ACETAMINOPHEN: what pharmacies pay, and what that tells you
ACETAMINOPHEN costs a pharmacy a median of $0.0336 per unit. That is what the pharmacy pays to acquire it. It is not your price: retail margin sits between this number and the shelf price.
This one genuinely varies between pharmacies
Most drugs are bought at close to a single price. ACETAMINOPHEN is not: between the cheapest tenth of listings and the dearest, it varies by 8.9 times. That is the unusual case where calling two pharmacies can change what you pay, and it outranks every other consideration on this page.
Where it sits against every other priced drug
Acquisition cost percentile, 3,439 priced products
This is among the cheapest products in the corpus. Sold over the counter, so what a shop charges above this floor is retail margin rather than a dispensing fee.
The other forms of ACETAMINOPHEN
CMS prices 3 distinct ACETAMINOPHEN products. They are not interchangeable and their costs are not comparable to each other, which is exactly why a single headline price for a drug name is usually meaningless.
The Sold as column is usually the reason two rows differ: an over-the-counter product and a prescription-strength one carry the same drug name and are priced as different products entirely. Unit matters as much: a price per tablet and a price per millilitre are not the same measurement.
| Product | Unit | Class | Sold as | Per unit | Listings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACETAMINOPHEN (shown above) | EA | Generic | OTC | $0.0336 | 1,554 |
| ACETAMINOPHEN | ML | Generic | OTC | $0.0184 | 203 |
| ACETAMINOPHEN ER | EA | Generic | OTC | $0.0644 | 187 |
What the spread tells you about shopping around
Between the cheapest tenth of listings and the dearest tenth, ACETAMINOPHEN varies by 8.9 times. That is a wide band, and it means the same product genuinely costs different pharmacies different amounts. It is one of the cases where calling around can change the number.
Documented interactions
- Ibuprofen with Acetaminophen (Mild). Ibuprofen and acetaminophen can generally be taken together safely and are sometimes recommended in combination for enhanced pain relief.
- Warfarin with Acetaminophen (Moderate). Regular use of acetaminophen (more than 2 grams daily for several days) can increase the anticoagulant effect of warfarin and raise the INR, increasing bleeding risk.
Interaction data is informational and not a substitute for your pharmacist, who can see your full list.
What this page is, and is not
Every figure here is CMS NADAC, the federal survey of what retail pharmacies pay to acquire a drug. It is public-domain federal data and it is the cleanest available floor. It excludes the retailer's margin and any promotion, which sit between this number and what you hand over. Nothing here is medical advice.
Source: CMS NADAC (National Average Drug Acquisition Cost), Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, dataset generated 2026-07-22. See how ACETAMINOPHEN compares across 385 brand and generic pairs, or look up another drug in our price tools.