. Involuntary dismissals also rose over the same period, meaning the 12.3% figure reflects both nurses choosing to leave and nurses being let go — a mix the researchers found important to separate, since the drivers behind each type differ substantially.

  4. Qualitative interviews with 54 nurses who had actually left TUMS hospitals identified 19 distinct reasons for departure, grouped into four categories: individual factors (family conflict, commuting distance, migration, health problems), job-related factors (excessive workload, lack of rest breaks, unclear roles, low autonomy), organizational factors (understaffing, low pay, favoritism, weak management), and external factors (inflation, outdated equipment, environmental stress).

  5. Organizational factors produced the largest number of distinct turnover themes of any category — more than individual, job-related, or external factors combined — meaning management practices, compensation structure, and staffing policy carry more explanatory weight for actual departures than personal circumstances or economic conditions alone.

Nurse Retention Statistics Iran: The Turnover Intention Evidence Base

  1. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis pooling 42 studies and 12,898 Iranian nurses found turnover intention consistently at a moderate-to-high level, whether measured before or after Iran’s 2016 Health Transformation Plan (HTP) and before or after the COVID-19 pandemic — indicating the underlying pressure is structural, not a temporary reaction to any single policy change or crisis event.

  2. Turnover intention scores were nearly identical across all four comparison periods analyzed (pre/post-HTP and pre/post-pandemic), all clustering in the same moderate-to-high range — a striking consistency suggesting neither the 2016 reform nor the pandemic meaningfully shifted the baseline level of nurses’ desire to leave.

  3. The meta-analysis found no evidence of publication bias across the 42 pooled studies, based on Egger’s test and funnel plot inspection — a methodological detail that strengthens confidence the moderate-to-high turnover intention finding reflects a genuine, consistent pattern rather than a skewed sample of alarming studies getting published more often.

  4. A separate study of nurses employed under temporary contracts at TUMS hospitals found about 52% were unwilling to continue working in their current setting after completing mandatory service — a distinct population (temporary/mandatory-service nurses specifically) showing an even more acute retention risk than the general workforce.

Nurse Retention Statistics Iran: Burnout as the Underlying Mechanism

  1. A meta-analysis of 21 studies and 4,180 Iranian nurses found overall burnout prevalence of 36% (95% CI: 20–53%), with researchers finding no statistically significant association between prevalence and sample size, data collection year, nurse age, gender ratio, or geographic region — suggesting burnout risk is broadly distributed across the Iranian nursing workforce rather than concentrated in specific demographics or regions.

  2. The TUMS qualitative study explicitly frames its findings through the Effort–Reward Imbalance model, describing how nurses reported high effort (heavy workloads, mandatory overtime, emotional demands) matched with insufficient reward (low salaries, limited recognition, weak managerial support) — a mismatch the researchers link directly to burnout and, ultimately, turnover.

  3. Nurses interviewed in the TUMS study described chronic under-staffing as self-reinforcing: one participant explained that being consistently short-staffed made working extra hours “normal,” while researchers noted this pattern directly normalizes the excessive workload that drives burnout in the first place.

  4. Economic factors and inflation were identified as the dominant external driver of actual turnover across all age groups in the TUMS study — a finding that notably contrasts with earlier Iranian research suggesting younger nurses prioritize job security over financial incentives, which the study’s authors attribute to the severity of Iran’s macroeconomic instability specifically between 2021 and 2024.

Nurse Retention Statistics Iran: Global Context

  1. Global meta-analyses cited in the TUMS study place average nurse turnover rates between 4% and 68% worldwide, with regional averages of roughly 20% in Asia, 15% in North America, and 7% in Europe — positioning Iran’s measured 12.3% actual turnover rate below several international benchmarks even as government officials describe the domestic situation as a serious crisis. [

  2. The World Health Organization projects a global shortage of approximately 4.8 million nurses and midwives by 2030, concentrated most heavily in the WHO Eastern Mediterranean region — the region that includes Iran — meaning Iran’s domestic retention crisis is compounding, not counteracting, a broader regional shortage trend the WHO has already flagged as most severe in exactly this part of the world.

Why Nurse Retention Statistics in Iran Show Different Numbers

Iran’s retention data spans three genuinely distinct measurement types, and conflating them produces a misleading picture:

  • Government-disclosed exit counts (Ministry of Health) report raw numbers of nurses leaving through specific channels — resignation, retirement, emigration — giving a real-time, current snapshot but without a clear denominator to calculate a rate.

  • Actual turnover rate (the TUMS study) is the only Iranian data point in this dataset measuring confirmed departures against a known workforce size, producing the 12.3% figure — but this is limited to one university hospital system, not a national rate.

  • Turnover intention (the 42-study meta-analysis) measures nurses’ stated willingness to leave, which is a leading indicator, not a confirmed outcome — the researchers themselves note that intention-to-leave levels are considerably higher than documented actual turnover, precisely because not everyone who intends to leave follows through.

Reading only the government’s raw exit numbers might overstate the crisis without context on total workforce size; reading only the 12.3% TUMS figure might understate it, since that’s one hospital system, not the national picture Abadi’s disclosure describes.

What the Evidence Says Would Help

  • Address organizational factors first, since they produced the most turnover themes in the only actual-departure study available. Fixing understaffing, compensation structure, favoritism in promotions, and management communication directly targets the category researchers found most influential — ahead of external economic factors or individual circumstances.

  • Treat mandatory-service and temporary-contract nurses as a distinct, higher-risk retention segment. With roughly 52% of temporary-contract nurses at TUMS unwilling to continue after their mandatory period ends, targeted retention efforts for this specific population could meaningfully reduce near-term losses.

  • Pair recruitment expansion with experience-retention strategies, not recruitment alone. The Ministry’s own Deputy Minister acknowledged that the 12,000 newly authorized nursing positions won’t offset the loss of experienced staff, since new hires require years to reach comparable skill levels.

  • Reduce mandatory overtime and improve rest-break structure specifically, since nurses in the TUMS interviews directly linked unsustainable shift patterns (being called back to work shortly after finishing a shift) to their decision to leave.

  • Recognize that Iran’s retention crisis sits inside a larger regional shortage. With the WHO projecting the sharpest nurse shortfalls globally in the Eastern Mediterranean region specifically, retention improvements in Iran may need to compete against a regional pull toward emigration that domestic policy alone cannot fully counteract.

Burnout and workload strain are documented, government-acknowledged drivers of Iran’s nursing retention crisis, not abstract concerns — the Deputy Minister of Health himself directly linked inadequate staffing to burnout in his June 2026 statement, and peer-reviewed research puts burnout prevalence at 36% nationally. Employer-led staffing reform, fair compensation structures, and licensed clinical mental health support remain the primary tools for addressing this. Some facilities may also explore complementary, non-clinical well-being resources to supplement licensed care — remote sessions such as Ne Ste Al Frequency Therapy, for example, as one additional layer alongside employer-provided support, not instead of it.

Ne Ste Al does not diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any medical or psychiatric condition, and individual results vary; nurses experiencing burnout or clinical symptoms should consult a licensed healthcare provider first.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many nurses are leaving Iran’s healthcare system each year?

According to Iran’s Deputy Minister of Health for Nursing Affairs, 1,800 nurses left the profession and 800 more resigned in the year preceding his June 2026 disclosure, alongside 380 emigrating abroad and 1,600 retiring — over 4,500 total exits across these categories in a single year.

What is the actual nurse turnover rate in Iran?

The most rigorous available figure comes from a study of Tehran University of Medical Sciences hospitals, which found 12.3% of nurses (590 of 4,793) actually left their positions between 2021 and 2024. This is lower than some global regional averages, but researchers note it still represents a serious concern given Iran’s broader workforce shortage.

How common is burnout among Iranian nurses?

A meta-analysis of 21 studies and 4,180 Iranian nurses found an overall burnout prevalence of 36%, with no significant variation by sample size, region, age, or gender ratio — indicating burnout risk is widespread rather than concentrated in specific groups.

Did the COVID-19 pandemic make Iranian nurse turnover worse?

Surprisingly, a large-scale meta-analysis of 12,898 nurses found turnover intention levels were nearly identical before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, both sitting at a moderate-to-high level — suggesting the underlying pressures driving Iranian nurses to consider leaving predate and outlast the pandemic itself.

Why are Iranian nurses emigrating abroad?

The Ministry of Health and peer-reviewed research both point to a combination of factors: low salaries relative to international standards, difficult working conditions, limited professional development opportunities, and macroeconomic pressures including inflation. Iran’s government estimates each emigrating nurse represents a loss of roughly 40 billion rials in training investment.

Related

Nurse Retention Statistics South Korea 2026
Nurse Retention Statistics Saudi Arabia 2026
Nurse Retention Statistics UAE 2026

Sources

Share this story

No obligation — a clear answer by Day 10, or we extend the evaluation until day 90.

Ne Ste Al Team

You were never meant to just manage symptoms. The Ne Ste Al Mind Reprogramming practice built for people who are ready to stop surviving and start thriving.

Ready to Move From Understanding to Action?

If you're evaluating ways to reduce nurse burnout and turnover, see how Ne Ste AI uses Frequency Therapy to help nurses shift toward the states they need.

Prefer to test it with your own nurses?

Related Posts