METHYLPHENIDATE: what pharmacies pay, and what that tells you
METHYLPHENIDATE costs a pharmacy a median of $0.2014 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.
The price varies, but this is not one you shop around for
METHYLPHENIDATE does vary between pharmacies, by 52.5 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, 3,234 priced products
This sits in the middle of the corpus, the range where where-you-fill-it genuinely changes the total.
The other forms of METHYLPHENIDATE
CMS prices 3 distinct METHYLPHENIDATE products. They are not interchangeable and their costs are not comparable to each other, which is exactly why a single headline price for a drug name is usually meaningless.
The Sold as column is usually the reason two rows differ: an over-the-counter product and a prescription-strength one carry the same drug name and are priced as different products entirely. Unit matters as much: a price per tablet and a price per millilitre are not the same measurement.
| Product | Unit | Class | Sold as | Per unit | Listings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| METHYLPHENIDATE (shown above) | EA | Generic | Rx | $0.2014 | 55 |
| METHYLPHENIDATE ER | EA | Generic | Rx | $0.6741 | 38 |
| METHYLPHENIDATE | ML | Generic | Rx | $0.0990 | 6 |
What the spread tells you about shopping around
Between the cheapest tenth of listings and the dearest tenth, METHYLPHENIDATE varies by 52.5 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.
METHYLPHENIDATE costs a pharmacy $0.2014 per 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 METHYLPHENIDATE, 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 2026-10-13. See how METHYLPHENIDATE compares across 385 brand and generic pairs, or look up another drug in our price tools.