How is Pay of A Pharmacist?

If you can somehow get into Medicine then do it. Even if you have to go abroad to do it somewhere in Europe. There is someone on here who talks about 65k a yr etc etc. Maybe, but not the norm. You'll be starting on 25-28k in community and after 15 yrs by the time you're 40 you may have got up to just over 40k as a manager. It all depends on location, company, responsibilities, etc.

I can tell you from experience that working 0830 to 1730, 5 days a week for 47 weeks of the year, is like being on a hamster wheel. You are always running but never seem to get anywhere. It turns into groundhog day, same staff moaning, same customers moaning, same senior management moaning (about targets). It becomes an incredibly boring, repetitive job, we have so much knowledge and could do so much, but the model of community is making money from dispensing prescriptions, which the Pharmacist is responsible for, so this is why MURs have failed, you can't be in the consulting room talking to people while there are lines of scripts and customers waiting for you to check your script. Even if you have an ACT ( checking technician) you are legally responsible for their work! (Madness)

Now we are trying something new: CPCS, like a combination of emergency supply and minor ailments, but once again you are in the consulting room and the scripts are piling up waiting to be checked and ONCE AGAIN this side of things seems to have been ignored AGAIN. The basic problem is, there is one pharmacist and 2 jobs, and that's if you have a dispenser, if you don't or they are counter staff cover too you will struggle, you are constantly stressed, the phone rings constantly because someone had the bright idea, that pharmacies can be phoned by patients to order their meds, not phone the surgery. I don't know what the prescription clerks are doing! Again, MADNESS, it's not our job to order patient's meds. Why involve a 3rd party. Patient should contact surgery, electronically, or walk in with repeat slip, exemptions for housebound to use the phone. It's not difficult but GP surgeries think they can push a bit of work onto us. Something we don't get paid for and when the patient doesn't get what they ordered,it's OUR fault, no it's not, we simply placed the order, don't shoot the messenger, if they didn't send an item it's not our job to find out why. It's your medicine, you want it, they haven't sent it, get off your ass and go find out why. Not our job, we did our unpaid bit by taking your call, printing out your meds request, taking it to the surgery to process, and then THEY haven't sent what you asked for. NOT our problem. Your meds, Your problem. Anyway I am going off on a tangent.

Basically if you can get into Medicine then do it, here or abroad. There is a career path and progression and salary progression. There is NOT in community pharmacy. A lot of companies have flat management structures now, there used to be progression in the big chains, now maybe less so. From my experience, the 30/40k is more likely that the 65/80k or whatever nonsense that person is posting. You may earn that as a Head pharmacist in a hospital at the top of a band. Or Superintendent of a chain. Your bog standard bloke or woman in a chemist shop will generally be on below 50k. And tbh lucky if they are on over 40k.
Pay has fallen rapidly in real terms. The locum rate was frozen in 2008 due to all the new graduates.
Drs get high wages and locum rates because there is demand and a shortage so their pay rate rises. In pharmacy, demand is the same or falling, and supply has increased so pay rate falls. Look at economics supply and demand curves. Maybe these new PCN networks will take up more pharmacists, and there are less people going to study pharmacy because they read these threads and hopefully make the right decision, that although it may be an interesting degree, the job at the end is far too stressful and badly paid for the work and responsibility you have. You can earn as much being the deputy manager up the road of the Lidl or Aldi if you enjoy retail. Personally not having had a pay rise for 11 and a half years since 2008 and some companies are back to paying locum rates that they were paying in 2004 due to the saturation, and more pharmacists than there are jobs in urban areas. In the NE and SW, and rural Wales and Scotland you may well earn those silly figures that have been quoted. But they are the exception, not the norm.
Basically, if money and status and progression is what you want then pharmacy is NOT for you.
(yes there are some 80k jobs, but these are rare, unlike Medicine where you will find most GPs working full-time as partners and not salaried, will all be on over 80k) If you look up your own GP surgery on the nhs.uk website they tell you the average salary of a GP there!

Good luck, but research carefully, remember, you will work until you are 70, that's 45 yrs if you qualify at age 25 so take some time now to decide. Do online quizzes to find out your personality type and what work you would be suited to. Example, there is no point becoming cabin crew because you love travel, but hate the general public and get scared of turbulence! If you think you have made a mistake, pull your UCAS form and apply next year, but in your year off, make sure you can explain to a Uni a productive thing you did, for example you travelled across America with a friend for 3 months, so that shows you looking after yourself, planning your travel and tickets and buses or trains and hotels, managing money, meeting and getting along with people from a different culture, etc etc. Then when you come back you work in a charity shop 3 afternoons a week, and you volunteer in a hospice 3 mornings a week. The important thing to do is show WHAT the experiences taught you and WHY you did them. How did they develop you as a person, how did they make you more suitable for the career you want to progress in. Example, if you want to be a GP, you will see and will need to deal with death. Old people die, people with cancer die, people have heart attacks and die. There is no point becoming a GP if you are a weepy daily type who will cry overtime. Hence the hospice experience. People you meet there one month, may not be there the following month.
So hopefully you get the idea. I'm sure there are plenty of people of a certain age reading these threads, like pre-reg tutors, pharmacists who take summer students like myself, lecturers, etc, of Generation X or Boombers who wish they had done more research and made better plans and always have a planB! Always.

Remember, life is what happens when you're busy doing other things. It's much easier to change courses, move Unis, or countries! when you're in your 20s, than try and start all over again when you're 35 and have a husband, a mortgage, 2 kids and a dog! It's not impossible!, But it's harder. So to the OP, these are just my thoughts. Hopefully someone it somewhere will trigger something in you to go and look at a particular area or career path you are interested in. Where do you want to be when you're 30, then 40.

A good simple example is what Michael Heseltine wrote on the back of a fag packet in the student bar many decades ago. 'Millionaire by age 30, MP by age 40, In the cabinet by age 50, PM by age 60.' He nearly did it, the last one he had to settle for deputy PM under John Major. Try something similar then start filling in the gaps between those decades of HOW you get to that goal.

so would you suggest not doing pharmacy degree ?

There's nothing wrong with a pharmacy degree.
The problem is, as any pharmacy student who goes on a community placement will tell you, What they teach you in University, and community pharmacy in the real world are totally different things! (60-70% of pharmacy grads go into community).
Do a pharmacy degree by all means, just don't do community pharmacy at the end of it. I know people who haven't bothered with the pre-reg year as they have decided they never want to practise and have used it as a basic science degree and gone from there. (Personally I would do the pre-reg so you have something to fall back on.)
One guy I know went into computer programming. There is a poster on here who went into something totally different and doesn't work as a pharmacist.
So, the slightly weird answer is: do a pharmacy degree if you want to, just don't do the main job at the end of it. It's a gamble! Will you be one of the lucky 30% who isn't in a shop!?

In terms of community pharmacy I think about a third of my academic year aren't doing pharmacy anymore, some didn't pass the pre-reg exam and became disillusioned, some worked for a while and left, becoming doctors, lawyers, musicians, others went into academia, and a couple went into industry as formulation scientists after doing a PhD (though it shows the breadth and value of the degree), though an easier entry point for a formulation scientist may well be a pure science degree, and a couple have gone into economics. Then you have the ones that went straight into hospital, and who seem to be happy there.

I'll second what 0895 said about salaries - there is no way in this climate as a fresh graduate you'll get that kind of money.

As a second pharmacist (good for getting experience) I've seen salaries as low as £24,000/yr, if you aren't acting as both a pharmacist and a manager don't expect it to go up rapidly. At the company I work for currently the entry salary for a pharmacist manager is £34,000 for 45hr per week. Due to decreases in funding pay rises have been hit and miss the last couple of years - a couple of years with 0% raise, a couple with 1 or 2%, so falling behind inflation.

Staffing levels have been cut due to decreased government funding and increases in minimum wage eroding profitability, and I don't see that changing as the 5 year plan outlines a 0% increase in funding for the next 5 years. Meanwhile workload increases as every year there are more scripts (though item growth is down), management will probably expect at least 2% growth as a KPI. My growth target KPI is 5% because I grew the business last year, despite having less staff to do it with this year.

In terms of locum rates - ChemistandDruggist has just published the latest figures

Bearing in mind the multiples have been complaining about more pharmacists working for GPs and in the NHS, the figures are disappointingly barely keeping up with inflation and locum rates are still lower than 2012.

I am interested in studying Pharmacy but want to ensure that I am not making a mistake. Everyone seems to have a lot of negative things to say about pharmacy, but what concerns me is the salary. My GCSE grades were not good enough for medicine or dentistry, but my grades are AAA, which I believe are respectable, and I worked hard for them; my hard work was essentially for nothing if it isn't able to pay for the lifestyle I aspire to live.

There seem to be mixed reviews on the salary. Some seem to think Pharmacy offers a 6 figure salary and job stability, describing salaries between £80-£120K with experience. Most seem to suggest that the pay of Pharmacists remains at £30K and that's it :/

Thank you for your advice guys it was very insightful and detailed.

I am interested in studying Pharmacy but want to ensure that I am not making a mistake. Everyone seems to have a lot of negative things to say about pharmacy, but what concerns me is the salary. My GCSE grades were not good enough for medicine or dentistry, but my grades are AAA, which I believe are respectable, and I worked hard for them; my hard work was essentially for nothing if it isn't able to pay for the lifestyle I aspire to live.

There seem to be mixed reviews on the salary. Some seem to think Pharmacy offers a 6 figure salary and job stability, describing salaries between £80-£120K with experience. Most seem to suggest that the pay of Pharmacists remains at £30K and that's it :/

I'm not sure where some of the other posters are getting their figures from - they must be from the most saturated, competitive locations? I qualified 4 years ago and immediately started community pharmacy locums in the southeast of England for £21 an hour (roughly 40k per year). After locuming in a few different places for the same rate I took on a permanent, contracted role in a community pharmacy for £19 an hour which rose to £20 within 2 years and now a further 2 years later I have bonuses such as paid annual registration, money for each NMS and smoking cessation completed and now I'm doing independent prescribing to do a clinic in the pharmacy to earn even further money.

I hear hospital starts lower than community and you can eventually climb to a senior role earning £60k+. Community from my experience starts at £40k and if you work for an independent there's opportunities to make more money by driving the business.

If you go through most of the threads here, it's always the same group of people painting negativity everywhere. I'm a manager like yourself and I earn just above £65,000 per year excluding bonuses. If I wanted to earn £100,000/year, i could simply increase my contracted hours or locum on my days off, but I wouldn't have a work-life balance by doing so. I know none of my fellow manager colleagues in my location earn below £55,000 per year. I honestly don't know where these doom and gloom posters get their abysmally low figures from. When I qualified last year, I started as a relief pharmacist for a 'big 4 chain' earning £42,000 per year excluding bonuses. In a space of just over 12 months, I have moved from £42,000 to £65,000 as a branch manager. My contracted bonuses probably take my wages to just above £75,000/year.

I'm now technically earning a GP wage whilst working as a community pharmacist.

I am interested in studying Pharmacy but want to ensure that I am not making a mistake. Everyone seems to have a lot of negative things to say about pharmacy, but what concerns me is the salary. My GCSE grades were not good enough for medicine or dentistry, but my grades are AAA

Just to emphasise your points, I have highlighted your figure.
I was on 28k as a pharmacy manager doing 45 killer hours a week in 1996!! That's nearly 24 YEARS AGO ! and the salary has gone up by 6k.

(a quick feed of 28k into an inflation wage calculator, (it assumed inflation of 2.8%/yr)
gave £51,630 as the wage expected for 2018!!!!)

If you want MONEY, then obviously DON'T DO PHARMACY!
(according to these figures/calcs).

That's a pretty insane jump of pay. How many items a month is your pharmacy processing? Do you have a quota of services you have to complete?

I been hearing nay-sayers since I started studying in 2009. It reminds me of a aged, past retirement locum I sometimes worked with during my pre-reg year; he was begging every pharmacy in the area for shifts and would moan about the decline of pharmacy and how difficult it was to find work anymore. Well, maybe if he didn't work at the speed of a turtle he would be more desirable for hire. In a typical evening shift he would be left with 40 baskets to check and bag and only complete half of it in the four hours. Another locum I used to work with (a young man this time) had to cast a massive net to find work because again, no one wanted him since he worked so slowly. I feel like the nay-sayers are people like these who shoot themselves in the foot by not making themselves desirable as possible. As a locum I always tried to be kind and helpful, push myself to make sure the work is done and worked on getting all my services up to scratch ASAP. I never had an issue finding work and had a few opportunities of people wanting to hire me on a permanent basis or a branch manager. In the end I settled with my pick working 40 hours in the space of 3 days and having four and half days off each week.

If you go through most of the threads here, it's always the same group of people painting negativity everywhere. I'm a manager like yourself and I earn just above £65,000 per year excluding bonuses. If I wanted to earn £100,000/year, i could simply increase my contracted hours or locum on my days off, but I wouldn't have a work-life balance by doing so. I know none of my fellow manager colleagues in my location earn below £55,000 per year. I honestly don't know where these doom and gloom posters get their abysmally low figures from. When I qualified last year, I started as a relief pharmacist for a 'big 4 chain' earning £42,000 per year excluding bonuses. In a space of just over 12 months, I have moved from £42,000 to £65,000 as a branch manager. My contracted bonuses probably take my wages to just above £75,000/year.

I'm now technically earning a GP wage whilst working as a community pharmacist.

I know of a lot of pharmacists and I can confidently say that your wage is an anomaly, I've had interviews with the big chains in different parts of the country and have been offered manager roles instantly, don't want to brag but even whilst locuming they always ask me if I'm interested in a manager role.

When it comes to salary negotiation they will not go above £50k, that is the norm. Doesn't even matter if it's a busy store that does 20k items. The reality is that you can earn £35k as a relief pharmacist, £45k as a manager pushing to £50k