XANAX: what pharmacies pay, and what that tells you

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

BrandPrescriptionvariable price spread285.9x its generic

XANAX costs a pharmacy a median of $7.04 per unit. Its generic equivalent costs $0.0246, which makes the brand 285.9 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.

$7.04median acquisition cost per unit
75%of priced drugs cost less than this one
395listed products, more than 85% of the corpus
2.8xspread from the cheapest tenth to the dearest

The generic conversation is the only one that matters here

At 285.9 times, the gap between XANAX 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.

Where it sits against every other priced drug

Acquisition cost percentile, 3,439 priced products

XANAX · 75%
cheapestdearest

This sits in the middle of the corpus, the range where where-you-fill-it genuinely changes the total.

The brand and the generic, side by side

Acquisition cost per unit, CMS's own correspondence

brand
generic

$7.04 against $0.0246. The generic bar is drawn to scale, which is why it is barely visible at 285.9x. CMS publishes this correspondence per product, so it is a comparison of the same thing rather than a match on names.

What the spread tells you about shopping around

Between the cheapest tenth of listings and the dearest tenth, XANAX varies by 2.8 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.

Documented interactions

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 XANAX would cost a pharmacy about $211.06. 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 XANAX compares across 385 brand and generic pairs, or look up another drug in our price tools.