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How Much Does a GLP-1 Cost Per Month? The Whole Market, Measured

There is no single answer. Published semaglutide figures run several times over from cheapest to dearest. The number you are shown depends mostly on which page you landed on.

Neil Sanders8 min read

There is no single answer, and that is the answer. Across 407 sellers publishing a billed figure for compounded semaglutide, the median is $179 a month. Half sit between $149 and $225. The full range runs $76 to $449, which is 5.9 times over.

Tirzepatide runs higher at every point, with a median of $249 across 384 sellers. Whether that premium buys anything is a separate question with a split answer.

Two things move a real bill more than the gap between sellers. One price in five is not what you are billed. And most sellers never say what happens at a higher dose.

Almost every article about what a GLP-1 costs quotes one number, usually the one a particular seller wants quoted. That is not a market rate; it is a sample of one. This desk holds published figures from 430 of 475 sellers on its roster. A corpus that size answers the question a single price cannot. How much does the answer vary?

The shape of the semaglutide market

Across 407 sellers publishing a billed monthly figure for compounded semaglutide by injection, the range runs from $76 to $449. That is a factor of 5.9. The median is $179, before the charges a headline can leave out. The middle half sits between $149 and $225. That is a band of $76 a month. In most cases it buys the same molecule from a compounding pharmacy.

The quartiles matter more than the extremes. A reader who finds a seller at $149 is not getting an unusual deal. That is the twenty-fifth percentile of a large market. A reader paying above $225 is in the top quarter. They should be able to say what the extra buys. A named pharmacy, an included consultation, a rate that holds as the dose climbs.

Tirzepatide costs more, consistently

The 384 sellers publishing a figure for compounded tirzepatide by injection run from $83 to $497, with a median of $249. That is $70 a month above the semaglutide median. The gap holds at the quartiles too, so it is not a few expensive outliers. And the format premium sits on top of it for anyone wanting a tablet.

What to do with a distribution

Use it as a position check rather than a target. Compare a quoted figure against the median and the quartiles for the same molecule and format. Not against the lowest number on the internet. On this corpus that is $76, and it belongs to one seller with its own conditions attached. The six-month totals are the version of this that matters over a course. And whether a rate holds as the dose rises decides whether any of these figures survive month three.

Every number above comes out of the desk’s own price records. They are recalculated as this page builds. Each figure was read off a seller’s published page, one at a time. The newest of those readings is September 2026. Nothing is projected, averaged in from elsewhere, or licensed.

What the published literature says about this price

Two findings sit underneath the spread. A production-cost analysis estimates that a licensed generic injectable semaglutide could be made for $28 to $140 per person-year [1]. The cheapest figure on this desk is a long way above that, and the distance is not one seller’s margin.

Prices are not falling as use rises, either. Across a national utilization record from 2017 to 2023, use rose roughly tenfold. Spending per prescription rose by nearly half [2]. Volume did not bring the number down.

Frequently asked

Where do these figures come from?
This site's own price corpus: figures read from sellers' published pages and recorded with the date they were read. No third-party dataset is involved, and nothing is modeled.
Why use billed prices rather than advertised ones?
Because a headline that excludes a mandatory membership or program fee is not what a buyer pays. Where a correction applies, the figure counted is the one a buyer cannot get below.
Does the median tell me what I should pay?
It tells you where a quote sits in the market. Paying above the upper quartile is not automatically wrong, but it is worth being able to say what the extra buys.

Sources

  1. [1] Levi J, Cross S, Ramesh N, Venter F, Hill A (2026). How Low Could Semaglutide Prices Fall? An Analysis of Production Cost and Implications for Global Access Obesity (Silver Spring, Md.). PMID 42437874
  2. [2] Jacobs M, Fang Q, Ellis C (2026). Trends in GLP-1 Receptor Agonist and SGLT2-Inhibitor Utilization and Expenditure Between 2017-2023: Demographic, Income, and Insurance Associations Journal of General Internal Medicine. PMID 41984414

Where to get it

The cheapest GLP-1

Every seller that publishes a price, ordered lowest first on the standing month-to-month rate, plus the question to ask before you pay any of them.

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