How much does tirzepatide actually cost per month?

Most pages answering this question give you a range and stop. The range is the easy part. The hard part — and the reason two people on the same medication pay very different amounts — is that tirzepatide pricing has two moving parts built into it, and neither one is visible at checkout.

We track every published tirzepatide price across the 28 providers on this site, with a source and a date for each. Thirty of them are current as of today. Here is what they say.

The range, stated plainly

Compounded tirzepatide starts at $119 a month at SnagRx and $125 at Trimi on a twelve-month plan. The middle of the compounded market sits nearer $289 to $299 a month. The full list is every compounded tirzepatide price we hold, ranked.

Brand-name Zepbound is a different market. Eli Lilly's own pharmacy, LillyDirect, sells it from $299 a month. Ro resells it at the same figures, with one caveat we record against its top dose: Ro prices that dose only with a manufacturer offer applied, and does not publish what it costs without one. Fridays lists the same drug at $1,828 a month — the widest spread we have recorded on any single drug. The same figures sit in one table at what Zepbound costs at each provider that sells it.

So the honest answer to "how much does tirzepatide cost" spans more than an order of magnitude, and where you land in it depends less on shopping around than on two structural things.

Moving part one: the dose goes up, and so does the price

This is the mechanism almost nobody explains before you buy.

Tirzepatide is titrated. You start low and step up. At LillyDirect, the price is attached to the dose, so stepping up is a price increase: $299 a month at the 2.5 mg starting dose, $399 at 5 mg, and $449 from 7.5 mg upward. Ro's pass-through pricing does the same thing at the same figures.

That is not a penalty or a catch. It is simply that the quoted starting price is the cheapest month you will have, and the figure most comparison pages print is the 2.5 mg one — a dose most people are not on for long.

If you are budgeting, budget the dose you expect to maintain, not the one you start on.

Compounded sellers mostly do the opposite: one price regardless of dose. SnagRx, Gala and Trimi all publish a flat monthly figure. That is a real advantage of the compounded market, and it is worth naming alongside the significant thing it gives up, which we come to below.

Moving part two: the refill window

This one costs more than the dose increase, and it is the single most expensive detail we have found in this category.

LillyDirect attaches a refill deadline to its Zepbound pricing. Refill within the window and the 10 mg, 12.5 mg and 15 mg doses cost $449 a month. Miss it, and the same dose is $699. At 7.5 mg, the same lapse takes you from $449 to $499.

The window is 45 days. Not a calendar month — 45 days from your last fill. A refill that slips because of a holiday, a delayed lab, a pharmacy backorder or a prescriber who is away can increase that month's bill by more than half at the higher doses, and nothing about the advertised price tells you this is how it works.

Our price table shows the lapsed figure directly beneath the standard one on every dose it applies to, because a price with a deadline attached is not the same product as a price without one.

What flexibility costs, to the dollar

bmiMD is the clearest illustration in our data of what you pay for the right to leave, because it publishes the same medication at four commitment lengths.

Compounded tirzepatide is $179 a month on a twelve-month commitment, $189 on six months, $229 on three, and $249 month to month.

Read from the bottom: staying free to cancel costs about a third more than signing away a year. That is a rational trade in either direction — but it is a trade, and you should make it knowing the number rather than being shown only the twelve-month figure in an advertisement.

One caveat we record against all four: bmiMD does not say whether the multi-month rates are billed monthly or charged up front. Those are very different commitments for the same headline number, and the site does not resolve it.

The same shape appears elsewhere. Trimi's tirzepatide runs $125 on a twelve-month plan against $235 month to month. Yucca Health's runs $225 on six months against $258.

A membership fee with the drug billed separately is a different purchase again, and which GLP-1 providers charge no membership fee sorts the providers by which of the two they sell.

The first month is not the price

One provider in our tirzepatide set leads with a promotional month: Noom Med's programme is $149 for the first month and $299 a month after that.

Noom Med publishes the ongoing rate, which is why we can record it. Several providers on this site do not publish one at all — and when a site prints only a first month, the ongoing price is not "similar", it is unknown.

Why compounded is cheaper, and what that means

The gap between $119 and $299 is not a discount on the same product.

Brand-name Zepbound is an FDA-approved medicine made by Eli Lilly. Compounded tirzepatide is prepared by a compounding pharmacy, and compounded medications are not FDA-approved and are not evaluated by the FDA for safety, effectiveness or quality. Most of the providers selling it carry that disclosure on their own pages.

We do not tell you which to choose — that is a clinical decision and this site is not your clinician. We do insist that the two are priced in separate tables and never ranked against each other, because presenting them as the same product at different prices is the most common way a comparison site misleads.

What none of these prices tell you

We record, for every offer, whether the price includes the consultation, shipping and lab work. Across all thirty published tirzepatide prices the result is lopsided enough to be worth stating on its own.

Not one of the thirty says whether lab work is included. Not one. Baseline bloods are a normal part of starting this medication, and no provider we track resolves, at the point of price, whether you are paying for them.

Only six state anything about shipping, and they are all the same seller: LillyDirect. Everywhere else it is simply unaddressed, which in practice means you find out at checkout.

Those same six LillyDirect prices are also the only ones that exclude the consultation — not as a catch, but because LillyDirect is a pharmacy rather than a clinic. You arrive with a prescription someone else wrote. That is a genuine difference in what the number buys, and it cuts the opposite way from the shipping line: the cheapest-looking brand price in our table is the one that assumes you have already paid a prescriber somewhere else.

The general lesson holds across the category. A monthly figure is a partial answer to a question about annual cost, and the missing pieces are rarely mentioned until you are far enough into the funnel to have given someone your card.

The microdose question

bmiMD sells both a standard and a "microdose" compounded tirzepatide. The prices are identical at every commitment length we recorded — $179 against $179 on twelve months, and $249 against $249 month to month.

Whether a smaller dose at the same price is good value is a question about the medicine, not the money, and it is one for a prescriber. What we can say is that the pricing carries no signal either way: nothing in what bmiMD charges distinguishes the two products.

The questions that decide your actual bill

1. Is this price attached to my dose, or flat? If it is dose-attached, ask what the dose you expect to maintain costs.
2. Is there a refill deadline? If yes, ask what the price becomes if you miss it, and by how many days.
3. Is the multi-month rate billed monthly or charged up front? A "monthly" figure on a twelve-month plan may be a single large charge.
4. What does month two cost? If the site only publishes month one, that is your answer about the site.

Two more sit outside the price itself: whether the provider treats patients in your state, and whether a plan can pay for the medication, or being on Medicare rules you out.

Every figure in this article links to the provider's review page, which carries the source URL and the date we last read it. If a price here looks wrong, click it — the evidence is on that page, and it updates when the provider's page does.

For the equivalent breakdown on the other drug, and the membership-versus-medication trap that catches most people comparing them, see our guide to the cheapest semaglutide.