What Wegovy pills cost, and what you get for it

How much is a month of Wegovy tablets?

Four strengths, four prices. Novo Nordisk advertises the cheapest of them, and the label moves you off it after 30 days.

Read from Novo Nordisk — manufacturer program terms · retrieved 2026-08-12 · a month here is 30 days and one bottle of 30 tablets

So the honest year looks like this. One month at $149, one at $199, and $299 from the third month on. Anyone budgeting on the advertised figure is budgeting for a strength the label moves them off.

There is one more thing in the small print worth a fill a year. Novo Nordisk counts a tablet month as 30 days and a pen month as 28. Twelve tablet months take you to the end of a year; thirteen pen months do.

Is the pill cheaper than the shot?

At the counter, yes, at the start. Underneath, no. A month of tablets and a month of pens cost a pharmacy almost exactly the same amount to buy.

The federal weekly file prices a month of the settled tablet at $1,301.50 and a month of the 2.4 mg pen at $1,306.72. That is a difference of 0.4 percent between two products that sound like different tiers of one treatment.

At the counter the two are not close. Novo Nordisk starts the tablet at $149 and the pen at $349. Both statements hold at once. What the tablet costs to obtain and what the tablet is sold for are two different decisions, and only the second one is aimed at you.

The practical reading is narrower than it sounds. The tablet undercuts the pen by $200 at the advertised price, and by $50 once both have settled. It does not become the cheap option in general.

What does a pharmacy pay for the tablet?

Every week CMS publishes what retail pharmacies report paying to buy each strength. It is the only public figure underneath the offers, and no patient ever pays it.

A month here means 30 days, one tablet a day, which is the schedule on the label. The per-unit figures are CMS’s; the monthly figures are ours, from that arithmetic.

The same tablet, two names, two prices

Novo Nordisk now sells semaglutide tablets under two applications at the same strengths. The Wegovy bottle and the Ozempic bottle both come in 1.5 mg and 4 mg. They differ in application and in approved use, and the federal file prices them apart.

A pharmacy pays between 31 and 32 percent more for the Wegovy bottle than for the Ozempic one at the same strength. We are not going to tell you why. The two carry different approved uses under different applications, and nobody publishes what a company charges a wholesaler.

What this number is not

• It is an acquisition cost, not a patient price. What you pay is set by your plan, your pharmacy and any manufacturer program you qualify for, and none of those are in this file.
• CMS prices these products per milliliter or per tablet. Any monthly figure on this site is our arithmetic on top of that, using the package size from the product’s own label, and it is labeled as derived wherever it appears.
• Wholesalers, pharmacy benefit managers, plans and manufacturers settle further amounts between themselves that are not public. A difference between what a pharmacy pays and what anyone is charged is not evidence of wrongdoing, and this site does not present it as one.
• Each row carries its own effective date, and CMS marks whether the figure came from the latest survey or was carried forward from an earlier file. Both are printed rather than averaged away.

Which GLP-1 pills actually exist?

Three, all of them semaglutide, all from one company. Two share an application and a purpose; the third is separate, and it is the only one approved for weight.

• Rybelsus. Novo Nordisk has told FDA it is stopping all three strengths. FDA’s shortage database carries the notice and gives the reason in one line: they are being replaced by Ozempic tablets.
• Ozempic tablets. The same application as Rybelsus, a new name and a new strength ladder. We have not read an approval letter for it, so nothing here dates it earlier than the day it started being shipped.
• Wegovy tablets. A separate application from both the Wegovy shot and the Ozempic tablet. It is the only oral semaglutide approved for weight, and it goes to a strength neither of the others reaches.

Semaglutide is not on FDA’s shortage list, checked 14 August 2026. The discontinuation notice and its one-line reason are in FDA’s shortage database, read 14 August 2026.

Is there a Zepbound or Mounjaro pill?

No. There is no oral tirzepatide of any kind, from anyone, at any strength. Every GLP-1 tablet on sale in the United States is semaglutide.

The federal drug code directory lists what companies are shipping, and it holds no tirzepatide tablet. Lilly sells both of its tirzepatide products as injections only. That is a fact about today rather than forever, and this page will say so when it changes.

It matters because sellers online advertise a tirzepatide pill anyway. Whatever the packaging says, such a product is neither Zepbound nor Mounjaro. The page on what a compounded copy is, and is not, sits on the compounded tirzepatide page.

What is the Wegovy tablet approved for?

Two of the four things the Wegovy shot covers. The tablet is a separate application, NDA 218316, and it did not inherit the shot’s list.

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.

The shot also covers weight reduction from age 12 and noncirrhotic MASH with liver fibrosis. The tablet covers neither. If your prescription names one of those, the tablet’s label does not cover it, and the savings offer asks you to attest that your prescription sits inside the label.

The Wegovy dose schedule carries the tablet ladder step by step off the label. This page never names a dose to take.

The tablet was approved 2025-12-22 under NDA 218316. Read from the signed FDA approval letter · retrieved 2026-08-12

Does swallowing it remove the risk of getting the dose wrong?

It removes the arithmetic. This site’s own reading of FDA’s side-effect data is the clearest thing on the page about what that is worth.

Dose-handling reports track how much work the device leaves you. The product people draw out of a vial with a syringe sits at 30% of Zepbound reports. The tablet sits at between 0.0% and 8.2% of Rybelsus reports, and the single term for taking the wrong amount is below 2.1% of Rybelsus reports.

Read those as bounds, not rates. A term outside a drug’s twenty-five most-reported carries no exact count, so the study gives an upper limit instead. That is what the ranges are. FDA’s data has no denominator, so a count is not an incidence and a report is not proof the drug caused anything.

The dosing-error study sets nine products against the device each one uses, with a control term that stays flat across all of them.

Does Medicare cover the Wegovy pill?

Yes, at $50 a month, and the tablet is better covered than most things on this site. The savings offer is closed to you; this route is not.

Medicare lists the covered drugs by name and by form. For Wegovy it names both: Wegovy (injection or tablet). That takes in every strength of the tablet, which is more than Zepbound gets — Medicare covers that one in a single device.

The program runs from 2026-07-01 to 2027-12-31. Two things inside it cost money and are easy to miss.

• The Part D deductible does not apply, and no part of the $50 counts toward your out-of-pocket limit.
• There is no low-income subsidy on it, so people who get help with drug costs may pay more here than under their plan.

Who qualifies for the federal route, in full covers the weight thresholds, the conditions that go with them, and who is ruled out.

Read from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services — federal program page · retrieved 2026-08-12

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