LITHIUM: what pharmacies pay, and what that tells you
LITHIUM costs a pharmacy a median of $0.4798 per ml. 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.
The drug is not the cost here
LITHIUM costs a pharmacy $0.4798 a unit, which places it in the cheapest 48% of the 3,439 products CMS prices. At that level the dispensing fee routinely exceeds the medicine itself, so what you pay is decided almost entirely by where you fill it and under what programme, not by the drug. What is worth more attention on this drug is the 1 documented interaction below, which affect whether it is safe to take rather than what it costs.
Where it sits against every other priced drug
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.
What the spread tells you about shopping around
Between the cheapest tenth of listings and the dearest tenth, LITHIUM varies by almost nothing. That is a tight band. That is less ordinary at this cost level, where products more often vary between suppliers. 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
- Lithium with Ibuprofen (Severe). Ibuprofen can cause dangerous increases in lithium blood levels, leading to lithium toxicity. Lithium has a very narrow therapeutic range, and even small increases in blood levels can cause...
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 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 LITHIUM compares across 385 brand and generic pairs, or look up another drug in our price tools.