SIMVASTATIN: what pharmacies pay, and what that tells you

Acquisition cost from CMS NADAC, 2026-07-22. Updated August 30, 2026.

GenericPrescriptionvariable price spread

SIMVASTATIN costs a pharmacy a median of $0.0310 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.

$0.0310median acquisition cost per unit

8%of priced drugs cost less than this one

3,179listed products, more than 99% of the corpus

3.6xspread from the cheapest tenth to the dearest

This one genuinely varies between pharmacies

Most drugs are bought at close to a single price. SIMVASTATIN is not: between the cheapest tenth of listings and the dearest, it varies by 3.6 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

SIMVASTATIN · 8%

cheapestdearest

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.

What the spread tells you about shopping around

Between the cheapest tenth of listings and the dearest tenth, SIMVASTATIN varies by 3.6 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.

SIMVASTATIN costs a pharmacy $0.0310 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 SIMVASTATIN, 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.

Documented interactions

Simvastatin with Amiodarone (Severe). Amiodarone significantly increases simvastatin blood levels, raising the risk of severe muscle damage (rhabdomyolysis) and kidney failure.
Amlodipine with Simvastatin (Moderate). Amlodipine increases simvastatin blood levels, raising the risk of myopathy and rhabdomyolysis. The FDA has set a maximum simvastatin dose of 20 mg daily for patients taking amlodipine.

Interaction data is informational and not a substitute for your pharmacist, who can see your full list.

A note on the 30-unit figure. Thirty units of SIMVASTATIN would cost a pharmacy about $0.9300. That is a comparison basis, not a prescription quantity and not a monthly cost: it assumes one unit at a time and says nothing about how this drug is actually dosed.

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 SIMVASTATIN compares across 385 brand and generic pairs, or look up another drug in our price tools.