Background: Perfectionism plays an important role in nursing students’ adjustment to training in the nursing profession. Nonetheless, perfectionism can complicate functioning and engender stress when experiencing failure. Self-compassion is one of the abilities that nursing students must possess in order to be compassionate. with themselves and with patients to cope with stress. Perfectionistic students develop a strict thinking that hinders a compassionate attitude towards oneself causing greater depressive symptoms. Aimed to: Assess perfectionism, self-compassion and depressive symptoms among nursing students. Design: Cross sectional descriptive design was used. Setting: The present study was done at the Technical Institute of Nursing Zagazig University. Subjects and methods: A stratified sample was used in the current study, which composed of 280 nursing students. Tools of data collection: The first tool consists of two parts: socio-demographic data sheet, and Hewitt and Flett's multidimensional perfectionism scale. The second tool was the Neff’s Self-Compassion Scale, and the third tool was beck depression inventory scale (BDI-II). Results: The study findings showed that 95% of the nursing students have high level of perfectionism, 74.7% have moderate level of self-compassion, and 87.5% have depressive symptoms ranging from mild to extreme. Multivariate analysis revealed that urban residence and socially-prescribed perfectionism were statistically significant independent negative predictors of students` self- compassion score. While students` grade and self-compassion were an independent negative predictors of students` depressive symptoms score. Conclusions: The majority of nursing students have high level of perfectionism, moderate level of self-compassion and depressive symptoms ranging from mild to extreme. The students with perfectionistic tendencies are at risk of increasing depressive symptoms when they do not practice their self-compassion. Recommendation: Effective self-compassion interventions could be targeted to students who have perfectionistic thoughts to increase level of kindness, and thus decrease perfectionistic thoughts. Experimental study is suggested to manage mal- adaptive perfectionism and depressive symptoms in nursing students.