Wegovy dosage: what the label actually says

Is there a Wegovy pill, and what is its dosage?

Yes. Wegovy also comes as a tablet, and the tablet has its own schedule, its own strengths and a shorter list of approved uses.

The Wegovy tablet comes in 1.5, 4, 9 and 25 mg. It is taken once a day, on an empty stomach, with water. Each strength runs for 30 days before the next one, and 25 mg is where it settles. The tablet covers only two of the four approved uses: heart risk reduction, and weight reduction in adults.

Approved 2025-12-22 under NDA 218316. That is a separate application from the shot, which is why the two cover different lists of approved uses.

The tablet schedule as a chart sets it out day by day, beside the two other semaglutide tablets, and the choice between a tablet and a shot covers what each form asks of you.

Who does the label cover, and who does it not?

The shot covers patients aged 12 and older with obesity. They follow the same schedule as adults: 2.4 mg recommended, 1.7 mg as the alternative. The label sets no 7.2 mg dose and no tablet dose for this age group.

The Wegovy label does not cover type 2 diabetes. It never sets a dose for blood sugar control.

What if a week gets missed?

For the shot, the label splits on how close the next dose is. More than 2 days away, and a missed dose can still go in. Less than 2 days away, and the label says to skip it. Miss 2 weeks in a row and the label says to restart the schedule lower down. For the tablet, it says to skip the missed day and carry on the next day.

What does it come in?

The device matters for dosing, because some of these hold one dose and some hold four.

Wegovy and Ozempic are the same drug. So why are the doses different?

Ozempic is the same drug substance from the same manufacturer, approved for type 2 diabetes rather than weight, and its label stops at 2 mg a week.

Both products contain semaglutide, and both come from Novo Nordisk. They were approved under separate applications, NDA 215256 and NDA 209637, for different groups of people. A separate application means a separate schedule, a separate top dose and a separate rule for a missed week.

The practical version: Wegovy stops at 7.2 mg and Ozempic stops at 2 mg. Neither label sets a dose for the other one’s patients.

Both labels print 0.25, 0.5 and 1 mg. Those are the same amounts of semaglutide on either label. What changes is where each one sits. 0.5 and 1 mg are steps you pass through on Wegovy, and doses the Ozempic label says you can stay on.

The Ozempic dose schedule in fullWegovy vs Ozempic compared line by lineWegovy vs Mounjaro compared line by line

How long does it take to reach the 7.2 mg dose?

The label’s own table puts 7.2 mg at week 21 at the earliest.

Wegovy has 5 steps between the 0.25 mg start and the 7.2 mg ceiling. The label asks for at least four weeks on a dose before the next one. Four weeks at each step is where week 21 comes from.

That figure is not our arithmetic. The label prints the week numbers itself, and the last row reads “Week 21 at the earliest”.

Week 21 is a floor, not a schedule. Nothing in the label says a person has to keep climbing, and a slower rise is a decision for whoever wrote the prescription.

Can you stay on a low dose of Wegovy?

Yes at 1.7 mg, which is the lowest dose this label recognizes as one to stay on.

The label names 1.7, 2.4 and 7.2 mg as doses to settle on. 1.7 mg is the lowest of those. Below it the label is describing a climb, not a destination.

0.25, 0.5 and 1 mg are printed on the same ladder and are not on that list. The label treats them as somewhere you pass through.

The label sets doses. It does not rank them, and it does not say a higher one suits a given person better.

How does the Wegovy ladder compare with every other GLP-1 brand?

Wegovy tops out at 7.2 mg once a week. Eight brands in this class stop in eight different places.

The table below compares the approved GLP-1 brands by their highest labeled dose. It is the only place the eight ladders are set out together.

Milligrams do not carry across molecules. 7.2 mg of semaglutide is not comparable to 7.2 mg of anything else. The last column says so on every row where the drug substance differs.

Where two brands do share a drug substance, the comparison is real, because the same molecule is being measured. That is the case for exactly two pairs in the class.

Do the side effects change as the dose goes up?

The label does not publish side effects broken out by dose for Wegovy. It reports them across a whole trial.

This is the question the trial tables cannot answer. A label counts how many people reported something over a study, not which dose they were on that week.

The escalation itself is the closest thing to an answer the label gives. It exists because moving up slowly is how the trials were run. The four-week interval is part of the approved schedule, not advice added later.

Where a figure does exist it sits on the side-effect page for this brand. It is taken from the label’s own trial table, with the arm it belongs to.

What is the most important information I should know about Wegovy?

The label’s boxed warning covers thyroid tumors in rodents

Wegovy carries the strongest warning the FDA uses. Rodents given semaglutide grew thyroid C-cell tumors. Whether the same happens in people is unknown. The label rules the drug out for anyone with a personal or family history of medullary thyroid cancer, and for anyone with the inherited condition MEN 2.

A boxed warning is the strongest warning the FDA applies. It appears at the top of the label, before the dosing section summarized here.

It does not change with the dose. Nothing on the ladder above makes it apply more or less.

Do not use Wegovy if:

The label’s boxed warning names the histories it says rule the drug out, and they are not dose-related.

The exclusions sit in the boxed warning rather than in the dosing section. They are about who a person is, not about how many milligrams they take.

The label separately lists 10 serious effects it tells prescribers to watch for. Each one is set out with the label’s own wording on the Wegovy side-effect page.

The dose schedule comes from the prescribing label. Read the full label for the complete list of reasons not to take it.

What are the possible side effects of Wegovy?

The most common in the label’s own trial table is nausea, reported by 44% on Wegovy 2.4 mg.

That figure comes from the label’s trial table, with the arm it belongs to attached. A percentage without its arm is not a rate of anything.

The trial reports side effects across the whole study. It does not say which dose each person was taking, so effects cannot be split by dose step.

The full table, every arm and the placebo column beside it, sits on the Wegovy side-effect page.

Where to read next

5 pages sit next to this one, and each answers something this page deliberately does not.

• Wegovy results at measured trial visits keeps the week-12 absence, the label endpoints and the continuation trial separate.
• Wegovy side effects, dose by dose carries the label’s own trial table.
• The semaglutide dosage chart covers the drug rather than the brand, including the vial and syringe arithmetic no pen needs.
• Storing Wegovy safely covers the fridge, the room-temperature window and what the label leaves out.
• What Wegovy costs reads the price off the manufacturer’s own terms rather than the label, including who those terms shut out.