What Is NADAC? The Federal Benchmark Behind Our Drug Prices
Every drug price on this site — every table, every comparison — traces back to one federal dataset: the National Average Drug Acquisition Cost, or NADAC. It's not a well-known number outside the pharmacy world, but it's arguably the most honest price benchmark that exists for prescription drugs in the U.S.
What it actually measures
NADAC is a survey run for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) that asks a large, representative sample of retail pharmacies what they invoiced-paid their wholesalers for each drug, by National Drug Code (NDC). It's published weekly and covers thousands of drug products. Because it's an average of real invoices — not a sticker price, not a negotiated insurance rate, not a list price set by a manufacturer — it's the closest public number to "what this drug actually costs to obtain."
What it is not
- It's not your cash price. Pharmacies still have rent, staff, and a business to run — some markup over acquisition cost is normal and expected.
- It's not your insurance copay. Copays are set by your plan's formulary tier, not by acquisition cost.
- It's not a coupon-card price. Discount cards route your purchase through a specific PBM contract that may beat or miss NADAC depending on the drug and pharmacy.
- It's not always available for every drug. Very new generics sometimes have zero NADAC rows until enough pharmacies report enough volume for CMS's survey to catch up — we verify every drug on this site actually has real NADAC data before listing it.
Why we use it instead of "real" retail prices
Real cash and insurance prices are set by tens of thousands of independent PBM contracts, aren't published anywhere centrally, and change constantly and privately. A site claiming to show "the" retail price for your specific pharmacy, your specific insurance, on a specific day would either be guessing or reselling data none of us can independently verify. NADAC is public, federal, updated weekly, and auditable — so instead of guessing at your exact price, we show you the honest floor: what the drug costs to obtain, so you can judge how far above that floor your own price sits.
How we process it
CMS publishes NADAC as rolling weekly snapshots — the same drug can appear dozens of times across a year as its acquisition cost shifts. We always use the most recent snapshot (the "As of Date" you see on every drug page), and for drugs with multiple package sizes or strengths, we show the median price across the reported package variants at that description.
The takeaway
Think of NADAC the way you'd think of a car's invoice price versus its sticker price: it won't tell you exactly what you'll pay, but it tells you what "normal" looks like, so an abnormal price stands out immediately.