Why the VA Says Nurse Vacancies Are 9.1% While Its Watchdog Talks About Staffing Shortages

Two numbers will describe the same hospital system, and they do not sound like they belong to the same story. One comes from the Department of Veterans Affairs’ own inspector general, which found that nearly 8 in 10 VA medical centers are reporting severe shortages of nurses.

The other comes from the VA itself, which says its nurse vacancy rate is 9.1 percent, lower than most other health care systems. Both are described as current. Both are, in their own way, accurate.

It’s in the space in between that many veterans are receiving their care. There is a disagreement about how to count, and it has become its own quiet fight inside the larger question of whether the nation’s biggest health system has enough people to do the job.

Office of Inspector General’s Findings

Last summer, the VA Office of Inspector General released its fiscal 2025 workforce assessment, and the findings were cause for concern. All 139 VA medical centers reported at least one severe occupational staffing shortage. Nearly four in five identified nursing as one of them.

Across clinical and non-clinical roles, facilities reported 4,434 severe shortages in total, a 50 percent jump from the year before. It was the 12th report in the OIG’s staffing series, and the department has been flagged for these gaps year after year.

However, the report has a limitation that turns out to be the crux of the whole disagreement. The inspector general’s report does not measure nurse vacancy rates; it does not count unfilled positions at all. Instead, it asks each VA medical center to identify the occupations where recruiting or retaining staff has become hard enough to interfere with the facility’s mission. A hospital that is fully staffed but struggling to keep it that way can report a severe shortage.

This report measures strain, in other words, not headcount. The OIG describes it as a descriptive review and notes that it did not independently verify the facilities’ data, which is drawn from a questionnaire rather than an audit.

The VA’s number measures something entirely different. A vacancy rate counts the positions a facility is funded to fill and currently has not. It is a snapshot of open slots, not of how hard those slots are to keep filled.

That is how both numbers can technically be accurate in this discussion. One says nursing is hard to sustain almost everywhere, while the other says the actual vacancies are relatively small at the moment. Neither side is inventing their numbers; they are simply measuring with different tools.

Dept of Veterans Affairs Position

Asked what the department’s own data shows, VA Press Secretary Quinn Slaven told Military.com the nurse vacancy rate is 9.1 percent as of July 2026, a figure he called lower than most other health care systems and in line with the VA’s historical averages.

“VA has already hired more nurses in the first nine months of this fiscal year than it hired in all of FY2025, and VA’s loss rate for nurses is lower in FY26 compared to the last several years,” Slaven said. This shows active movement toward addressing the OIG report.

He framed the shortage as a national condition rather than a VA failure. “There is a nationwide shortage of health care workers that has made hiring and retention difficult for the last 15 years across the entire health care sector, including at some VA locations,” he noted.

Slaven pointed to a set of tools the department uses to recruit and keep nurses, including a contract buy-out program, nursing residency programs, a Travel Corps, nurse-specific retention bonuses, and loan-repayment programs. “VA facilities have always been empowered to fill positions as needed but are not immune from industry-wide challenges,” he said.

A Numbers Game

Fiscal year 2025 marked the first annual net decrease in the VA’s workforce in the department’s history. By the VA’s own metrics, it targeted a reduction of roughly 30,000 positions through attrition, deferred resignations and a hiring freeze.

In December, it announced plans to trim an additional 26,000 jobs from the Veterans Health Administration. VA workforce data show a net loss of about 3,000 registered nurses and 1,000 physicians over the year. A January report from Democrats on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee put the total departures higher, at more than 40,000 employees, and said 88 percent of them came from the health care side.

The VA has disputed that figure, with a spokesman saying the department met its 30,000 reduction goal and did not lose 40,000. It is, fittingly, one more number both sides count differently.

VA Secretary Doug Collins has argued that years of simply growing the workforce failed to improve care, and that the department largely has the staffing it needs.

The Veteran

For veterans, their first question will be: Does any of this change the care they get? Asked how the VA ensures veterans at the most short-staffed facilities are not facing longer waits or reduced access, Slaven said community-care referrals, which send veterans to private providers outside the VA, are a benefit “approved by a broad, bipartisan margin in Congress,” and he pointed to volume.

In fiscal 2025, he said, the VA completed a record 82,083,918 direct-care appointments and a record 60,007,423 community-care appointments, opened 38 new health care clinics since January 2025 and enrolled more than 200,000 new veterans this year.

Those totals describe a system doing the work, yet they do not answer whether a veteran at a hospital reporting a severe nursing shortage waits longer than one somewhere else.

What Vets and Would-Be Nurses Can Do

For all the disagreement over the numbers, the VA points to concrete programs it says are closing the gap. Veterans, transitioning service members and military spouses are a natural recruiting pool for exactly the nursing roles the VA is trying to fill.

Veterans Affairs runs education-support, scholarship and new-graduate pathways aimed at moving people into them. Slaven directed those interested to the VA’s recruiting team and its careers portal at vacareers.va.gov.