Nurses need moral courage in their ethical decision-making. As a personal characteristic, moral courage varies between individuals. The aim of this study was to analyse nurses’ self-assessed moral courage, morally courageous acts and associated individual factors in older people care in one large city in Finland. The data of this cross-sectional study were collected with the ‘Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale’ (NMCS) and the main analyses were conducted with multi-way ANOVA. A total of 205 nurses responded. Respondents’ self-assessed moral courage was 4.16 on a Likert scale of 1 to 5. Higher moral courage was associated with a higher knowledge base in ethics, more frequent encountering of ethical conflicts and having several sources for knowledge of ethics, suggesting that providing ethics education for nurses in the care of older people is important. The STROBE checklist was used as the reporting guideline for the manuscript.