What NovoCare Pharmacy Actually Costs, Dose by Dose

NovoCare Pharmacy is Novo Nordisk's direct-to-patient channel, and it does something almost nobody else in this market does: it publishes a complete price table, every dose, in a downloadable PDF with a document number on it.

That makes it easy to price. It also means the things that will surprise you are all in the footnotes, so this piece is organised around them.

The Wegovy table

Self-pay, from Novo's Wegovy price guide, document US26NC00049 dated April 2026¹:

Pill — 1.5 mg $149/mo · 4 mg $149/mo until 31 August 2026, then $199 · 9 mg $299 · 25 mg $299. A month is one bottle of 30 tablets.

Pen — 0.25 mg and 0.5 mg $199/mo for a new patient's first two fills, then $349 · 1 mg, 1.7 mg and 2.4 mg $349 · Wegovy HD 7.2 mg $399. A month is one box of four pens.

The Ozempic table

From the Ozempic pill and pen price guide, document US26NC00009 dated May 2026²:

Pill — 1.5 mg $149/mo · 4 mg $199 · 9 mg $299. One bottle of 30 tablets.

Pen — 0.25 mg and 0.5 mg $199 for a new patient's first two fills, then $349 · 1 mg $349 · 2 mg $499. One box of one pen, delivering four weekly doses.

Priced across a first year, the tablets on both brands run $149 + $199 + (10 × $299) = $3,338. The Wegovy pen, over 13 four-weekly fills, runs (2 × $199) + (11 × $349) = $4,237. The Ozempic pen escalated to 2 mg runs (2 × $199) + (2 × $349) + (9 × $499) = $5,587.

Two expiry dates, not one

Novo's introductory pricing is routinely reported as running to the end of 2026. Two different dates are actually printed on the guides.

The Wegovy 4 mg tablet at $149 is available "only until August 31, 2026, then $199 per month for 4 mg."¹

The pen offers — $199 for two fills of the 0.25 and 0.5 mg doses on both Wegovy and Ozempic — run "through December 31, 2026", after which the standard rates apply.¹

If you are reading this in August 2026, one of those two has days left on it and the other has months. They are not the same offer and they do not expire together.

The "$25" offer has a $100 ceiling

Both brands advertise a commercial-insurance copay of "as little as $25 per month". Both footnotes qualify it identically: "Pay as little as $25, subject to a maximum savings of $100/month. Government beneficiaries excluded."¹

A maximum saving is a ceiling on the discount, not a floor under your price. If your plan leaves you owing $260, the offer takes $100 off and you pay $160 — not $25. The $25 is reachable only when your plan's own cost sharing is already at or below $125.

Delivery is a self-pay privilege

This one is buried in a single line above each table, and it is a real structural difference rather than a wording quirk.

Self-pay: "Pricing is available for local pharmacy pickup with a savings offer or home delivery."

Commercial insurance: "Pricing is only available for local pharmacy pickup with a savings offer."¹

So the route that lets NovoCare mail the medicine to you is the cash route. Run it through your plan and, on Novo's own description, you are collecting it from a pharmacy counter.

The sentence Novo prints about paying cash

On the pharmacy page itself, the tooltip attached to the self-pay option reads: "If you don't have insurance or elect not to use it, this is your cost. By opting to pay outside of your insurance, any money spent will not count toward your out-of-pocket limits or deductible."³

That is the manufacturer telling you the cost of its own cheapest option, and it is the single most useful sentence on the site.

Put 2026 numbers against it. Medicare.gov states that no Medicare drug plan may have a deductible above $615 in 2026, that you pay 25% coinsurance in the initial coverage stage, and that catastrophic coverage begins once your out-of-pocket spending on covered Part D drugs reaches $2,100 in 2026.⁴ Every dollar you spend at NovoCare's self-pay price moves you zero distance toward that $2,100. If you have other significant drug costs in the same year, the cash route can be cheaper this month and more expensive by December.

Medicare: $50 a month, with CMS deciding who qualifies

Novo's Wegovy savings page carries a separate Medicare route. Its own words: "Starting July 1, eligible Medicare patients pay $50 per month for Wegovy®, through the Medicare GLP-1 Bridge program. This pricing is for adult patients with Medicare prescribed Wegovy® for weight loss only."

The footnote adds the part that matters: "Eligibility criteria will be determined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). This information is not a guarantee of coverage."⁵

So it is $50 if you qualify, and Novo is not the party that decides whether you qualify.

What we could not establish

We could not price the Wegovy tablet at 9 mg or 25 mg against the pen at 2.4 mg on a like-for-like basis, because they are different products with different labelling — the tablet ladder and its 25 mg maintenance dosage are set out in the FDA label, and whether a tablet is appropriate at all is a clinical question, not a pricing one.⁶ We work through the two forms in oral semaglutide: the tablet against the pen.

We could not verify what NovoCare charges anyone who is neither commercially insured nor Medicare-eligible beyond the published self-pay table, because no other tier appears on the guides.

And we could not confirm any plan-level insured price, because none is published per drug anywhere first-party.

For the same exercise on the other manufacturer's storefront, see what LillyDirect costs. For what happens when a telehealth company resells these exact products with a membership attached, see our Ro review and Hers review.

Wegovy® and Ozempic® are registered trademarks of Novo Nordisk A/S. Doseworth is not affiliated with Novo Nordisk.