Objective To identify the common practical skills in rehabilitation nursing and to determine the difficulty coefficient of each skill. Methods Nineteen common practical skills in rehabilitation nursing were established by literature review and expert conference, then 507 senior nurses working in the rehabilitation department were selected through convenience sampling and surveyed to rank the difficulty of each task. The difficulty coefficient of each skill was determined by linear weighted sum method. Results The familiarity, judgment coefficient and authority coefficient of the surveyed nurses were 0.70, 0.88 and 0.79, respectively. The difficulty coefficients of the practical skills in rehabilitation nursing were between 0.96 and 1.23. Among them, 13 were difficult, 4 were ordinary and 2 were easy. Conclusion The establishment of common practical skills and their difficulty coefficients in rehabilitation nursing can provide reference for hierarchical training of rehabilitation nurses, evaluation of nursing workload and allocation of nursing workforce.