Best Pharmacy Schools in Manila 2026

TL;DR: Two Metro Manila pharmacy schools publish a cost you can check. UST's Faculty of Pharmacy bills PHP 75,797 to 86,125 on full payment for the first term of A.Y. 2026-2027. UP Manila charges no tuition under RA 10931. CEU, Adamson, UE and MCU publish nothing. Nationally, the April 2026 PhLE passed 1,085 of 1,895 (57.26%).

What This Page Used to Say, and Why It Does Not Anymore

An earlier version carried a per-semester tuition estimate for six schools and a passing-rate column for all of them. On checking, four of the six tuition figures corresponded to no published schedule anywhere, and most of the passing rates could not be traced to a PRC release.

They are gone. What follows is what schools and the PRC actually publish, and an explicit "not published" wherever that is the answer. A missing number is more useful than an invented one, because it tells you which question to ask.

The National Benchmark

Roughly four in ten examinees did not pass. That is the context for any school claim of being "above the national average" — the average is not high, so clearing it is not the achievement it sounds like. Ask for the actual passers and examinees.

On per-school figures. The PRC publishes a Performance of Schools table with every release, but for the PhLE it is attached as a downloadable file rather than printed as text. It is authoritative and it is awkward to reach. Secondary reporting of the November 2025 table puts UST at 197 of 199 (98.99%) and Saint Louis University at 301 of 307 (98.05%) at the top of the largest bracket. We were unable to open the PRC file itself, so treat those as reported rather than as figures we verified.

What Each Manila School Publishes

1. University of Santo Tomas

UST has the oldest pharmacy faculty in the country and, far more unusually, it prints its prices.

From UST's own schedules of fees for the first term of A.Y. 2026-2027, the Faculty of Pharmacy comes to PHP 75,797 to 86,125 on full payment for incoming students, which places it at the top of the UST undergraduate range alongside Rehabilitation Sciences and Architecture. The underlying rates are PHP 1,959 per lecture unit for Levels I to III and PHP 1,884 for Level IV, with laboratory units at PHP 3,918 and PHP 3,768 — and pharmacy is a laboratory-heavy degree, which is exactly why it sits at the expensive end.

Two things to hold on to. That is a first-term figure; the second term is billed separately, so do not read it as an annual cost. And foreign students pay an out-of-state fee of USD 50 in most UST undergraduate colleges, a trivial amount next to the USD 15,000 charged in Medicine.

Our UST tuition fee guide breaks the schedules down college by college.

2. UP Manila

UP Manila's College of Pharmacy lists four programmes on its own site: BS Pharmacy, BS Pharmaceutical Sciences, MS Pharmaceutical Sciences and MS Social and Administrative Pharmacy. The college records itself as Top 1 Performing School in the June 2021 and November 2021 licensure examinations.

Tuition is free, and this is the one place where the free-tuition law works the way people expect. Republic Act 10931 removes tuition for Filipino undergraduates admitted to state universities. BS Pharmacy is a first bachelor's degree, so it qualifies — unlike the Doctor of Medicine at the same university, which section 6(a)(1) of the same law excludes because every MD entrant already holds a degree. Other school fees and your own living costs still apply.

Admission is the constraint, not cost.

3. Centro Escolar University

CEU runs pharmacy on its Sampaloc and Makati campuses and is widely described as the first Philippine school to offer the Doctor of Pharmacy. Its clinical pharmacy orientation is the reason most people shortlist it.

We could not read CEU's current programme structure or fees from its own site, and the programme mix has changed over the years, so confirm directly which pharmacy routes it is running this cycle rather than relying on a description written at some earlier point. Our clinical pharmacy schools guide covers the PharmD landscape.

4. Adamson University

Adamson on San Marcelino Street is a long-established Manila pharmacy school with industrial and community pharmacy linkages. An earlier version of this page credited it with a specific perfect passing rate in a named 2024 cycle and a CHED Center of Development designation. Neither could be confirmed, so both have been removed. CHED publishes its Centers of Excellence and Development lists; check the current one there rather than taking any school's or any guide's word for it.

5. University of the East

UE on Claro M. Recto Avenue is routinely listed as the more affordable Metro Manila private pharmacy option. That may be true. It publishes no pharmacy fee schedule, so we cannot show it to you, and we are not going to estimate it. Ask the registrar, and compare against cheapest private universities.

6. Manila Central University

MCU in Caloocan runs a BS Pharmacy programme with a community and retail pharmacy orientation, which matters because retail is where most Philippine pharmacists actually work. It publishes neither fees nor board performance.

How to Choose

Ask for passers and examinees, by cycle. Not "consistent", not "above average" — two numbers, three times.

Ask for the schedule of fees in writing, before you apply. Four of the six schools here publish nothing. That is normal in Philippine higher education and it is still your problem to solve.

Ask about laboratory fees separately. Pharmacy is laboratory-heavy. At UST a laboratory unit costs roughly double a lecture unit, and the same structure exists elsewhere even where the numbers are not published.

Ask where interns are placed, and whether placement is guaranteed. This is the question that most changes your career and the one schools are least often asked.

Take the free-tuition route seriously if you can pass the entrance exam. UP Manila removes the largest number in the whole calculation. See free tuition universities.

Model the whole cost, not one term. Our college tuition per semester guide walks through the pieces most families forget.

Still deciding on your senior high track? See what strand fits pharmacy and how many years BS Pharmacy takes. For the regional comparison, see best pharmacy schools in Cebu and the national best pharmacy schools guide.

Sources

• PRC — April 2026 Pharmacists Licensure Examination results, released in three working days (official)
• PRC — Examination results archive
• University of Santo Tomas — Tuition Fees, schedules of fees for the first term of A.Y. 2026-2027 (official)
• UP Manila College of Pharmacy — programmes and licensure records (the college's own site)
• Republic Act No. 10931, Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education Act, sections 4 and 6
• SchoolFinderPH — UST Tuition Fee Guide
• SchoolFinderPH — Best Pharmacy Schools in Cebu
• SchoolFinderPH — Clinical Pharmacy Schools in the Philippines
• SchoolFinderPH — In-Demand Courses in the Philippines

Disclaimer: UST figures are first-term A.Y. 2026-2027 schedules published by the university and change annually. Where a school is marked "not published", that means we could not find a figure the school itself publishes, not that the programme is unavailable. Confirm fees, programmes and accreditation with the school before applying.

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