Semaglutide is sold in the United States as Ozempic, Wegovy and a tablet, all from Novo Nordisk, and all need a prescription. Novo Nordisk sells the pens and the tablet for cash through its own pharmacy at published prices.
Source: Novo Nordisk’s own program terms, read 2026-08-12
What matters first
Approved US forms
Weekly pens and a daily tablet
Lawful routes checked
7
Lowest published cash row
$149 for Tablet, 1.5 mg
FDA warning letters
135 naming semaglutide
Semaglutide is the only molecule here you can take as a tablet, and the tablet is the reason the advertised prices mislead. The number people quote is the strength you start on for a month. The strength the label settles on costs twice that.
The advertised price is a starting strength
The lowest published semaglutide price is a tablet, and it is a starting strength rather than a monthly rate. The label keeps you on it for thirty days and then steps up, and the strength it settles on is the dearer one. The pen does a smaller version of the same thing: a new-patient price for the first two fills, then the standard one.
The price question needs two numbers and the date when the first changes to the second. Both come from Novo Nordisk’s published terms.
The federal acquisition file adds one more thing the price lists do not. A month of tablets and a month of pens cost a pharmacy within a few dollars of each other. Whatever the tablet is, it is not the cheap version of the drug — the difference is a decision about what to charge.
NovoCare Pharmacy self-pay — the advertised row
$149 for Tablet, 1.5 mg. Starting strength. The label moves off it after 30 days.
The strength the label settles on is Tablet, 25 mg, and that one is $299. Both figures are Novo Nordisk’s, read 2026-08-12.
Both forms, priced
A month means different things in these two rows. For the shot it is four pens and 28 days. For the tablet it is a bottle of thirty and 30 days.
Form and strength
Price a month
Novo Nordisk’s own condition
Pen, 0.25 mg and 0.5 mg
$199
New patients only, first two fills, filled by 2026-12-31. Then $349
Pen, 0.25 to 2.4 mg
$349
Standard price
Pen, 7.2 mg
$399
Standard price
Tablet, 1.5 mg
$149
Starting strength. The label moves off it after 30 days
Tablet, 4 mg
$199
Standard price. $149 on a limited offer through 2026-08-31
Tablet, 9 mg
$299
Standard price
Tablet, 25 mg
$299
Standard price, and the dose the label settles on
Read from Novo Nordisk’s own terms on 2026-08-12. The savings offer, the exclusion and the caps are on the Wegovy cost page, and the tablet has a page of its own.
Ozempic climbs with the dose
The price goes up as the dose does. Moving from 1 mg to 2 mg adds $150 a month, and the label puts 2 mg at the top of the ladder rather than at the start.
Ozempic is a diabetes drug, and that changes the Medicare answer completely. The detail is on the Ozempic cost page.
What a pharmacy pays for the pen
CMS acquisition cost — WEGOVY 2.4 MG/0.75 ML PEN
$1,306.72 a month for the single-dose pen. $435.57 per mL × 0.75 mL a pen × 4 pens = $1,306.72.
That covers 28 days and one box of four single-dose pens, one a week. Effective 22 July 2026, from a file CMS republishes weekly.
This is what pharmacies report paying to buy the drug. It is not a price anyone is offered. It is here because it is the only public number underneath the counter, and it shows the tablet and the shot costing a pharmacy about the same.
Every route, for this drug
The same seven routes, read against a drug with three approved products and two dosage forms.
A prescription from a clinician you see
Open
The ordinary route. A doctor, nurse practitioner or physician assistant assesses you and writes a prescription, and a pharmacy fills it.
Prescription
Yes, and it is not optional. Federal law makes every drug on this site prescription-only, which means it cannot lawfully be sold to you without one.
What is published about cost
Whatever your plan charges, plus the manufacturer’s savings card if your plan covers the drug. The cards take most people to about $25 a month.
Who it does not work for
Nobody, in principle. In practice the delay is getting an appointment, and plans differ wildly on whether they cover a GLP-1 for weight at all.
A prescription from a telehealth service
Conditions apply
You fill in a questionnaire or take a video call, a clinician the service works with writes the prescription, and a pharmacy ships it.
Prescription
Yes. The law does not treat a telehealth prescription differently. What changes is who you are talking to and what they are selling.
What is published about cost
Set by the service, and it usually bundles the visit, the drug and the follow-up into one monthly fee. Those fees are not published in one place and they move.
Who it does not work for
Anyone the service decides not to take. Some will not work with insurance at all, so the fee is on top of whatever else you pay.
In FDA’s letters
This is where FDA’s letters land hardest. The largest single group in the published research is telehealth companies, and the two things FDA describes most are claims the advertising could not support and drugs sold without approval.
Buying direct from the manufacturer
Conditions apply
Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk both sell some of their own products for cash, through their own pharmacies, at prices they publish.
Prescription
Yes. Buying direct changes who ships the box, not whether a prescription is needed.
What is published about cost
Published, dose by dose, on the manufacturer’s own site. It is the only cash lane on this page where the price is written down and dated.
Who it does not work for
Not everything is in it. Lilly publishes a full cash ladder for Zepbound and none at all for Mounjaro, and Novo Nordisk prices its starting strengths well below the ones people settle on.
In FDA’s letters
Both manufacturers have received FDA warning letters about how they advertised these drugs. We include those letters under the same rules used for every other company.
Your own insurance
Conditions apply
A commercial plan covers the drug, you pay a copay, and a manufacturer savings card usually covers most of what is left.
Prescription
Yes, and the plan often wants more: a prior authorization, a documented reason, sometimes a weight or a diagnosis.
What is published about cost
About $25 a month on every card here, while the card lasts. Each card caps what it will pay in a month and in a year, and the caps differ by product.
Who it does not work for
Every one of these cards excludes anyone on Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE or VA coverage. The exclusions are quoted word for word on each product’s cost page, because that is where a reader loses money.
Medicare’s GLP-1 Bridge
Conditions apply
A federal program that puts some GLP-1 drugs at a fixed monthly price for people with Medicare drug coverage. It runs on a stated end date.
Prescription
Yes, plus a prior authorization, and your prescriber has to certify a diet and exercise program as well.
What is published about cost
$50 a month. None of it counts toward the Part D out-of-pocket limit, and there is no low-income subsidy on it.
Who it does not work for
It covers three named products and no others. It also rules out anyone whose reason for taking a GLP-1 is type 2 diabetes, which puts Ozempic and Mounjaro outside it entirely.
A compounded copy from a pharmacy
Basis ended
A pharmacy mixes its own version rather than dispensing an approved product. Nobody checks it for safety, strength or quality first.
Prescription
Yes. A compounded drug is still a prescription drug, and under section 503A it needs a prescription with your name on it.
What is published about cost
Whatever the seller charges. There is no published price for a compounded preparation because there is no product to publish one for.
Who it does not work for
The legal basis for large-scale compounding of these two drugs was the shortage listing, and both shortages ended. The windows closed in March and May 2025.
In FDA’s letters
Compounding pharmacies appear in the published research in their own right. FDA inspected the places that mixed the drug, and several of those letters describe what it found there.
A site selling it as a research chemical
No lawful route
A website sells a vial of powder labeled for laboratory use, usually with a line saying it is not for human consumption.
Prescription
Nobody asks you for one, and that is the tell. A seller who does not need a prescription is not selling you a medicine, whatever the vial says.
What is published about cost
Cheap, and the price is the product. Nothing about what is in the vial is established by anyone: not the strength, not the purity, not that it is the drug on the label.
Who it does not work for
There is no lawful route here to a person. These are unapproved drugs, and selling one to a consumer in the United States is what most of FDA’s letters to these sites are about.
In FDA’s letters
A large block of the published research is exactly this: sites offering unapproved drugs to United States consumers over the internet. Several letters name a web address rather than a company.
Where the compounded route stands
The legal basis for large-scale compounding of these two drugs was the shortage listing, and both shortages ended. The windows closed in March and May 2025.
Semaglutide is not on FDA’s shortage list, checked 14 August 2026.
The database holds 3 discontinuation notices for Semaglutide Tablet, updated 4 June 2026.
A manufacturer has told FDA it is stopping this product. A discontinuation is not a shortage.
Status comes from FDA’s drug shortage database on the date shown. The list changes daily. openFDA, read 2026-08-14.
FDA has published 141 warning letters that mention semaglutide somewhere in the text, read on 12 August 2026. 135 of them were issued in the last 24 months and are named on this site.
Semaglutide is the drug named in more published warning letters than anything else on this site. The two largest groups are telehealth services and websites selling unapproved versions.
Novo Nordisk has itself received letters, including one about how it advertised these drugs and one about its reporting of side effects. Those are in the page too.
A warning letter is FDA telling a company what the agency believes it found. It is not a court ruling and not proof that anyone was harmed.
A seller missing from this list is a seller FDA has published no letter about. That is all it means. Many sites selling these drugs are not registered with FDA at all, so nothing they do produces a letter in the first place.
All 135 of them are listed with FDA’s own wording, both dates and the close-out column at the enforcement record.
Questions people actually ask
Is compounded semaglutide still legal?
The basis for it has gone. FDA declared the semaglutide shortage resolved on 21 February 2025, and the windows that let pharmacies keep going closed in April and May 2025.
FDA has raised a second problem with this molecule that tirzepatide does not have. Some compounded semaglutide was made from a salt form, and FDA says a salt form is a different active ingredient from the one in the approved drugs.
Can I get the semaglutide tablet cheaper than the injection?
At the starting strength, yes, and that is what the advertising is built on. At the strength the label settles on, the two are much closer.
The full ladder for both, with Novo Nordisk’s own conditions and the date the terms were read, is on the Wegovy cost page.
2Scope and reviewWhat this molecule record cannot cover, and how it is checked
What can change locally
This is a description of routes that exist and prices that are published. It is not advice about which one to take, and it is not medical or legal advice.
Only a licensed clinician can write a prescription. Nothing here helps anyone get a prescription.
Prices move. Every figure on the cost pages carries the date its source was read, and manufacturer terms change without notice.
Insurance is not covered in any depth, because plans differ so much that a general statement about coverage would be wrong for most readers.
State law is not covered. Pharmacy practice and telehealth rules are set state by state and they differ.
How we checked these details
JM
Medically reviewed by Jennifer Montecillo, MD· non-practicing medical reviewer
Reviewed 2026-08-12
No seller is named as a place to buy, ranked or linked on this page, and no listing here is for sale. Every price is Novo Nordisk’s own or a federal figure, with the date it was read. The rules are in the sourcing methodology, and corrections go to contact@healthspanledger.com.