Background: Hand hygiene is an essential practice in preventing sickness and damageupon patients and the nursing care environment. Despite this there is a lack of handhygiene adherence in the healthcare systems. Hand hygiene routines in Swedishhealthcare systems are regulated by law and to be applied in all healthcare activities.Nurses core expertise is to practise evidence based, assess risks, provide safe care and tofollow established guidelines. Objective: The aim of this literature review was to describe the perceived barriers ofnurses for hand hygiene adherence. Method: Descriptive literature review using Popenoe et al. (2021) data analysis guide toidentify, summarise and condense data from selected articles for thematicallycategorising a nurse's perceived barriers for hand hygiene adherence. Results: The results showed a lack of knowledge, heavy workload, inadequateinfrastructure and materials, social barriers and skin irritation were the most perceivedbarriers to hand hygiene adherence according to participating nurses. Conclusion: Nurses from different parts of the world perceive similar barriers to handhygiene adherence. The perceived barriers are several and impact nurses differentlydepending on the location. The lack of hand hygiene can have a widespread damage onthe wellbeing of healthcare users. Nurses have an important role to provide theirpatients with evidence based nursing care by adhering to established hand hygieneguidelines. The motivation behind the making of this literature review is to raiseawareness of nurses' perceived barriers to hand hygiene adherence which can facilitatethe process of resolving the perceived barriers.