Published October 12, 2026
Learning how to look up the NADAC price for a specific drug takes about two minutes once you know where the number lives. NADAC, the National Average Drug Acquisition Cost, is the price retail pharmacies paid wholesalers for a drug, surveyed by CMS and published weekly. It is the most honest number in drug pricing, and most patients have never seen it. Here is the walkthrough.
First, find your drug's identity. NADAC is published per NDC, the National Drug Code, which is specific to manufacturer, strength, and package size. The label on your pill bottle lists the NDC. If you do not have it handy, the drug name and strength are enough to get you close; there will just be several rows to sort through.
Second, search. The fastest route is a lookup tool that indexes the weekly CMS file: type the drug name, pick your strength, and read the NADAC per-unit price. The raw option is data.medicaid.gov, which hosts the full NADAC dataset with a public API, or the weekly file on medicaid.gov itself. All three read from the same CMS release. The tool is for humans, the API is for people who want to pull ten thousand prices at once.
Third, do the arithmetic. NADAC is quoted per unit: per tablet, per capsule, per milliliter. Multiply by your quantity. If NADAC for your generic is $0.14 per tablet and your prescription is 90 tablets, the pharmacy's average acquisition cost was $12.60. That is the cost of the pills in the bottle. It is not what you pay, which adds dispensing costs and the whole PBM and plan-design stack on top, but it is the one number in the chain that comes from actual invoices.
How to look up the NADAC price: the two gotchas
The first gotcha is the NDC jungle. Ten generic manufacturers can make the same drug at the same strength, and each has its own NDC and its own NADAC. They cluster, but they do not match. When you look up a price, match the manufacturer on your bottle if you can. If the label just says the generic name, use the median of the rows for your strength, and treat the exact number as approximate.
The second gotcha is the lag. CMS publishes weekly, and each file reflects invoices from recent weeks, not this morning. A sudden shortage or a new generic launch can move the market price before NADAC catches up. Myers and Stauffer, the contractor that runs the survey, operates a help desk pharmacies use to flag rates that look stale. For a patient comparing prices, a week or two of lag rarely matters. For a pharmacy deciding whether a prescription loses money, it matters a lot, which is why they watch it closely.
A practical tip from the data itself: compare the brand NADAC against the generic NADAC before you argue with anyone about your copay. The gap is often enormous, and seeing it in dollars per tablet makes the generic conversation with your doctor a concrete one. 46brooklyn Research's free dashboards chart the brand-vs-generic NADAC gap over time for exactly this reason, and it is worth a look if you want the trend, not just this week's number.
One opinion worth stating plainly: NADAC being public is one of the better transparency wins in American health care, and it arrived with almost no fanfare. Every week, CMS publishes what thousands of pharmacies paid for thousands of drugs, down to the NDC. Nothing in that file is estimated from list prices. It is surveyed invoice data. The rest of drug pricing, list prices, rebates, spread pricing, is theater by comparison.
Skip the spreadsheet: type your drug name into the NADAC Drug Price Lookup and get the weekly CMS price per unit in seconds.
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Frequently asked questions
Where can I look up the NADAC price for a specific drug?
Three places: the CMS weekly NADAC file on medicaid.gov, the data.medicaid.gov open dataset, or a drug lookup tool that indexes the weekly file by drug name and NDC. All three read from the same weekly CMS release.
How current is the NADAC data?
CMS publishes NADAC weekly. The survey collects pharmacy invoice prices, computes a national average per NDC, and posts the new file every week, so the number you see is never more than a few weeks old.
What does the NADAC per-unit price mean?
It is the average price pharmacies paid per tablet, capsule, milliliter, or other unit of that specific NDC. Multiply the per-unit price by your quantity to estimate the pharmacy's acquisition cost for your prescription.
Why are there multiple NADAC prices for the same drug?
NADAC is published per NDC, and every manufacturer, strength, and package size gets its own NDC. Ten generic versions of one drug have ten prices. Pick the NDC that matches the label on your bottle.