A proposed Chinese Nurses Job Satisfaction Scale was developed and its psychometric properties tested. Instrument development was conducted in four phases. The constructs and items of the instrument were developed from literature review and were confirmed by interviewing six Chinese clinical experts in phase I. During phase II, five experts evaluated the scale’s content validity. In phase III, exploratory factor analysis was used to examine the instrument constructs (n = 302). In phase IV, a multi-stage random sampling was used to recruit 510 subjects to examine the proposed model by confirmatory factor analysis. The Content Validity Index of the instrument for items ranged from 0.8 to 1.0. Seven factors were extracted from exploratory factor analysis, which explained 71.47% of the total variance. A confirmatory factor analysis supported the modified measurement model of nurses’ job satisfaction with 34 items. The scale overall internal consistency Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was 0.93.