The pharmaceutical industry remains highly lucrative not only for investors but also for employees. The average worker at a biopharmaceutical company earned $116,648 in 2025 – roughly 30% more than an employee at an S&P 500 company, according to an Endpoints News study. But the link between company size – or even profitability – and employee pay is not straightforward.
The Endpoints report includes data from 181 public companies that disclosed their median employee salaries over the past year. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has required public companies to disclose the ratio of CEO pay to median employee pay since 2018, offering a window into industry trends.
This year, Endpoints also incorporated headcount data into its report. This approach helps avoid distortions caused by small biotech firms with very lean staff.
Most shareholder reports carry a warning that salary data across companies cannot be compared directly. The SEC permits different methodologies for calculating pay and defining the typical worker. Some reports included health insurance costs and pension contributions, others did not, and so on.
Even with all these caveats, the data provide a picture of salaries in the pharma industry. It remains an exceptionally well-paid field, especially compared with the average US income of $45,140 in 2024. Biopharmaceutical companies pay more than typical S&P 500 firms, where the average worker earned $89,744 in 2025, according to an analysis by Associated Press and Equilar.
The 32 large biotech companies together employ just over one million people and have a combined market capitalisation of $3.88 trillion. But it is worth noting that the link between revenue and employee pay is not direct: perennial revenue leader Johnson & Johnson ranked only 10th in median salary, which came in at a “mere” $91,000 last year.
Among Big Pharma companies, Gilead is the most generous, with a median employee salary of $239,000 per year. It is followed by Novo Nordisk: the Danish company, despite its troubles and headcount reductions, pays $175,000 a year. Its far more successful rival Eli Lilly, however, pays only $125,000 a year.
But even the highest median salaries in Big Pharma are lower than those at biotech firms. Employees at Alnylam, a leading US biopharmaceutical company specialising in RNA interference (RNAi)‑based therapies, earn $312,000 a year.
Ionis – a California-based biopharmaceutical company, a pioneer and global leader in RNA-targeted therapeutics – is a close second, with a median salary of $305,000 a year.
At Vertex Pharmaceuticals – a developer of HIV drugs (amprenavir and fosamprenavir) and the hepatitis C drug telaprevir, and one of the world’s largest public companies – the median salary last year was $264,000. That put the manufacturer ahead of Moderna, which, despite declining COVID-19 vaccine revenues, held its median pay at $225,000 a year.
At US-based Biogen, which specialises in drugs for multiple sclerosis, spinal muscular atrophy and Alzheimer’s disease, the median salary in 2025 was $208,000.
Rounding out the top 10 most generous biotech employers is BioMarin, which focuses on orphan diseases such as mucopolysaccharidoses, phenylketonuria and haemophilia. Its median salary was $201,000 in 2025.
