Quality Control Analyst Salary Guide 2026

Last updated: September 19, 2026

By Dave Manchester, Scientific Recruiting, KORE1

Is $62,000 enough to land a good QC analyst this year? A quality control analyst makes a median of $62,280 a year across all U.S. industries, but drug and medicine manufacturers pay a median of $78,350, going by Bureau of Labor Statistics data for May 2025. Which of those two numbers your band was built on usually decides whether the offer gets signed.

Picture the finalist every QC manager is hoping for. Three years of HPLC assays and dissolution testing on commercial product. At home in Empower. Has already written up a phase 1 out-of-specification investigation without someone checking every line. You loved her in the panel interview.

So did somebody else.

I tell hiring managers to think of a strong candidate as a professional athlete. If they’re amazing, multiple companies should be interested in hiring them. A strong QC analyst is a free agent with a short list of teams calling, and the team that shows up with a band built on the wrong federal number doesn’t get a counteroffer to consider. It gets a polite email. Getting the band and the seat right together is what our pharma quality search team does before a req is posted. The manager above the bench has a pay guide for quality managers of its own.

I recruit for pharma, CDMO, and lab quality teams as part of KORE1’s life sciences staffing group. That puts me on the side that gets paid when you hire. I’m not neutral. Every range below comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, O*NET, or a salary site, and I’ll name which one each time. I didn’t invent any. Where I’m giving an opinion instead of a number, I’ll say so.

The Federal Code Your QC Analyst Is Filed Under

A quality control analyst runs lab tests on raw materials, in-process samples, finished batches, and stability pulls, checks each result against its specification, and recommends whether the data supports release. O*NET files the job as occupation 19-4099.01, inside a Bureau of Labor Statistics catch-all called life, physical, and social science technicians, all other.

That catch-all is the first problem.

BLS counted 73,910 people in that code in its May 2025 occupational profile. Colleges and universities employ 25,880 of them, more than a third. Scientific research firms employ another 10,070. Drug makers? 2,660. So when a salary page quotes $62,280 as the national median for this code, it is mostly describing research techs in university labs, plus contract researchers, temp workers, and federal lab staff, and only a sliver of the people who test commercial batches for a living. The O*NET profile for quality control analysts lists educational services as the top industry for the code. Not pharma.

The second problem trips up more people, and it’s that plenty of QC analysts aren’t in that code at all. Call the job “QC Chemist” and BLS counts the person as a chemist. Your micro analyst? Probably filed under microbiologists. The person running pH, Karl Fischer, and loss on drying at a small generics site often shows up as a chemical technician, which pays differently again. Same department, four federal codes.

Here’s what each of them paid nationally, across every industry.

Source: BLS OEWS, May 2025, annual wages, all industries.

Chemists sit about $29,000 above the catch-all at the median. Some of that is PhD research chemists dragging the number up, and some of it is real, because a posting with “chemist” in the title pulls a different crowd with different expectations. If you’re still deciding what the seat even is, my post on QC versus QA in pharma is the better place to start.

Who You’re Really Bidding Against

For this code, the industry cut is the one I trust most. Here’s the same catch-all, sorted by who’s doing the hiring.

Source: BLS OEWS industry estimates, May 2025, occupation 19-4099.

The bottom row is the one I’d circle. A contract testing lab pays a median of $49,280 for the same code that a drug maker pays $78,350, a gap of $29,070, and contract labs are exactly where a lot of good QC analysts learn the job, because they run huge volumes of compendial methods across dozens of products for dozens of clients. I’m oversimplifying a little, since contract labs also hire plenty of people straight out of school who stay for years. Only a little, though. The good ones know the gap, and they see it every time a pharma posting shows its range.

That’s my free agent. Her current lab may counter, sure. The bigger threat is the medical device plant twenty minutes away, which pays a median of $79,310 and runs plenty of the same bioburden and cleanroom testing you do.

Startups get hit hardest. A company hiring its first two QC analysts tends to set pay from whatever salary page came up first, then can’t figure out why every finalist in a plant town says no. Resetting that number is often the first thing our biotech recruiters do.

A Working Band From Analyst I to Senior

The federal data doesn’t break QC pay out by level. Not BLS, not O*NET. So below is how I’d build one from the federal percentiles, and I want to be plain about it. This is my mapping of BLS numbers onto levels. It isn’t a survey of job titles. It still works.

How the rows were built: the Analyst I floor is the national 25th percentile for code 19-4099. Every other breakpoint is a pharmaceutical manufacturing percentile for the same code, May 2025 (25th $64,840, median $78,350, 75th $98,500). Hourly is annual divided by 2,080.

Two ways to sanity-check it. First, PayScale’s self-reported data puts an analyst with less than a year of experience at $55,901 in average total pay and a one-to-four-year analyst at $64,579, which puts both inside the first row, the second one just under its ceiling. Good sign. Second, pull the offer letters for your last three QC hires and look at where each one landed inside its row, because if all three came in near the top, the row is wrong for your market. Not them.

If you’d rather run the number against your own zip code and title, our free salary benchmark assistant does that in a couple of minutes.

Micro Bench or Chemistry Bench?

Inside drug manufacturing the codes pull closer together, and one of them breaks away.

Source: BLS OEWS, May 2025, NAICS 325400, annual wages.

The analyst, the chemist, and the microbiologist sit within $5,420 of each other at the median once they’re inside a drug plant. Chemists actually earn less there than chemists overall, $80,440 against $91,240. The chemical technician is the one that breaks away, at $61,430, and that’s worth knowing if your posting says “technician” and your expectations say “analyst.” Titles set the applicant pool before anyone reads the job description.

Microbiologists are the scarce ones. BLS counts 18,940 nationally, against 82,770 chemists, and a sterile site needs them for environmental monitoring, endotoxin testing, bioburden, and sterility testing, all of which keep running whether or not your micro seat is filled. If you make injectables, budget the micro seat at or above the chemistry seat. That’s opinion, but the medians back it. The search will run longer, too, so if you use a scientific recruiting partner, brief the micro seat as its own search, not as a line on the chemistry req.

Why Raleigh Reads $28,000 Above Durham

Metro numbers for this code are noisy, and the Research Triangle shows it best. The Raleigh metro’s median for code 19-4099 is $77,000. Durham-Chapel Hill, about 25 miles away, is $49,030. Same labor market. My read is that Durham’s figure is mostly university research techs, while the Raleigh metro takes in the biomanufacturing plants in Holly Springs and Clayton. Different employers, not a different market.

So I put the chemist median next to it. Two imperfect numbers beat one.

Source: BLS OEWS, May 2025, annual median wage, metropolitan statistical areas, all industries.

Boston should make you stop. The catch-all median there is $65,780, barely above national, while chemists in the same metro earn a median of $127,290. A QC analyst at a Cambridge biotech is paid like neither of them. Indianapolis and Trenton-Princeton, two metros with serious drug manufacturing, sit at the very bottom of the first column for the same reason Durham does, because the code there is counting university and research techs rather than the analysts releasing commercial batches. Somebody else is in the sample.

What I’d do, and this is opinion, is start from the pharma rows in the band table instead of the metro column. Then push up in any metro where chemists run well above the $91,240 national chemist median. Boston, the Bay Area, Baltimore, and San Diego all do.

Why the Salary Sites Disagree

You’ve probably searched this already and gotten three answers. PayScale puts the average QC analyst base at $69,975, from 424 self-reported profiles last updated May 31, 2026, with a 10th-to-90th percentile range of $50,000 to $95,000. Talent.com, a job board, lists $82,850, based on 10,000 salaries. BLS says $62,280. That’s a $20,570 spread for one job title.

Nobody’s lying. BLS counts every employer in the code, universities included. PayScale counts whoever fills out its survey. A job board counts what employers post. If your finance team picked the lowest of the three because it came from the government, they picked the one least like a drug plant.

When a Finalist Is Worth More Than the Band

I don’t have a sourced dollar figure for any of these, and I won’t guess one for you. They’re the things that get a candidate a second offer, which is the thing that actually moves your number. Before the offer comes the posting, and our quality control analyst job description template covers what belongs in it.

• Sterile manufacturing. Gowning-qualified, comfortable in a Grade A/B environment, has run environmental monitoring on a filling line.
• Someone who has sat in the room during an FDA inspection and answered an investigator’s questions about her own data is worth more than her years suggest.
• Method validation under ICH Q2(R2), or method transfers between sites. Rare below the senior row.
• Empower administration, or LIMS experience on LabWare or STARLIMS. Every lab thinks this is common until they need it.
• Second or third shift, willingly.

Two of those on one resume and I’d expect competition. Plan the offer for it.

Before You Name a Number

Realistically, what does an entry-level QC analyst cost in 2026?

$48,000 to $65,000 in base pay, depending mostly on whether you make drugs or test them for someone else. Those are the national 25th percentile and the pharmaceutical manufacturing 25th percentile for code 19-4099 in the BLS May 2025 data. PayScale’s figure for analysts under a year of experience, $55,901 in total pay, lands right in the middle.

Our finalist has another offer. Match it or walk?

Neither, at first. Ask what the other offer actually contains, because a higher base with a rotating shift, a longer commute, or a contract-lab workload is a different job, and most analysts will tell you what they’d trade if you ask plainly. If it really is the same job for more money, you’re looking at the free-agent problem from the top of this guide, and matching is usually cheaper than restarting the search.

QC chemist or QC analyst, does the title change what we pay?

Less than you’d think inside pharma. Drug makers paid chemists a median of $80,440 and the QC analysts’ code $78,350 in May 2025. The title changes who applies, though. “Chemist” draws people with chemistry degrees who expect to run instruments, and “technician” draws people who may never have touched an HPLC.

Do we have to put a salary range on the posting?

In New Jersey and Massachusetts, two of the biggest pharma states, most employers now do. New Jersey got there first. Its salary range law reaches any employer with 10 or more employees and has applied since June 1, 2025, and Massachusetts added its own on October 29, 2025, for employers with 25 or more. Other states have their own versions, so check yours. Once your range is public, so is every competitor’s, and your finalist has read all of them.

What does a contract QC analyst make per hour?

About $31 to $38 an hour for a mid-level analyst at a drug maker, going by the BLS pharma percentiles divided by 2,080 hours. That’s the analyst’s W-2 pay. What you pay an agency sits on top of it and covers payroll taxes, insurance, and the agency’s margin. For stability backlogs and inspection crunches, our pharmaceutical staffing team places contract QC analysts on exactly those terms.

How fast do we need to move once we like someone?

Faster than most approval chains allow. A strong analyst with current HPLC experience rarely waits out a three-week offer process. Someone else calls first. Get the band approved before anyone books a panel interview, and the problem mostly goes away.

Price the Seat for the Analyst You Want

Build the band from the pharma numbers if you make drugs. Build it from the testing-lab numbers only if you are a testing lab. And if the analyst you want is currently at a contract lab, assume she already knows the difference. She usually does.

KORE1 placements hold at a 92% retention rate after twelve months, and the offer is where that starts. If the seat is permanent, direct hire is how we’d run the search. If you’d like a second opinion on your band before it goes to finance, let’s connect. My LinkedIn works too.