Aims: Nurses play an irreplaceable role in disaster response. However, there is no tool for assessing nurses' disaster literacy. The study was to develop a disaster literacy assessment model for nurses and verify its effectiveness. Design: 31 nurses took part in the critical event interview, 7 members in the focus group discussion, 32 experts in Delphi correspondence consultation, 2135 nurses in the preliminary survey, and 2161 in the confirmatory survey. Methods: The study was divided into two steps. (1) Model development, in which literature analysis, critical event interviews, and analysis of disaster nursing cases were used to determine the disaster literacy index system for nurses. Focus group discussion and Delphi expert consultation were used to optimize the index system. An analytic hierarchy process was used to determine the weights of indicators at all levels and establish evaluation models. (2) Model verification, in which item analysis, content validity analysis, exploratory factor analysis, and reliability analysis were used to identify the potential structure and reliability of the model. The analysis of aggregate validity, discriminative validity, and model fitting index were used to verify the overall fit. Results: The performance evaluation results revealed that a reliable and valid disaster literacy assessment model for nurses was obtained comprising 34 items in three dimensions: functional literacy, interactive literacy, and critical literacy. Conclusions: The new disaster literacy model for nurses was developed. It can become an effective evaluation tool for the measurement of disaster literacy for nurses and can be adapted globally.