Finasteride cost

The short answer

In the 16 September 2026 CMS NADAC file, a generic finasteride 1 mg tablet costs a retail pharmacy $0.04260 on invoice — shared by all 9 of its NDCs — so a year of one tablet a day is $15.55 of drug, or $1.30 a month. The brand of that same tablet, PROPECIA 1 mg (30-tablet bottle), is $3.96500 in the same file, so a year of it is $1,447.22 — 93.1× the generic, and the widest brand-to-generic gap any cost page on this site has met. The 5 mg brand, PROSCAR 5 mg, is dearer again at $5.70733 a tablet. Against that, our directory records 8 hair-loss plans; 4 of them are oral finasteride alone and run $228.00 to $730.00 a year, which is 14.7× to 46.9× the drug. The other 4 cannot be divided by anything, because they are combinations or carry no named active. And the 5 mg tablet is 3.1× cheaper per milligram than the 1 mg tablet — a real gap this page declines to price, for a reason that is on the label rather than in our judgement.

The figures, and where each one comes from

What this page will not tell you

Each of these is missing because it could not be sourced, not because it was overlooked. Where a figure is unpublished, this page says so rather than estimating it.

• A price for a 1 mg dose taken from a quartered 5 mg tablet.

  The 5 mg tablet is 3.1× cheaper per milligram and quartering it is the best-known cost hack in men's hair loss, so the omission needs a reason rather than a silence. It is not that the label forbids it: the word "split" appears zero times in PROPECIA, zero times in PROSCAR and zero times in any generic finasteride label read for this page. What the labels say instead is narrower and heavier. Finasteride can cause abnormal development of the external genitalia of a male fetus, and the labels' stated protection is the coating — "Finasteride tablets are coated and will prevent contact with the active ingredient during normal handling, provided that the tablets have not been broken or crushed." A saving whose mechanism is destroying the label's own stated safeguard is not one this site will compute, so the cell prints the refusal instead of a number.

• What your pharmacy will charge you in cash for a bottle.

  NADAC is an acquisition cost — what the pharmacy paid, before its dispensing fee and before margin. No federal or commercial dataset publishes what pharmacies then charge a cash payer, and the same NDC is quoted severalfold apart by two counters in the same town. Ring two pharmacies, ask for the cash price on 90 tablets of generic finasteride 1 mg, and put what they say into the calculator.

• Any price for topical finasteride.

  There is no FDA-approved topical finasteride product in the United States, so there is no NDC, so NADAC prices nothing. Three of the recorded plans here contain a topical preparation and one of them states a concentration — 0.3% finasteride with 6% minoxidil — and none of that can be read against a published rate, because no published rate for the preparation exists. /tools/topical-finasteride-calculator does the concentration arithmetic for a formulation a prescriber has already specified, and likewise refuses to cost it.

• A per-year drug figure for the combination plans.

  4 of the 8 recorded plans name more than one active ingredient or name none at all — finasteride with minoxidil, a four-in-one chewable with biotin and vitamin D3 in it, and one category listing with no plan behind it. Splitting a bundled monthly across its ingredients would require knowing what the seller attributes to each, which no listing states. The annual figure is printed for every plan; the multiple against the drug is printed only where one molecule is named.

• A cost for dosing less often than once a day.

  Every-other-day and twice-weekly finasteride are real prescribing practice, and neither appears on any label: both PROPECIA and PROSCAR specify one tablet once a day, and the module behind this page never suggests a figure below one tablet per day. Costing a regimen no label describes would be presenting common practice as though it were labelled, which this site does not do anywhere.

• A GoodRx or discount-card price.

  Those resolve per ZIP code, per pharmacy and per card, and change without notice. Finasteride is one of the drugs where a card genuinely moves the number, which is exactly why a single figure printed here would mislead: it would be wrong for most readers on the day they read it and stale by the following week.

• What finasteride costs with insurance.

  This page is the cash case. Male pattern hair loss is treated as cosmetic by most commercial plans and finasteride 1 mg is frequently excluded outright, while finasteride 5 mg for benign prostatic hyperplasia usually is not — so coverage turns on which indication the prescription is written for. That is not a national number and we will not invent an average copay for a benefit many readers do not have.

Why the drug is almost free and the plan is not

CMS contracts a monthly survey of the invoice prices retail community pharmacies actually pay and publishes the average weekly, per NDC, with a methodology document. Finasteride is the cleanest case this file offers: one tablet, swallowed once a day, priced per each, no strength to divide by and no device to account for. In the 16 September 2026 release there are 42 finasteride rows in four description groups, and the 9 generic 1 mg NDCs all carry $0.04260 exactly, with no spread between them at all. Multiply by 365 and a year of the drug is $15.55.

The brand rate in the same file is the widest gap any of these cost pages has recorded. PROPECIA 1 mg (30-tablet bottle) is $3.96500 a tablet, which is $1,447.22 a year — 93.1× the generic, $1,431.68 of difference for an identical molecule at an identical dose. And NADAC prices the two PROPECIA NDCs 10.6% apart under one description, which the file alone cannot explain: section 16 of the label can, because NDC 78206-0152-01 is a bottle of 30 and NDC 78206-0152-02 is the 90-tablet PROPAK. The two PROSCAR NDCs are a bottle of 30 and a bottle of 100 and carry the identical rate, so pack size moving the rate is a thing to check rather than a rule.

Then there is the 5 mg tablet, and it is worth saying the tempting part out loud. It holds five times the drug for 61% more money, which is 1.368¢ a milligram against 4.260¢ — 3.1× cheaper by that measure. The two strengths are also licensed for different things: PROPECIA's section 1 is for male pattern hair loss "in MEN ONLY" and PROSCAR's is for symptomatic benign prostatic hyperplasia. The reason the cheaper milligrams are not available as a saving is set out in the refusals and it is about the coating, not about the indication. /compare/propecia-vs-proscar is the page for the clinical difference between the two.

None of which is what you will pay. The 8 hair-loss plans our directory records annualise from $180.00 to $985.50, and they are not comparable to each other either: 4 are oral finasteride and 4 bundle a topical or a second and third active into the same monthly, so the cheapest recorded plan contains more than several dearer ones. 2 of them are quoted per 30 days rather than per month, which is not a rounding detail — a year holds 12.17 thirty-day periods, so PeterMD's $60.00 per 30 days is $730.00 a year and not $720.00. One of those two providers records the same figure as a monthly in one field and a 30-day price in another.

A year of finasteride at the published rates

Every finasteride row in the 16 September 2026 CMS NADAC weekly reference file, at one tablet a day — the dose both labels specify. Container totals come from section 16 of the brand labels, not from NADAC, which states no package size for any finasteride row.

Not what you will be charged: acquisition costs, before any dispensing fee, pharmacy margin, prescriber or shipping. A year is 365 days and not 52 weeks — 52 weeks is 364 days, and for a once-daily tablet the missing day is a real tablet. The two PROPECIA NDCs share one description at rates 10.6% apart and NADAC cannot say why; the label can, and the package counts above are its answer. Generic rows carry no package count because nothing we read discloses one, so the container column is left empty rather than estimated.

What a daily dose costs, and the one this page will not price

Each labelled daily dose composed from whole tablets of each generic presentation. The third column is the cost of the milligrams inside a tablet, which is not the same thing as the cost of a milligram anyone can take.

The empty cell is the point of this table, so it is inside the table rather than under it. A 1 mg dose cannot be composed from a 5 mg tablet without breaking one, and finasteride's labels make the coating the stated protection against fetal exposure with the condition attached in the same sentence: "PROPECIA tablets are coated and will prevent contact with the active ingredient during normal handling, provided that the tablets have not been broken or crushed." PROSCAR section 5.3 and every generic label read carry the identical sentence with the brand swapped. The word "split" appears in none of them, which is why this is not the same refusal as the one on /tools/ed-cost-per-dose. Every finasteride SPL read also declares the FDA Score characteristic as one piece — no score line.

What our directory records hair-loss plans listing

Each recorded plan exactly as the provider states it, annualised through the period the record gives. The last column divides by the drug figure only where the listing names finasteride and nothing else, because a bundle has no single published rate to be read against.

Ordered by annualised price because that is how a price is looked up; it is not an order of merit and these are not the same product — the cheapest row here includes a topical minoxidil solution that three dearer rows do not. 2 plans are quoted per 30 days and are annualised over 30 days accordingly, so the same figure read as a calendar month would understate the year by five days of tablets; MangoRx's record states "$81/mo" in its category listing and "$81 /30 days" in its pricing tier, and those are not the same claim. Sesame Care is in the hair-loss category with no period-qualified price recorded and is left out rather than guessed at. Verify the current price with the provider before you buy.

Frequently asked questions

How much does finasteride cost?

The drug costs almost nothing. In the 16 September 2026 CMS NADAC file a generic finasteride 1 mg tablet is $0.04260 at pharmacy acquisition, so a year at the labelled one tablet a day is $15.55 — $1.30 a month. What you pay is set by everything around it: the oral-finasteride plans our directory records annualise from $228.00 to $730.00, which is 14.7× to 46.9× the drug. The gap is the prescriber, the pharmacy and the shipping.

Is Propecia worth the price over generic finasteride?

On price, the gap is extraordinary: PROPECIA 1 mg (30-tablet bottle) is $3.96500 a tablet against $0.04260 for the generic — 93.1×, or $1,431.68 a year of difference for the same molecule at the same dose in the same weekly file. Whether that buys anything is a question about bioequivalence rather than about price, and this page does not answer it; what it can say is that both figures are acquisition costs from one federal file and neither is a retail quote.

Can I buy the 5 mg tablet and quarter it to save money?

The 5 mg tablet really is 3.1× cheaper per milligram — 1.368¢ against 4.260¢ — and this page will not price the quartered dose. Not because a label forbids it: the word "split" appears zero times in PROPECIA, zero times in PROSCAR and zero times in any generic finasteride label. It is because the labels make the tablet coating the stated protection against fetal exposure and attach the condition in the same sentence — the coating prevents contact with the active ingredient during normal handling "provided that the tablets have not been broken or crushed." That is a decision for you and a prescriber, and a cost page is not the place it should be made.

Why is one Propecia NDC cheaper than the other?

Because they are different packages, and NADAC alone cannot tell you that. The two PROPECIA NDCs share the description "PROPECIA 1 MG TABLET" and sit 10.6% apart per tablet — $3.96500 against $3.58511. Section 16 of the label supplies the reason: NDC 78206-0152-01 is a bottle of 30 and NDC 78206-0152-02 is the 90-tablet PROPAK. It is not a universal rule: the two PROSCAR NDCs are a bottle of 30 and a bottle of 100 and carry an identical rate.

Why can you not compare every hair-loss plan to the drug price?

Because 4 of the 8 recorded plans are not finasteride on its own. One pairs finasteride tablets with a topical minoxidil solution, one is a 0.3% finasteride and 6% minoxidil spray, one is a four-in-one chewable with biotin and vitamin D3, and one is a category price with no plan named behind it. Dividing a bundled monthly by the published rate for a single ingredient would attribute the whole price to that ingredient. The annual figure is shown for every plan; the multiple is shown for the 4 that name one active.

Is a plan quoted per 30 days the same as a monthly plan?

No, and the difference is real money over a year. A calendar month is a twelfth of 365 days, which is 30.4 days, so a year holds 12.17 thirty-day periods and not 12. PeterMD lists $60.00 per 30 days, which is $730.00 a year rather than the $720.00 that multiplying by twelve would give. 2 of the 8 recorded plans are quoted this way and one provider's record states both forms for the same figure.

Does topical finasteride cost more than the tablet?

We cannot say, and nobody can from a published source. There is no FDA-approved topical finasteride product in the United States, so there is no NDC and NADAC prices nothing — the only figures available are what a compounding pharmacy or a telehealth platform charges, which is a retail price for a preparation with no approved counterpart to compare it to. /tools/topical-finasteride-calculator does the concentration arithmetic for a formulation a prescriber has already specified and refuses to cost it for the same reason.

What does this page not tell me?

Seven things, printed above rather than quietly omitted: a price for a quartered 5 mg tablet, what your pharmacy will charge in cash, any price for topical finasteride, a per-year drug figure for the combination plans, a cost for dosing less often than daily, a discount-card price, and what any of it costs with insurance. Each is missing because it could not be sourced or should not be computed, and each entry says which.

Sources

1. [1]
   CMS / Medicaid.gov — Retail Price Survey, the programme behind the NADAC files

   These pricing files, entitled the NADAC (National Average Drug Acquisition Cost) files, provide state Medicaid agencies with covered outpatient drug prices by averaging survey invoice prices from retail community pharmacies across the United States.

   Retrieved 2026-09-20

2. [2]
   NADAC weekly reference file, 16 September 2026 — the finasteride rows charted above (CSV, ~97 MB; the quoted line is the generic 1 mg rate this page is anchored on)

   FINASTERIDE 1 MG TABLET,31722052630,0.04260,08/19/2026,EA,C/I,N,1,G,,,09/16/2026

   Retrieved 2026-09-20

3. [3]
   PROPECIA (finasteride) tablets prescribing information, Organon, NDA 020788 — section 5.1, the sentence that decides this page

   PROPECIA tablets are coated and will prevent contact with the active ingredient during normal handling, provided that the tablets have not been broken or crushed.

   Retrieved 2026-09-20

4. [4]
   Alpha Health Finder online hair-loss provider directory — the plans charted above, recorded by us from each provider

   Roman "Hair Loss" $15/month through MangoRx "Hair Loss (Grow)" $81/30 days, of which 4 name finasteride and no other active, as recorded in src/data/online-providers.ts

   Retrieved 2026-09-20

5. [5]
   PROSCAR (finasteride) tablets prescribing information, Organon, NDA 020180 — section 5.3, the identical coating sentence on the 5 mg tablet

   PROSCAR tablets are coated and will prevent contact with the active ingredient during normal handling, provided that the tablets have not been broken or crushed.

   Retrieved 2026-09-20

6. [6]
   PROPECIA prescribing information — sections 1 and 2, the indication and the labelled once-daily dose every figure here is computed at

   The recommended dose of PROPECIA is one tablet (1 mg) taken once daily.

   Retrieved 2026-09-20

Next steps

• Finasteride cost per year calculator
• Propecia vs Proscar
• Topical finasteride calculator
• Finasteride vs dutasteride
• All hair-loss providers

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