Earning Your MSN in Washington, DC: Schools, Pathways, and Costs

How many universities inside Washington, DC actually confer a master's in nursing? Four. Georgetown University and George Washington University anchor the list, and beyond city limits the real competition sits across the Beltway in Maryland and Virginia, plus a growing stack of out-of-state online nursing programs that simply market to District residents.

That scarcity forces a choice early: BSN-to-MSN, RN-to-MSN, or direct entry for career-changers holding an unrelated bachelor's degree. Each pathway carries different prerequisites, timelines, and clinical placement logistics in a metro area where hospital systems, federal agencies, and community health centers all compete for advanced practice nurses.

Cost, earnings, licensure through the DC Board of Nursing, and where clinical hours actually happen all shift depending on which door you walk through. Jump straight to the program list →

Nursing in the District: Employers, Demand, and Where MSN Grads Work

Nurses who plan to work only in DC face different clinical and licensing considerations than those who will practice across the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metro, and that distinction should shape your enrollment in one of the MSN degree programs.

Who Is Hiring Advanced Practice Nurses

The District's advanced-practice hiring is anchored by a handful of large systems. MedStar Washington Hospital Center, a 912-bed teaching and research hospital,¹ is currently posting nurse practitioner openings across CVICU, palliative care, urogynecology, women's health, neuroscience, and neurosurgery, with adjacent demand in diabetes and geriatrics.² Children's National Hospital covers pediatric advanced practice, Howard University Hospital and GW Hospital round out the academic medical center presence, and the DC VA Medical Center offers a federal employment path with its own hiring cycle and benefits structure. Beyond hospitals, DC's density of national nursing associations, health policy nonprofits, and federal agencies creates advanced-practice and informatics roles that simply do not exist in most other metro areas.

Licensure Crosses Borders, But Not Automatically

Washington, DC is not a member of the Nurse Licensure Compact, while Maryland and Virginia both are.³ That asymmetry has real consequences: a multistate RN license issued by Maryland or Virginia does not, by itself, authorize practice in the District. A nurse living in DC generally needs a separate DC license, typically obtained by endorsement,³ and the reverse is also true. A DC license does not carry compact privileges into Maryland or Virginia, so a DC-based nurse who wants to work across the river needs separate MD and/or VA licenses too. For nurse practitioners, the layering is heavier still, since DC advanced-practice authorization and prescribing credentials sit on top of RN licensure and follow state-by-state NP laws. Some regional postings, including MedStar's own listings, explicitly require licensure in whichever combination of DC, MD, and VA the role touches.³

What This Means for Your Plan

If your clinical placements and eventual job are both inside DC, the licensing math stays simple. If you expect to commute into Maryland or Virginia for either, budget time and fees for a second license well before graduation, not after you have accepted an offer.

MSN Nursing Schools Physically Located in Washington, DC

A search for MSN programs in Washington, DC pulls up dozens of results, but many are online programs from schools headquartered elsewhere that simply market to District residents. If you want a university with an actual DC campus offering graduate nursing in 2026, the list is shorter than the SERP suggests. The 2027 rankings dataset includes four schools, Georgetown University, George Washington University, Howard University, and Trinity Washington University, and The Catholic University of America also offers an MSN. Two others frequently mentioned alongside them, George Washington University and Trinity Washington University, could not be independently verified as currently enrolling MSN cohorts in 2026, so confirm status directly with each school before you plan around them.

Georgetown University

Georgetown offers a full ladder of graduate nursing: MSN, DNP, and PhD.¹ It has not moved to DNP-only entry. Four MSN specialty tracks are actively enrolling for the January 4, 2027 cohort, with a final application deadline of November 11, 2026:²

• Adult-Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner (AG-ACNP)
• Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP)
• Nurse-Midwifery / Women's Health NP (NM/WHNP)
• Women's Health NP (WHNP)

These are delivered online with on-site clinical intensives.¹ The AG-ACNP track, for example, runs roughly 23 months at 40 credit hours with 750 clinical hours and requires prior ICU, ED, or PCU experience. Georgetown also runs a campus-based Master of Science Entry to Nursing, a direct entry MSN for career-changers without a prior nursing degree.

The Catholic University of America

Catholic's Conway School of Nursing offers MSN, DNP, and PhD degrees in 2026.³ The MSN is confirmed active, but publicly available sources do not clearly state which specialty tracks are currently open for new applicants versus paused or rolled into the DNP. If Catholic is on your shortlist, contact admissions to confirm which MSN concentrations are accepting applications for your intended start term.

Howard University

Howard, an HBCU, offers both MSN and DNP pathways and has not gone DNP-only. The active MSN concentration is Family Nurse Practitioner, delivered online with full-time and part-time study plans. The program requires 46 semester hours and 720 clinical hours, compared to 1,000 clinical hours at the DNP level. Applicants need an active RN license, a minimum 3.0 GPA, at least one year of acute care experience, and three letters of recommendation. Published deadlines are May 1 for fall entry and November 1 for spring.⁴ Howard also offers a Washington D.C. Post-Graduate Certificate in Nursing Programs for nurses who already hold an MSN in another specialty.

Which MSN Pathway Fits You: BSN-to-MSN, RN-to-MSN, or Direct Entry

Three doors lead into a master's in nursing, and the one you use depends entirely on what you already hold: a BSN, an associate degree or diploma with an RN license, or a bachelor's degree in something else entirely. BSN-to-MSN and RN-to-MSN both require an active RN license at the point of admission, so neither is open to career-changers who have never practiced. Direct entry (also marketed as MSN-E or Entry into Nursing) is the only route that builds prelicensure nursing education into the graduate degree, which means those students sit for the NCLEX-RN partway through rather than before they start.

MSN Specialties Offered in and Around the District

The District's menu of MSN specializations is narrower than its reputation suggests: two universities carry most of the advanced practice tracks, and everything else is concentrated in education and administration.

What DC schools actually offer

Georgetown University holds the widest range, listing Family Nurse Practitioner, Psychiatric Mental Health NP, Adult-Gerontology Acute Care NP, Nurse-Midwifery, Nursing Leadership and Management, and Women's Health, including a combined Nurse-Midwifery/Women's Health NP pathway.¹ George Washington University runs a comparable slate: AGACNP, Adult-Gerontology Primary Care NP, FNP, Nurse-Midwifery, Nursing Leadership and Management, and PMHNP, though it does not list Women's Health as a standalone track.²

Howard University's graduate nursing offering in DC is the Family Nurse Practitioner track, a 46-credit program with 720 clinical hours that prepares graduates for ANCC and AANP-CB certification.¹ Trinity Washington University takes a different lane entirely, with Nursing Administration and Nursing Education pathways rather than nurse practitioner preparation. Its Nurse Educator track runs 39 credits with a 100-hour practicum and a dual MPH/MSN option. Chamberlain University, which serves DC students through its national programs rather than as a DC-founded institution, adds FNP, PMHNP, AGACNP, Nurse Educator, and Nurse Executive.

Specialties you will have to leave the District to find

Pediatric nurse practitioner preparation, neonatal NP, nurse anesthesia, and acute care pediatrics do not appear among the tracks these DC schools currently list. If those are your target, plan on commuting into Maryland or Northern Virginia, or enrolling in an online program authorized to place students in DC clinical sites. Women's Health is a single-school option in the District, which makes seat availability tight.³

How specialty choice changes your clinical hours and exam

Your track determines both the practicum load and the NP certification exam by specialty you sit for. Georgetown's AGACNP requires 750 clinical hours across 40 credits and prepares candidates for ANCC and AACN AGACNP certification exams, with at least one year of ICU, ED, or PCU experience expected before admission. GW's FNP requires 600 clinical hours over 48 credits.² Howard's FNP sets the bar at 720 hours. Education and administration tracks sit far lower: Trinity's Nurse Educator practicum is 100 hours, because those roles lead to teaching or leadership credentials rather than state APRN licensure.

Decide the specialty before you shortlist nurse practitioner programs in Washington, DC. In DC, the track you want may eliminate most of the list on its own.

What an MSN Actually Costs in Washington, DC

Graduate nursing tuition in the District varies widely, and only some schools publish current per-credit rates. Georgetown is the most fully documented: its 2026-27 graduate nursing rate is $2,758 per credit, which puts a 44-credit MSN Family Nurse Practitioner track at roughly $121,352 in tuition before fees and travel for required on-campus intensives. Howard publishes a 2026-27 graduate rate of $1,732 per credit but does not state a total MSN credit requirement, so a program total cannot be calculated from published figures. Catholic University, George Washington University, and Trinity Washington University have not posted current MSN-specific per-credit tuition or total program costs, so budget estimates for those programs should come directly from the bursar's office. Figures below reflect tuition only unless noted; fees, books, health insurance, and clinical travel are additional.

Earnings, Debt, and Payback at DC Nursing Schools

Nurse practitioners in the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metro area earned a median of $129,920 a year as of May 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics¹, with the middle half of the region's 4,430 NPs earning between $117,310 and $150,380. That wage band is the yardstick against which any MSN price tag in Washington, DC should be measured.

Earnings data that isn't published yet

For the four MSN-granting schools in the rankings dataset, Georgetown, George Washington, Howard, and Trinity Washington, program-level earnings at one, two, and four years after completion are not currently reported for these specific nursing graduate programs. The federal database that tracks outcomes by individual credential simply doesn't yet have that information filled in for these programs, nor does it show a 10-year monthly loan payment figure tied to the nursing degree itself. Rather than borrow a campus-wide number and present it as what an FNP or AGACNP graduate actually earns, the honest answer is that this figure isn't published yet, so ask the program directly about placement and starting pay for recent cohorts.

What is known: debt at graduation

Median debt at graduation, reported for the institution as a whole rather than for the nursing master's specifically, gives a rough proxy for borrowing patterns at each school:

• Georgetown University: $15,500
• George Washington University: $20,449
• Howard University: $24,500
• Trinity Washington University: $28,250

These are campus-wide medians, not nursing-program-specific totals, so treat them as a starting point for questions to admissions about how to afford nursing school rather than a guarantee of what an individual MSN student will owe.

Running the payback math

Without a published 10-year monthly payment figure tied to these nursing programs, a rough gut check still holds up. A federal loan near $28,250 at typical graduate rates runs somewhere in the low $300s a month over a decade, comfortably inside a starting salary anywhere near the district's 25th-percentile NP wage of $117,310. A loan closer to Georgetown's $15,500 median costs proportionally less. Metro-area NP pay, sitting well above the national median², suggests graduates entering DC-area advanced practice roles are generally earning enough to service standard federal debt loads, provided they land full-time APRN work near the metro median rather than the bottom of the range.

Admission Requirements, GRE Policy, and Application Deadlines

Requirements vary by school and by pathway, and only Georgetown publishes a fully detailed, program-specific picture for its online MSN. Treat the items below as the common shape of a DC-area application, then confirm the specifics directly with each program before you build your timeline.

1. Active RN license

   Post-licensure MSN tracks expect you to already be practicing. Georgetown's online MSN requires a current U.S. RN license, and applicants must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Direct-entry applicants, by definition, do not hold a license yet, that is the core divide between the two application types.
2. Prior degree and accreditation

   For a BSN-to-MSN route, Georgetown requires a BSN or a CNL/entry-level MSN earned from a program accredited by CCNE or ACEN. If your undergraduate nursing degree came from an unaccredited program, resolve that question with the admissions office early, because it can be disqualifying rather than merely inconvenient.
3. Minimum GPA

   Georgetown's online MSN sets a 3.0 cumulative GPA and a 3.0 science GPA as the published floor. A 3.0 is a common benchmark across graduate nursing admissions, but do not assume every DC program uses the same number, verify each one, since several area schools do not publish a figure we can confirm for this cycle.
4. Prerequisite coursework

   Georgetown requires a college-level, three-credit statistics course completed with a grade of C or better. Statistics is the prerequisite most often missing from an older transcript, so check the date and credit count on yours now and plan a community college course if it falls short.
5. GRE policy

   The GRE is not required for Georgetown's online MSN, and no other standardized test scores are required for its entry-to-nursing master's. The broader trend across graduate nursing admissions has moved toward GRE-optional and GRE-free review. We cannot confirm the current test policy at every DC nursing school, so ask directly rather than assuming a waiver applies.
6. English proficiency

   TOEFL applies only to applicants who are not native English speakers. If English is your first language, this requirement does not apply to you.
7. References and personal statement

   Expect professional and academic references plus a personal statement explaining your specialty choice and career goals. Committees read the statement for evidence that you understand the role you are applying to train for, name the population you want to serve and the clinical experience that pointed you there.
8. Application deadlines

   Georgetown lists a final deadline of November 11, 2026 for its online MSN. Its entry-to-nursing master's runs on a separate calendar, with a Fall 2027 cycle deadline of June 15, 2027. Deadlines differ by pathway within the same school, and some programs review on a rolling basis while others hold a fixed date, confirm which model applies before you pace your materials.
9. Extra steps for direct-entry applicants

   If you are entering nursing from another field, you will typically need undergraduate science prerequisites that BSN-holders have already satisfied, plus transcripts from every institution you attended. You will not have an RN license or nursing clinical hours to submit, so your prior work experience and personal statement carry more weight. Direct-entry cycles also tend to open and close far ahead of the start term, so begin gathering transcripts a year out.

DC Board of Nursing APRN Licensure Requirements

MSN Programs Ranked for Washington, DC Students

Below are the top MSN programs serving Washington, DC students, ranked by IPEDS completion data, accreditation status, and program fit. Four institutions inside the District award master's degrees in nursing, and each takes a different route: Georgetown and George Washington spread their offerings across several advanced practice tracks, Trinity keeps its focus on education and leadership, and Howard anchors family primary care in the city. Every program listed holds CCNE accreditation, and the midwifery tracks carry their additional professional accreditation as well.

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