Nearly 15,000 nurses go on strike at major New York City hospitals

Brad Lander, the former New York City comptroller and a current Democratic candidate for the House, applauds striking nurses on the picket line outside Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, one of the hospitals affected by a strike, on Monday morning, Jan. 12, 2026. The striking nurses are aiming to force hospitals to ensure minimum staffing ratios. (Vincent Alban/The New York Times)

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

Nearly 15,000 nurses went on strike earlier this week at some of New York City’s top hospitals, setting the stage for what could be one of the biggest labor showdowns in the city’s health care industry in decades.

The union representing the nurses says a strike is necessary to force hospitals to ensure minimum staffing ratios so that nurses aren’t overwhelmed with too many patients. They are also demanding higher wages and more security at hospitals to reduce violent episodes and shootings.

The strike is targeting some of the city’s leading medical institutions: NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia, Montefiore Medical Center and the main campus of Mount Sinai Hospital along with two other major hospitals within the Mount Sinai system.

It poses an early test for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office two weeks ago and spoke at a rally Monday in a show of support for the striking nurses.

Before his election, Mamdani, a democratic socialist, had said that the city “needs to reconsider its relationship to wealthy private hospital systems” and questioned whether such hospitals deserved to keep their tax exemptions. The striking hospitals include some of the city’s leading medical institutions and are among its largest employers.

For weeks, hospital executives had been preparing to keep hospitals running and medical care accessible in the event of a strike. They secured contracts with staffing agencies to provide travel nurses and reserved hotel rooms for them, according to officials at the Greater New York Hospital Association, a trade group. NewYork-Presbyterian spent $60 million preparing for the strike, hiring more than 1,700 contingency nurses, according to a hospital spokesperson.

Some hospitals canceled scheduled surgeries and accelerated discharges over the weekend to reduce patient counts. The affected hospitals have also been transferring some patients in highly specialized units, such as neonatal intensive care units, according to Elisabeth R. Wynn, an executive vice president at the hospital association. At NewYork-Presbyterian, more than 100 patients were transferred during the past 10 days in preparation for the strike.

On Monday morning, when the strike began, ambulances diverted some patients to other hospitals “to help with the transition to a strike,” according to Brian Conway, a spokesperson for the hospital association. One of the hospitals had “an extended diversion” for pediatric critical care in the morning before resuming services, Conway said. The emergency departments at the hospitals with striking nurses were open and staffed.

At Montefiore Medical Center, “we have not canceled even one patient’s access to care,” Dr. Philip O. Ozuah, the president of Montefiore Einstein, which includes the medical center, wrote in a note to employees Monday, describing how he spent the first day of the strike on medical rounds across the hospital.

This is the second major nursing strike in just three years in New York City. But the 2023 strike was the first major strike by nurses in New York City in many years. In 1998, some 600 nurses went on strike at a Brooklyn hospital for three weeks.

The last strike three years ago involved 7,000 nurses at Mount Sinai, in Manhattan, and Montefiore, in the Bronx. That time, the biggest issue was chronic understaffing of units, which nurses said left them with too many patients to care for safely. The strike ended after three days when the hospitals agreed to hire more nurses and to set minimum staffing ratios with a strict enforcement mechanism. In the years since, the nurses’ union has won payouts for its members when hospitals left units understaffed.

But nurses say that they need to strike now because hospitals are trying to erode protections related to minimum staffing levels.

“Wealthy hospitals are trying to undo the safe staffing standards we won for our patients when we went on strike three years ago,” Nancy Hagans, president of the nursing union, the New York State Nurses Association, said Saturday.

Three years ago, nurses also won significant raises, boosting minimum pay nearly 20% over three years, and propelling starting pay well above $100,000.

At Montefiore, pay for starting nurses is $119,423, and the average base salary for nurses — many of whom have years of experience — is about $165,000, according to figures provided by the hospital.

The last strike unfolded when the coronavirus pandemic still felt recent. Many New Yorkers remembered banging pots and pans and cheering from their windows at 7 p.m. each day in gratitude for nurses and other health care workers.

There was a widespread sense that some hospitals were caught unprepared for the pandemic, leaving some nurses to fashion protective gear out of garbage bags in the deadly first wave in March 2020. And hospitals were buoyed by federal pandemic bailout money.

But the dynamics could be different this time.

Hospitals are expecting lean years ahead, as many New Yorkers lose health insurance and billions of dollars in federal health care funding to the state start to dry up, the result of the domestic policy law President Donald Trump signed in July.

“The health care system is under siege financially,” Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, said. “The demands of the union are so outrageous” that there was no way hospitals could give in to them, he said.

Lucia Lee, a spokesperson for Mount Sinai, said that nurses at the hospital make on average $162,000 — and that the union’s salary demands would increase that to $275,000 over three years. At Montefiore, the union’s demands would eventually lift the nurses’ average base salary from about $165,000 to $220,000, according to figures provided by the hospital.

Officials with the New York State Nurses Association disputed the hospitals’ claims. Union officials said that Mount Sinai and the other hospitals were offering only about $4,500 more per nurse, while declining to fund health care benefits to the same extent as before.

Nursing union officials, meanwhile, point to the multimillion-dollar salaries of hospital executives. The head of NewYork-Presbyterian, Dr. Steven Corwin, for instance, received more than $26 million in compensation in 2024, some of which related to retirement funds and bonuses deferred from years before, according to a public filing. A hospital spokesperson declined to comment on Corwin’s salary.

“While NewYork-Presbyterian, Montefiore and Mount Sinai — three of New York City’s wealthiest private hospitals — are claiming they can’t afford to settle a fair union contract that keeps nurses and patients safe, they likely have plenty of cash on hand to use to fight their own workers,” Hagans, the union president, said.

Nurses cite workplace safety concerns as another reason they are striking.

“We deserve not to get hurt on the job,” Beth Loudin, a nurse at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia, said.

Hospitals across New York have been the site of shootings or threatened shootings in recent years, and some nurses have been troubled by the lack of metal detectors and other measures to screen weapons at some hospital entrances.