BUPRENORPHINE-NALOXONE: what pharmacies pay, and what that tells you

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

GenericPrescriptionwide price spread

BUPRENORPHINE-NALOXONE costs a pharmacy a median of $1.29 per unit. That is what the pharmacy pays to acquire it. It is not your price: a dispensing fee and margin sit between this number and your receipt.

$1.29median acquisition cost per unit

60%of priced drugs cost less than this one

1,740listed products, more than 97% of the corpus

9.0xspread from the cheapest tenth to the dearest

The price varies, but this is not one you shop around for

BUPRENORPHINE-NALOXONE does vary between pharmacies, by 9.0 times from the cheapest tenth of listings to the dearest. On most drugs that would be the lever worth pulling. Here it is not the useful advice: as a controlled substance it generally cannot be transferred between pharmacies once a prescription is filed, many pharmacies do not stock it at all, and the binding constraint is usually whether a pharmacy has it rather than what it charges. Settle supply with your prescriber and one pharmacy first; the spread below is context for the number you are quoted, not a reason to ring round.

Where it sits against every other priced drug

Acquisition cost percentile, 3,439 priced products

BUPRENORPHINE-NALOXONE · 60%

cheapestdearest

This sits in the middle of the corpus, the range where where-you-fill-it genuinely changes the total.

What the spread tells you about shopping around

Between the cheapest tenth of listings and the dearest tenth, BUPRENORPHINE-NALOXONE varies by 9.0 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.

A note on the 30-unit figure. Thirty units of BUPRENORPHINE-NALOXONE would cost a pharmacy about $38.82. 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.

The drug is cheap. The route is what costs you.

Almost none of what you pay for BUPRENORPHINE-NALOXONE is the cost of the drug itself. A dispensing fee and a margin sit on top, and both are set by where you fill it and under what programme. These are the routes worth checking, and what each one is actually for.

Cost Plus Drugs sells at a stated markup over its own acquisition cost, so the pharmacy margin is visible rather than inferred. What we found
Honeybee Health a mail-order pharmacy that posts cash prices publicly, which makes it a useful sanity check on any card quote. What we found
Amazon Pharmacy mail order, so it competes on the dispensing fee rather than on the drug. What we found
GoodRx a discount card negotiated per pharmacy, so the same drug can differ between two shops on one street. What we found
SingleCare the same mechanism as a rival card, and worth checking against it rather than instead of it. What we found
RxSaver another card on the same model; cards are cheap to compare and routinely disagree with each other. What we found
WellRx a fourth card, listed because checking one card and stopping is the most common way to overpay. What we found
Blink Health prepay-then-collect, which prices the drug before you reach the counter. What we found
Costco membership pharmacy pricing, which US federal law makes available without a membership. What we found
Walmart a flat-price generic list, which beats a card on some drugs and loses badly on others. What we found
CVS and Walgreens, the default retail route, and usually the one every other option is measured against. What we found

We do not quote a per-pharmacy price for BUPRENORPHINE-NALOXONE, because that varies by pharmacy, by ZIP code and by week, and we have not measured it for this drug. What is measured here is the acquisition cost above, from CMS NADAC. The order of these routes is editorial and fixed; it is not for sale, and no placement here implies a medical recommendation.

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 your dispensing fee, your pharmacy's margin, your insurance design and any discount-card pricing, all of 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 BUPRENORPHINE-NALOXONE compares across 385 brand and generic pairs, or look up another drug in our price tools.