Vilnius currently offers general practice nurses the most: the median advertised salary in the capital is €2,300 gross. But that is not the interesting part. Šiauliai trails by just €37, with a median of €2,263. The capital-city premium, worth several hundred euros in most professions, has all but disappeared from nursing — while the gaps between the cities themselves now run to hundreds of euros, not tens.
Kaunas looks stranger still. The city that hosts the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences and trains a large share of the country's nurses advertises a median of €2,000 — less than in Vilnius, Šiauliai or Klaipėda, and less even than in Palanga. General practice nursing is a licensed profession that requires a university degree, making it the most qualified role in this comparison. A median, note, is the middle value rather than the average: half of the listings offer more, half less.
A map of seven cities
Seven cities make it onto the map this quarter — that is how many have enough general practice nurse listings with a stated salary. The coast is holding firm. Klaipėda's median is €2,013, and in Palanga, where sanatoriums and rehabilitation clinics recruit nurses year-round, the figure is €2,047: €47 more than in Kaunas. Smaller towns offer less: Prienai advertises €1,814, while Panevėžys — the only one of the five major cities to fall below the €2,000 mark — shows a median of €1,600. Both, though, have only a single active listing, so those medians should be read with caution.
The bar chart below also shows Birštonas, which does not make it onto the map: its median is €1,557, a full €743 behind Vilnius. Resort status, it turns out, does not raise pay by itself: Birštonas, famous for its sanatoriums, sits at the bottom of the list while Palanga is among the leaders.
Why does Šiauliai offer almost as much as the capital? Living costs alone cannot explain it: the gap between Šiauliai and Kaunas runs to €263 in Šiauliai's favour, when city size would predict the opposite. Supply is the more likely answer. Kaunas graduates new cohorts of nurses every year, so employers there can fill a vacancy for less, while regional hospitals have no such luxury: to attract a specialist the big cities are also courting, they have to bid higher. The health sector's collective agreement adds to this — with base pay levels similar across the country, a smaller city's hospital can compete with the capital far more easily than it could in, say, IT.
Geography works differently in nursing.
A different geography for nursing assistants
In nursing assistant listings the cities line up in their own order. Vilnius leads with a median of €1,800, Klaipėda offers €1,599, and Kaunas advertises €1,398. Demand, meanwhile, runs in the opposite direction to pay: Kaunas currently has seven active assistant listings, Klaipėda six, Vilnius three. The assistant role does not require a nursing degree, which is why the advertised sums are lower everywhere. Šiauliai, which pays nurses at near-capital level, does not appear in the assistant comparison at all: too few listings there state a salary. Palanga and Dotnuva enter the comparison only through recently expired listings — neither has an active one right now.
The steadiest performer across both lists is Klaipėda: the port city offers both nurses and assistants more than Kaunas does, despite having no famous medical university of its own.
The step up in qualification pays off in every city, just not equally. In Kaunas the gap between the advertised nurse and assistant medians is €602; in Vilnius, €500; in Klaipėda, €414. It is in Kaunas — where the advertised nurse median is among the lowest of the major cities — that moving up pays off most.
All of these figures are salaries offered in public job listings, not wages actually paid. Care institutions recruit both through their own career pages and through the Employment Service (Užimtumo tarnyba), but in either case the advertised sum usually reflects the opening offer to a new hire; with supplements for night or shift work, real earnings are often higher.
For a nurse weighing where to work, the conclusion is unexpected: the same job in Šiauliai is now advertised at almost the Vilnius rate, without capital-city housing costs — the €37 difference would not cover a single hotel night, while the rent gap between the two cities runs to hundreds of euros a month. For an assistant planning to qualify as a nurse, the numbers promise a clear reward: in Kaunas alone, a median €602 higher. And whether Šiauliai keeps pace with the capital will become clear next quarter, when the medians are recalculated over fresh listings.