Background <p>Missed nursing care refers to the pertinent nursing tasks that are delayed, unfinished, or not carried out at all and is also becoming an increasing healthcare issue worldwide. At present, the emergence of various societal issues has placed psychological, financial, and occupational burdens on nurses. This situation can have detrimental effects on patient safety, duration of hospital stay, patient survival rates, and overall surgical outcomes. We aimed to determine the pooled prevalence and associated factors of missed nursing care among nurses.</p> Methods <p>In our systematic review and meta-analysis, targeted articles were searched from a variety of electronic databases; including Pub Med, Science Direct, Cochrane Library, Medline, Center for Evidence-Based Medicine, AJOL, Excerpta Medical Database, Global Health Library, Institutional repository, Scopus, and Google Scholar. All studies on missed nursing care among nurses in Ethiopia published up to February 2, 2025, have been retrieved and the necessary data were extracted by using a standardized data extraction format. We used a statistical software Stata version 17 for analyzing the data. Funnel plot and I² tests were used to check publication bias and heterogeneity between studies, respectively. The pooled prevalence was determined by using a random-effects model. Sub-group analysis and leave-out-one sensitivity analysis was done.</p> Results <p>Our search strategy identified 10 full-text articles; comprising 3,803 study participants. This study revealed that the overall prevalence of missed nursing care among nurses was 55.99% (95% CI 47.9, 64.08), reflecting the significant impact of missed nursing care on the overall healthcare system, and five predictors were identified. Nurse intention to leave either profession or hospital (OR = 2.45, 95% CI, = 1.79 to 3.36), Job satisfaction (OR = 3.6, 95% CI = 2.8 to 5.54), level of education (OR = 4.9, 95% CI = 2.2 to 11.19), working shift hours (OR = 3.16, 95% CI = 2.06–4.9), and training opportunity (OR = 1.8, 95% CI = 1.2–2.77) with P-value &lt; 0.001, all were the significant correlated factors.</p> Conclusion and clinical implications <p>In Ethiopia, the pooled prevalence of missed nursing care is significantly high, with more than half of basic nursing care being missed. Therefore, all possible efforts should be made to address this issue. To tackle these problems, we identified several key focus areas: decreasing nurses’ intention to exit the profession, boosting job satisfaction, and offering training, reducing the occurrence of night shifts, and improving educational qualification.</p> Clinical trial number <p>Not applicable.</p>