Pharmacy Technicians 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 ($35,100) to the 90th ($59,450). 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

With 487,920 jobs nationally, Pharmacy Technicians make up 0.32% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 45,210 of those jobs, the top three states hold 25.8%, and the deepest concentration sits in West Virginia (location quotient 1.66, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $36,920 at the 25th percentile, $43,460 at the middle, $48,580 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $24,350, a ratio of 1.7 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

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 45,210 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Washington would lead at $56,140. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Pharmacy Technicians stands number 70 by employment and number 659 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 56% less than its group median, and it supplies 5.1% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 25 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $43,460, 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 26,860 jobs, 5.5% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 393 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Aguadilla, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $24,500 a year, against $71,550 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Pharmacy Technicians paycheck, gross, is $1,672 every two weeks on an annual $43,460, which is $3,622 a month and $836 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($36,920) to the 75th ($48,580) is worth $11,660 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $47,806 would sit between the median ($43,460) and the 75th percentile ($48,580), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $36,920, is $6,540 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Respiratory Therapists, Psychiatric Technicians, Veterinary Technologists and Technicians, Surgical Technologists, Dentists, General, Family Medicine Physicians. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.