Pharmacy Aides Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($29,360) to the 90th ($58,660). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 41,100 Pharmacy Aides jobs in May 2024, which is 0.03% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Oklahoma, where the location quotient is 2.28, meaning the occupation holds 2.28 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 9,430 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 37.8% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $34,450 at the 25th percentile, $37,000 at the middle, $42,570 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $29,300, a ratio of 2.0 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

District of Columbia posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $55,590, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Pharmacy Aides stands number 423 by employment and number 763 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Support Occupations, the group median wage is $41,590 across 17 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 11% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.6% of the group's 7,448,000 jobs. In 18 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $37,000, 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

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 4,660 jobs, 11.3% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

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, $30,020 a year, against $65,100 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $37,000 works out to $3,083 a month before taxes, $1,423 per biweekly paycheck, and $712 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($34,450) to the 75th ($42,570) is worth $8,120 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $40,700 would sit between the median ($37,000) and the 75th percentile ($42,570), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $34,450, is $2,550 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 Support Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Medical Equipment Preparers, Orderlies, Occupational Therapy Assistants, Physical Therapist Aides, Medical Transcriptionists, Psychiatric Aides. The full directory is on the Careers hub.