Credential
Pharmacist licence (PharmD)
Four years of doctoral study and six figures of debt for work that pays well and is one of the few on this site where almost everyone who finishes ends up earning.
What it costs to get — the middle half of the range.
Months of training, full time. Part time takes longer.
Months of the pay premium needed to cover that cost. Not months until you are ahead overall — the training time above comes first.
Source: US Department of Education, College Scorecard, Field of Study data, 2026 · view
What that cost figure is, and what it is not
The spread between the quarters is wider than for dentistry or medicine, which is a real finding about where you study rather than noise. That range is median cumulative FEDERAL LOAN DEBT at completion, not a tuition sticker price and not total cost. It is what completers actually borrowed, so it excludes grants, savings, family money, employer funding and living costs — which makes it a FLOOR on what the credential costs, never a ceiling. The low and high figures are the 25th and 75th percentiles across the institutions that report a figure for this programme, so a quarter of institutions sit below the low end. College Scorecard pools two award years into each figure; the release used here is dated 10 June 2026.
Four years of doctoral study, usually after two to four years of undergraduate prerequisites, then the NAPLEX and a state law examination.
Licences renew every one to two years by state with continuing education requirements.
How many people hold this, and how many are working in the field
We could not source this one
For some credentials the issuing body publishes a credible count of everyone who holds it, and where it does we publish that count beside the number of people employed in the work. No such count exists for this one that we could verify, so this page shows none. We would rather leave the gap visible than fill it with an estimate — an invented denominator is worse than an absent one, because it cannot be checked.
The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy publishes a national count of licensed pharmacists, and it is behind a $395 paywall in its Survey of Pharmacy Law. A figure a reader cannot check is not a figure we will publish, so this page carries no credential-holder count. What it does carry, below, is the federal record of what happened to the people who completed the degree.
What happened to the people who finished the training
Four years after completing — a figure for the programme code, not for this job alone
Of 14,903 people who completed Pharmacy, first professional degree and were no longer studying four years later, 438 had no earnings on record at all — 2.9%. The ones who were working earned a median of $138,348, with the middle half between $120,409 and $158,074.
“No earnings on record” is not “unemployed”. The measure is the absence of any wage record and any positive self-employment income for the whole year. Nobody was asked whether they wanted work, so the count holds people who left the workforce by choice — raising children, caring, travelling, living on someone else's income, moving abroad — alongside everyone who wanted a job and had none. Nobody publishes the split and we will not guess it. What it does establish is how many people finished this training and were earning nothing from it or from anything else four years on, which is exactly what the pay figure above cannot tell you.
And this figure is not specific to this job. The federal government publishes programme outcomes at four-digit granularity and no finer, and this credential's programmes share their code with others. So the figure describes everyone who completed anything under that code at this level, not only the people who went on to do this work.
What that programme code covers: CIP 51.20 is pharmacy together with pharmaceutical sciences and pharmacy administration. The first-professional row is the PharmD, the route to licensure; the doctoral row is largely research doctorates in pharmaceutical science, which lead to laboratory and industry work rather than a pharmacy counter.
Who is in the cohort: completers who received federal student aid — roughly half of US undergraduates, and the other half are not measured here. People who went on to further study are in neither column. The Department suppresses institutions with cohorts too small to publish and adds statistical noise to the rest, so this is a sum over the institutions large enough to report: 80 of them, recovering 93.0% of the Department's own national count for this programme. Dropping the smallest reporting programmes moves the rate by 0.0 percentage points.
Source: US Department of Education, College Scorecard, Field of Study data, 2026 — release of 10 June 2026; measured four years after completion · view · the same figure for every programme we can publish
What it lets you do
The pay belongs to the job, not to the credential. These are the occupations it qualifies you for.
| Job | Is it required? | Median | Employed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pharmacists | Legally required to hold the job | $140,910 | 321,970 |
Median pay and employment: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025.
Does it pay for itself?
The job this unlocks pays a median of $140,910. The employment-weighted median across every occupation we publish is $50,020, so the premium for holding this is about $90,890 a year before tax.
Read that as a comparison to an average job, not to your job. What that baseline is, and what it leaves out
And it assumes you get the job. Every payback figure on this site is conditional on being hired into the work. That is the assumption the credential-holder count above exists to test, and it is the assumption every other pay site makes silently.
What you need before you start
- Undergraduate prerequisites, and at many schools a bachelor's degree
- A place at an ACPE-accredited school of pharmacy
- A pass in the NAPLEX and the state pharmacy law examination
Do not do this if
- you are counting on the retail job market of a decade ago — chain closures have reduced the number of community pharmacy posts and the competition for hospital and clinical roles is correspondingly harder
- you cannot stand for a full shift, which most community pharmacy work requires
All credentials, by payback period · How this is calculated · Look up something else