LIPITOR costs a pharmacy a median of $19.07 per unit. Its generic equivalent costs $0.0382, which makes the brand 498.6 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.
At 498.6 times, the gap between LIPITOR and its generic equivalent is larger than any difference between pharmacies, insurance designs or discount cards combined. Nothing else on this page comes close to that number, and no amount of shopping recovers it.
Acquisition cost percentile, 3,439 priced products
This sits in the middle of the corpus, the range where where-you-fill-it genuinely changes the total.
Acquisition cost per unit, CMS's own correspondence
$19.07 against $0.0382. The generic bar is drawn to scale, which is why it is barely visible at 498.6x. CMS publishes this correspondence per product, so it is a comparison of the same thing rather than a match on names.
Between the cheapest tenth of listings and the dearest tenth, LIPITOR varies by 1.4 times. That is a tight band. 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.
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 LIPITOR compares across 385 brand and generic pairs, or look up another drug in our price tools.