Pharmacy Technician: how many are there, and how many are in private practice?

National totals

What this specialty covers

A person who works under the direct supervision of a licensed pharmacist and performs many pharmacy-related functions that do not require the professional judgment of a pharmacist.

Reading the sole-proprietor share

For this specialty, 3,244 records, or 26.9%, are marked as sole proprietors in NPPES. That field is self-reported and is an imperfect proxy for private practice: it describes the NPI record's reported status, not whether a technician works independently, owns a business, or practices outside pharmacist supervision. Use the share to describe NPPES registrations, not to estimate the share of all pharmacy technicians in private practice.

By state

New NPI registrations by year

Counts reflect the year each NPI was first issued, among records still active today. The final year is partial: this data covers through 2026-01-11.

Data notes

• The sole-proprietor field is self-reported by the provider in NPPES and is an imperfect proxy for private practice.
• A sole-proprietor count shown as <11 is suppressed: the true value is below 11, which could include zero.
• NPI counts are registration records, not a definitive count of people, jobs, or service locations.
• Taxonomy, address, and other NPPES fields can be updated, so the results represent a registration snapshot; enumeration year records first NPI issuance, not necessarily when work began.
• Providers are counted once, by their primary taxonomy code only.

Source: CMS National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES) Data Dissemination file, FOIA-disclosable public data under CMS-6060-N. Aggregated by Hero EMR on 2026-08-03; deactivated NPIs excluded; specialty assigned from the primary taxonomy code (NUCC 25.1). Counts below 11 are suppressed. Individual providers are never published. All provider data pages.

Common questions