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

National totals

What this specialty covers

A facility used by pharmacists for the compounding and dispensing of medicinal preparations and other associated professional and administrative services. A pharmacy is a facility whose primary function is to store, prepare and legally dispense prescription drugs under the professional supervision of a licensed pharmacist. It meets any licensing or certification standards set forth by the jurisdiction where it is located.

Reading the sole-proprietor share

For Pharmacy, 666 of 25,364 active records, or 2.6%, are flagged as sole proprietors in NPPES. This is a self-reported NPPES field, not a direct measure of ownership, staffing, independence, or whether a pharmacy operates in private practice, so it is an imperfect proxy rather than a count of privately practicing pharmacies.

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.
• NPPES records represent NPIs and reported taxonomies, not necessarily unique physical locations, organizations, or dispensing sites.
• Counts include active records with Pharmacy as the primary taxonomy, so entities using another primary taxonomy may not appear.
• 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