CIALIS: what pharmacies pay, and what that tells you
CIALIS costs a pharmacy a median of $53.69 per unit. Its generic equivalent costs $0.1664, which makes the brand 322.6 times the price of the same molecule. 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.
This one genuinely varies between pharmacies
Most drugs are bought at close to a single price. CIALIS is not: between the cheapest tenth of listings and the dearest, it varies by 5.8 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 most expensive products in the corpus by unit cost, which is where coverage rather than shopping decides what you pay.
The brand and the generic, side by side
Acquisition cost per unit, CMS's own correspondence
$53.69 against $0.1664. The generic bar is drawn to scale, which is why it is barely visible at 322.6x. CMS publishes this correspondence per product, so it is a comparison of the same thing rather than a match on names.
What the spread tells you about shopping around
Between the cheapest tenth of listings and the dearest tenth, CIALIS varies by 5.8 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.
The drug is cheap. The route is what costs you.
CIALIS costs a pharmacy $0.1664 a unit. Almost none of what you pay is that number. 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 CIALIS, 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 CIALIS compares across 385 brand and generic pairs, or look up another drug in our price tools.