Pharmacists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Pharmacists worker at that point in the distribution, so $158,620 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 328,870 people in May 2024, 0.21% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 34,490 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 23.9% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in West Virginia, whose location quotient of 1.72 says this work is 1.72 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

One in ten workers in this field earns $86,930 or less, and one in ten earns $172,040 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.0 to 1 and the annual gap is $85,110. The mean ($137,210) versus median ($137,480) comparison shows an unusually symmetric ladder in this occupation.

Pay by state

California posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $165,150, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Pharmacists stands number 112 by employment and number 46 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations, the group median wage is $98,340 across 71 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 40% more than its group median, and it supplies 3.4% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 18 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $137,480, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 22,010 jobs, 6.7% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $99,060 a year, against $187,480 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $11,457 a month before tax, $5,288 biweekly, $2,644 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($127,250) to the 75th ($158,620) is worth $31,370 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $151,228 would sit between the median ($137,480) and the 75th percentile ($158,620), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $127,250, is $10,230 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Diagnostic Medical Sonographers, Veterinarians, Opticians, Dispensing, Dietitians and Nutritionists, Ophthalmic Medical Technicians, General Internal Medicine Physicians. The full directory is on the Careers hub.