ASPIRIN: what pharmacies pay, and what that tells you

Acquisition cost from CMS NADAC, 2026-07-22. Updated August 30, 2026.

GenericOver the countertight price spread

ASPIRIN costs a pharmacy a median of $0.0260 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.

$0.0260median acquisition cost per unit

7%of priced drugs cost less than this one

458listed products, more than 87% of the corpus

1.7xspread from the cheapest tenth to the dearest

You can buy this without a prescription, and that changes the question

ASPIRIN is sold over the counter, so the usual pharmacy economics do not apply to it. There is no dispensing fee, no formulary tier and no prior authorisation between you and the product. What CMS records here is what a pharmacy pays to acquire it at $0.0260 a unit, which makes it a floor to compare shelf prices against rather than an explanation of your receipt. Store brand against national brand is the decision that actually moves this number.

Where it sits against every other priced drug

Acquisition cost percentile, 3,439 priced products

ASPIRIN · 7%

cheapestdearest

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.

What the spread tells you about shopping around

Between the cheapest tenth of listings and the dearest tenth, ASPIRIN varies by 1.7 times. That is a tight band. That is the ordinary case for something this cheap: there is little room between suppliers to differ over. Pharmacies are buying it at close to the same price, so a difference in what you are charged is a difference in fees and margin rather than in the drug.

Documented interactions

Ibuprofen with Aspirin (Moderate). Taking ibuprofen with aspirin can reduce aspirin's cardioprotective effects. Ibuprofen competes with aspirin for the same binding site on the COX-1 enzyme in platelets, which can block...
Warfarin with Aspirin (Severe). Combining warfarin with aspirin dramatically increases the risk of bleeding, including potentially life-threatening gastrointestinal and intracranial hemorrhage.
Clopidogrel with Aspirin (Moderate). Clopidogrel and aspirin together (dual antiplatelet therapy or DAPT) is a standard treatment after heart attacks and stent placement, but the combination significantly increases bleeding...

Interaction data is informational and not a substitute for your pharmacist, who can see your full list.

A note on the 30-unit figure. Thirty units of ASPIRIN would cost a pharmacy about $0.7800. That is a comparison basis, not a prescription quantity and not a monthly cost: it assumes one unit at a time and says nothing about how this drug is actually dosed.

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 ASPIRIN compares across 385 brand and generic pairs, or look up another drug in our price tools.