Pharmacist Salary Tracker: Q1 2026 Regional Medians

The first PharmSee quarterly snapshot — nine English regions ranked, with annualized movement and what is pulling each number.

This is the first of what will become a quarterly salary tracker from PharmSee — a single reference snapshot of community pharmacist pay across the nine English regions, benchmarked against the same live data feed every three months.

The 2,400+ pharmacist and pharmacy technician vacancies currently in PharmSee's dataset (sourced from Boots, NHS Jobs, Superdrug, Asda, Cohens, Morrisons, Tesco, Weldricks, Rowlands, Day Lewis, and Well Pharmacy) give us a live-market median with almost no aggregator lag. Here is what that median looks like as of Q1 2026.

The Q1 2026 regional league table

Rank	Region	Median pharmacist salary	90th percentile	Active vacancies
1	London	£51,468	£62,400	208
2	East Midlands	£46,696	£56,300	94
3	South East	£42,631	£53,100	171
4	Yorkshire & Humber	£42,570	£52,980	127
5	West Midlands	£34,762	£47,400	156
6	North West	£34,422	£47,100	189
7	East of England	£34,422	£46,800	111
8	North East	£32,640	£46,100	67
9	South West	£32,640	£45,300	89

The spread from top to bottom is £18,828 — 58% of the South West median. Between the top four regions (all above £42,000) and the bottom five (all below £35,000) there is a distinct band gap. No region sits in the £35,000-£42,000 range, which is unusual for wage distributions and speaks to a two-speed community pharmacist market.

The "above £42k" cluster

London, East Midlands, South East, and Yorkshire & Humber form a distinct upper band. Three of the four drivers:

London: scarcity-driven. 208 active vacancies, 1.01:1 GP-to-pharmacy ratio, highest pharmacist shortfall per capita. The £51,468 median is a market-clearing floor, not a luxury.
East Midlands: Leicester's 1.25:1 ratio does the heavy lifting. Nottingham's 0.73:1 pulls the regional average down, but the median holds at £46,696 because the supply-constrained Leicester market sets the rate.
Yorkshire & Humber: driven by Weldricks (37 vacancies, Doncaster-based) plus hospital pharmacy pay from Leeds and Sheffield NHS trusts. The mix of community scarcity and NHS band weighting keeps the median at £42,570.

The "below £35k" cluster

West Midlands, North West, East of England, North East, and South West all sit below £35,000 at the median. Drivers:

West Midlands: 156 active vacancies, 1.02:1 ratio, but a high proportion of large-chain postings (Boots, Superdrug) that hold base pay at the mid-£30k mark. The 90th percentile tells a different story — £47,400 shows that specialist roles do exist.
North West: Liverpool's stretched 1.42:1 ratio should be pulling pay up, but Manchester's balanced 0.91:1 and the chain saturation (Boots, Cohens, Rowlands, Well) hold the baseline down.
North East and South West: joint last at £32,640. Both regions are characterized by a thin pharmacist hiring base — 67 and 89 active vacancies respectively — and heavy supermarket pharmacy share (Asda, Morrisons, Tesco).

Q1 2026 movement signals

Because this is the first quarterly snapshot, there is no direct Q4 2025 comparison — but we can triangulate movement from the underlying data:

NHS Jobs pharmacist postings: 519 active (up from an estimated 480 in early Q4 2025 based on feed telemetry). This is the biggest single-source driver of upward pressure on the median, especially in London and Yorkshire.
Boots active pharmacist vacancies: 537, broadly flat quarter-on-quarter. Boots tends to hold base rates fixed and adjust shift bonuses instead, which doesn't move the median.
Supermarket pharmacy combined: 130 vacancies (Asda 54, Tesco 43, Morrisons 33). Supermarket postings have been growing steadily and hold the North East and South West medians down.
Locum market: PharmSee's 1,385 locum vacancies snapshot suggests day-rate pressure is still intense in London and Liverpool, which feeds into permanent-role negotiation.

The net signal: the upper-band regions (London, East Midlands, South East, Yorkshire) are firm-to-rising; the lower-band regions are flat. The two-speed market identified above is not converging.

What to watch in Q2 2026

NHS Agenda for Change 2026-27 uplift. If the national pay review body recommends above-inflation rises, the Yorkshire & Humber and London medians will jump first (hospital-heavy employer mix).
Boots restructuring decisions. Any formal shift from Boots's 537 open roles to branch closures would push the North West median down further.
Weldricks, Cohens, and Peak Pharmacy hiring volume. All three mid-size regional chains hold meaningful share of Yorkshire, East Midlands and North West medians. If they ramp or contract, the tracker will show it.

Methodology

All figures derived from PharmSee's live /api/jobs/search endpoint, aggregated across 11 sources. Median calculated on posted salary strings (numeric ranges averaged). Vacancies without published rates (e.g. "Competitive") are excluded from the median calculation but counted in the active-vacancy totals. The 10-mile radius location analysis and city-level atlas referenced here use PharmSee's NHS Digital ODS-backed pharmacy and GP practice datasets.

The tracker will be updated at the end of each calendar quarter. The Q2 2026 snapshot will publish in early July.