Pharmacist employment continues to shift away from retail and toward hospitals and other clinical settings, according to a June analysis from Drug Channels Institute of May 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Here are four things to know:
- Retail pharmacist employment fell by about 8,200 positions (4.8%) in 2025 to 162,200, the lowest level since Drug Channels began tracking the figure in 2010. It is now 14.2% below its 2017 peak and 7.5% below the 2021 pandemic trough, after a drop of 11,700 positions across 2023 and 2024 combined.
- Hospitals added 3,000 pharmacist jobs (3%) to reach 102,500, or 31.8% of the roughly 322,000 practicing pharmacists in the U.S. That follows more than 11,000 jobs added in 2023 and 2024.
- Retail settings still employ 50.4% of pharmacists, compared with 37.1% in nonretail settings and 12.5% in other industries such as government, manufacturing and wholesale. Within retail, drugstores and independent pharmacies employ 121,800 pharmacists, supermarkets 19,700 and mass merchants 20,700. Outside retail, physician offices employ 8,600, outpatient care centers 7,000 and home healthcare services 1,500, a workforce that shrank for a third straight year.
- Drug Channels tied the hospital growth partly to health systems building in-house specialty pharmacies in response to manufacturers’ restrictions on external 340B contract pharmacies. Some systems have also started operating, the analysis noted, as the two remaining national drugstore chains have closed nearly 3,000 locations since 2018.
