We gathered pharmacist salary data from the most reputable sites. Each report demonstrated a six-figure salary for nearly all pharmacists. Despite many negative job market factors, which we discuss more in our downloadable report, the pharmacist salary remains stable if not slightly increasing, according to a few reports. 

Next, let’s look at pharmacist salary based on experience, salary based on job sector, and recent pharmacy salary changes.

Pharmacist Salary Based on Experience:

PayScale.com reported the following salaries based on experience level:

No surprises here. The pharmacist salary continues to prove it has a high starting salary but an extremely low ceiling. Twenty years of experience can increase your salary by nearly $12,000 (or a 10% increase from a starting salary with no experience). This low ceiling may subtly not encourage high performance. 

Pharmacist Salary Based on Job Sector:

A few of the reports broke down pharmacists by job type, although each could not agree to the same terms. Unfortunately, after 6 years of making these reports, we pharmacists cannot seem to agree on how to name job types. An interesting insight is that physicians, nurses, and physician assistants salary reports rarely disagree about the job types or industry names.

Overall, you can see wide reporting on various pharmacy job settings. Here it is important to note the differences between the reports’ use of median and average. As one may suspect, specialties like nuclear, ambulatory care, or oncology continue to be higher-paying pharmacist jobs. 

GlassDoor’s data may be misleading, as you may notice multiple similar salaries for different job types are the same. This indicates perhaps Glassdoor isn’t properly coding salary reports. We believe the 10,010 reported salaries (at the time of our review, Jan 2021) are not properly distinguished between job types.

Note:

We initially included ZipRecruiter data in this chart, however, we later excluded this data because the reported 3 out of 5 top-paying positions were “hospital pharmacist”, “inpatient pharmacist” and “inpatient pharmacist” without providing more detail of what the differences between these positions would be (if you’re an outsider, a typical pharmacist would see these titles and believe them to be the same type of position). We also excluded “Food and Beverage Store Pharmacists” ($132,750 Median) from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics report in our table, as no distinction was made between it and “General merchandise stores” or “Pharmacies and drug stores.”

Pharmacist Salary Changes:

We continue to see the overall pharmacist salary slow down in growth, if not decreasing in certain pharmacy sectors.

DrugChannels.com reported that while salaries in all pharmacy industries grew in 2019 (2020’s report releases mid-2021), the salaries of pharmacists employed in hospital settings had greater increases (+2.1%) than those in retail settings (+1.2%).

Drug Topics mentioned the potential salary decrease: “The number of pharmacists with salaries in the $100,000 to $130,000 range in 2020 [was]: 38% reported making that amount in 2020, compared with 40% in 2019.” Note, the same pharmacists are not surveyed every year.

Glassdoor.com provides an overall cumulative pay growth based on the median of anonymous and self-reporting pharmacists since 2015. This includes all pharmacists positions. The year 2020 saw a very small increase in pharmacist salary. Reports stated a small increase in salary, which is consistent over the last 6 years of our salary reports. 

But what we’ve anecdotally observed is a significant sum of practitioners (new and experienced) reporting abysmal starting salaries ($35/hour-$40/hour, but even single reports of as low as $28/hour). The best evidence that displays this trend is the Drug Topics salary report. They found 13% reported less than $70,000 annual salary. However, it wasn’t reported how many of the 13% under $70K were full-time or part-time employees, but only 4% reported less than $40/hr (< $83,200/yr). Drug Topics reported the total employment rates were 78% full-time and 13.4% employed part-time.

Finally, U.S. News and World Report notes that pharmacists rank #20 in best-paying jobs (up from #21 in 2018).

There you go! 

We hope this quick guide was informative and helpful. If you’d like to download our Salary Guide PDF to review later, click here. In it, we’ve also included a bit about pharmacist stress, job satisfaction, and job growth. We think you’ll like it!