NAPROXEN: what pharmacies pay, and what that tells you
NAPROXEN costs a pharmacy a median of $0.0589 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 drug is not the cost here
NAPROXEN costs a pharmacy $0.0589 a unit, which places it in the cheapest 15% 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. CMS lists 3 distinct NAPROXEN products at different costs, so the figure above is one of several and the table below sets them side by side.
Where it sits against every other priced drug
Acquisition cost percentile, 3,439 priced products
This is among the cheapest products in the corpus. At this level the pharmacy’s dispensing fee is usually the larger half of your bill.
The other forms of NAPROXEN
CMS prices 3 distinct NAPROXEN 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NAPROXEN (shown above) | EA | Generic | Rx | $0.0589 | 1,392 |
| NAPROXEN DR | EA | Generic | Rx | $1.87 | 232 |
| NAPROXEN | ML | Generic | Rx | $0.1762 | 145 |
What the spread tells you about shopping around
Between the cheapest tenth of listings and the dearest tenth, NAPROXEN varies by 1.4 times. That is a tight band. That is the ordinary case for something this cheap: there is little room between suppliers to differ over. 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
- Ibuprofen with Naproxen (Severe). Ibuprofen and naproxen are both NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) and should not be taken together.
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 NAPROXEN compares across 385 brand and generic pairs, or look up another drug in our price tools.