Pharmacist Salary in South Carolina 2026,
$135,700 Median | BLS Data by City

A median $135,700 a year, or $65.24 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, which is 3.7% below the national median of $140,910. The middle half falls between $126,790 and $158,210 and the full band runs $82,430 to $170,270. The long lower tail is relief and part-time work rather than a low entry rate, so the median is the figure to use rather than any average.

Florence at $155,020, then Spartanburg $153,610, Charleston-North Charleston $145,950, Hilton Head Island-Bluffton-Port Royal $137,360 and Greenville-Anderson-Greer $135,580. The ordering runs almost exactly opposite to market size, which is unusual and informative: the smaller Pee Dee and upstate markets are paying recruitment premiums that the state's larger and more desirable metros do not have to.

Through the South Carolina Board of Pharmacy at the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation. You need an accredited Doctor of Pharmacy degree, completed intern hours, a passing NAPLEX score and the South Carolina jurisprudence examination. The board also registers technicians and permits pharmacies, and it operates alongside the state's prescription monitoring programme, so it is the single regulatory point of contact for practice in the state.

Because it has to. Florence at $155,020 and Spartanburg at $153,610 are competing for pharmacists against Charleston and Greenville, which attract applicants on lifestyle grounds without needing to bid up. Rural and small-market pharmacies in the Pee Dee and the Lowcountry carry the state's recruitment difficulty, and the roughly twenty thousand dollar premium over Greenville-Anderson-Greer is the price of solving it. For a pharmacist willing to practise outside the coastal and upstate metros, that is the most straightforward pay decision available in this state.

Neither dominates the published data, and the interquartile range of $126,790 to $158,210 covers both. What separates the top of the band is management responsibility and market: a rural community pharmacy manager in the Pee Dee can out-earn a Greenville hospital staff pharmacist, which is not how most states work. The reliable generalisation is that in South Carolina, where you practise is worth more than which setting you practise in — the reverse of the usual advice.

That the market is clearing on willingness to relocate rather than on qualification. In most states the largest metros pay the most because they concentrate specialised work and high living costs; in South Carolina pharmacy the smallest published markets pay the most because they cannot attract applicants. That has three practical implications: a pharmacist indifferent to location has an unusually large arbitrage available, roughly twenty thousand dollars; a pharmacist committed to Charleston or Greenville should expect to trade pay for that choice and negotiate on other terms; and the premium is likely to persist, because it reflects a structural distribution problem rather than a temporary vacancy.

The 10th percentile of $82,430 is a long way below the 25th of $126,790, which means the bottom of this distribution is part-time and relief work rather than entry-level full-time practice — anyone reading the band as a career ladder will misjudge the starting point. The figure also excludes the sign-on and retention incentives that the rural premium markets use on top of base salary. And with about 5,320 pharmacists across community, hospital, long-term care and specialty settings, one median covers quite different jobs.

Location, unusually, and first: the Florence and Spartanburg premium over Greenville-Anderson-Greer is worth nearly twenty thousand dollars and requires no additional credential at all. Management responsibility second — pharmacy manager and hospital pharmacy director roles are what the $158,210 seventy-fifth percentile and $170,270 ninetieth describe. Residency training and specialty certification third, for the clinical posts concentrated in Charleston, Columbia and Greenville. And full-time rather than relief status fourth, which is the difference between the $82,430 tenth percentile and the rest of the band.