Senior Living Still Replaces a Third of Its Staff Every Year

Senior living operators have spent four years trying to rebuild their workforces, and the latest data shows both progress and how far the industry still has to go. The 2026 State of the Senior Living and Care Workforce report from investment bank Ziegler found that average total workforce turnover declined slightly, from 36.3 percent in 2025 to 35.4 percent in 2026. That means a typical community still replaces more than a third of its employees every year.

Nurses are leaving faster

The slight improvement in overall turnover hides a problem in clinical roles. Registered nurse turnover rose to 40.8 percent in 2026, up from 36.4 percent the year before, making RNs the licensed clinical role with the highest turnover in the survey. Dining staff turnover held at 40 percent.

The share of providers that reported often using temporary staffing agencies increased from 16.8 percent to 24.8 percent. Agency staff fill gaps, but they cost more and they rarely build the relationships with residents and families that define good care. Senior Housing News reported that 48.4 percent of Ziegler's respondents still use agency staffing as a stopgap.

Pressure on staff is rising at the same time. A survey of more than 500 senior living professionals by technology company Sage found that 81 percent of leaders reported rising resident acuity, while only 12 percent said staffing conditions were consistently sufficient in 2026. Higher acuity means each resident needs more hands-on care, which stretches every shift further.

What workers say keeps them

Argentum, the national senior living association, released its 2026 Perceptions of Careers in Senior Living report in June with Activated Insights. The report found that culture now outranks pay as the top retention driver. Workers rated positive team culture, competitive pay and supportive supervisors as the three most important reasons to stay, cited by 82.9 percent, 77.9 percent and 74.4 percent of respondents.

Pay still matters. Argentum's earlier research found that senior living hourly wages rose 30.9 percent between 2019 and 2023, and operators continue to cite non-competitive wages as the top reason workers leave. Pay and supervisor difficulties remain the biggest drivers of turnover in the Argentum data. The lesson is that raises alone do not fix a community where supervisors are overextended or the team culture has broken down.

Argentum CEO James Balda put it plainly in the report's release, saying purpose alone is not enough to sustain a workforce. Senior living workers are deeply mission driven, but mission does not cover a rent payment or make up for a manager who never has time to listen.

Scheduling is another lever. Many caregivers juggle second jobs or family duties, and a community that publishes schedules earlier, honors reasonable swap requests and limits last minute changes gives staff a reason to stay that a competitor cannot match with a small raise.

Supervisors are the pressure point

The supervisor finding lines up with broader research on managers. Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that manager engagement has fallen nine points since 2022, the steepest decline of any group. In senior living, the charge nurse or shift lead often carries both clinical duties and people management, with little training for the second role. We look at the national picture in our report on manager engagement.

Operators that have improved retention tend to invest in those middle layers first. They give shift leads protected time for check-ins, teach them how to handle conflict and scheduling requests, and measure their teams' turnover as a core performance indicator. Ziegler's respondents named improving culture, increasing wages and offering training as their three most common strategies.

Compliance and leave add more strain

Senior living depends heavily on immigrant workers. About a quarter of employees in residential assisted living communities are immigrants, according to the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care. That makes accurate employment verification records especially important this year, as our Form I-9 guide explains.

Leave rules are also changing for operators with communities in multiple states. Three new state paid family and medical leave programs began paying benefits in 2026, which affects scheduling and coverage planning. Our paid leave roundup lays out which states are covered.

Senior living is moving away from short-term crisis staffing and toward longer workforce strategy, according to Ziegler. The communities that get there first will be the ones that treat culture and supervision as measurable parts of operations rather than soft extras.