Pharmacist Salary in Tennessee 2026,
$133,390 Median | BLS Data by City

A median $133,390 a year, or $64.13 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $123,820 and $153,380 and a full range of $88,700 to $164,430. That is 5.3% below the $140,910 national median, and Tennessee's absence of state income tax recovers a good part of that difference in take-home terms.

Jackson at $140,540 — a small West Tennessee metro, ahead of Nashville at $137,590, Memphis at $134,220, Clarksville at $133,920 and Kingsport-Bristol at $133,270. That inversion is real and it is informative: small-market community pharmacy in Tennessee pays a premium because those sites are the hardest to staff.

Through the Tennessee Board of Pharmacy at the Department of Health. You need a PharmD from an ACPE-accredited programme, the required internship hours, a passing NAPLEX score and the Tennessee MPJE jurisprudence examination. Tennessee also licenses pharmacy practice sites separately from individuals, and the board administers the collaborative pharmacy practice and statewide protocol provisions that define what you may do without an individual prescription.

Because supply, not demand, sets the local rate. Tennessee is largely rural with a location quotient of 1.22, meaning a dense community pharmacy footprint spread across small markets that new graduates rarely target. Jackson at $140,540 above Nashville at $137,590 is the visible result: an employer in a small market has to outbid the metros to fill the post. The trade is on the other side — those roles usually mean sole-pharmacist coverage, longer hours and less clinical variety.

Hours, not rate. It sits more than thirty-five thousand dollars below the 25th percentile of $123,820, a gap far larger than any other step in this band, and that shape is the signature of part-time, relief and float pharmacists being counted in an annual wage series. A full-time Tennessee staff pharmacist is realistically looking at the $123,820 to $153,380 range, not the bottom of the published band.

That the profession's geography of pay runs opposite to almost every other occupation on this site. Nashville is Tennessee's pay ceiling for physician assistants, medical assistants and phlebotomists; for pharmacists it is not even first. The reason is that community pharmacy demand tracks population rather than economic density, while the pharmacist supply concentrates around the pharmacy schools and the metros. A graduate willing to practise in West Tennessee or the smaller East Tennessee markets has real negotiating leverage — signing incentives and above-metro base salaries are routinely available there and rarely available in Nashville.

It blends three different jobs. Community retail pharmacy, health-system and hospital pharmacy, and industry or managed care roles all fall under one occupation code, and they differ in hours, call obligations and how much of the compensation is bonus. The figure also excludes retail bonus structures and the sign-on packages Tennessee's small-market employers use, which are a material part of the offer in exactly the places that pay best. And the $88,700 tenth percentile should not be read as a full-time salary — it reflects part-time and relief work.

Setting and market. Managing a pharmacy is the standard step from the median to the $153,380 seventy-fifth percentile. Board certification — BCPS, BCOP, BCACP — is what pays in health-system practice, particularly in the Nashville and Memphis academic centres. And in Tennessee specifically, taking a hard-to-staff small-market post is a live financial option rather than a sacrifice, as the Jackson figure of $140,540 demonstrates. Layered on all of it is the no-income-tax position, which is worth several thousand a year at this salary and should be part of any cross-border comparison.