Background <p>Nurse managers’ career success is crucial for healthcare quality, nursing workforce stability, and field advancement. While demographic and organizational factors are well-documented predictors, the impact of psychological mechanisms, specifically psychological capital mediated through quality of work life, remains insufficiently researched. This research aims to investigate the current state of career success among nurse managers and to explore the mediating effect of quality of work life between psychological capital and career success.</p> Methods <p>A national cross-sectional study was conducted in 2023 with 2,085 Chinese nurse managers recruited from 51 tertiary general hospitals through multi-stage stratified proportional sampling. The participants completed an online questionnaire assessing their psychological capital, quality of work life, and career success. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences version 26 was used for descriptive analysis, Pearson correlation analysis, hierarchical multiple linear regression, and structural equation modeling to analyze the data and confirm the relationships between the variables using Mplus version 7.0 software.</p> Results <p>The career success score was 37.09 ± 8.02. There was a positive correlation between psychological capital, quality of work life, and career success, with coefficients ranging from 0.573 to 0.673. Psychological capital and quality of work life explained 38.0% and 14.0% of the variance in career success, respectively. The structural equation modeling results showed that psychological capital positively and directly predicted career success (<i>β</i> = 0.371, <i>P</i> &lt; 0.001), and indirectly affected career success via quality of work life (<i>β</i> = 0.346, <i>P</i> &lt; 0.001). The final model explained 72.3% of the variance in career success.</p> Conclusion <p>Psychological capital was positively correlated with career success among nurse managers, and the quality of work life partially mediated this relationship. Thus, interventions emphasizing these two factors may be beneficial in improving the career success of nurse managers. Hospital administrators should cultivate positive personalities in nurse managers to enhance their psychological capital, improve their quality of work life, help them grow within the organization, achieve career success, and ensure the quality of nursing and its effectiveness.</p> Clinical trial number <p>Not applicable.</p>