This site has published, more than once, that the tablet route costs more than the injection. That claim came from comparing the market’s median oral figure against its median injection figure — and those two medians are taken from two different sets of sellers. Comparing formats inside a single seller gives a different and more useful answer, in the same way that a paired figure beats a corpus median in the gap between what is shown and what is billed.
The paired comparison
73 sellers publish a billed figure for both injected and oral semaglutide. Among them, 39 price the tablet higher, 22 price it lower, and 12 price the two identically. The median premium is $20 a month.
The range is what makes the median misleading on its own: from $-229 — a seller whose tablet is substantially cheaper — to $320 at the other end. A reader told “tablets cost about $20 more” would be right on average and wrong about roughly a third of the sellers they might choose.
The other molecule
Among the 36 sellers publishing both tirzepatide formats, 14 charge more for the tablet and 14 charge less, at a median premium of $0. The pattern is directionally the same and the sample is smaller, so it carries less weight.
What to do with it
Stop treating format as a price lever and start treating it as a per-seller question. If a tablet is what you want, the useful move is to check the two figures at the seller you are already considering rather than assuming the route costs more — because at 30% of these sellers it does not.
And hold onto the separate point that a tablet is not a smaller version of the injection. What an oral formulation delivers is its own question, which is the subject of where choice runs out, and the arithmetic behind every figure quoted here is in what a GLP-1 actually costs.