About RxTrueCost

What this site is

RxTrueCost publishes the National Average Drug Acquisition Cost, known as NADAC, in a format you can actually read. NADAC comes from CMS. It's built from a survey of what retail community pharmacies pay to buy drugs from wholesalers and manufacturers. CMS updates the file every week.

We take that raw file and turn it into pages organized by drug name and package. No spreadsheets to download, no codes to decode. Just the number, the date it's from, and some context on how to read it.

This is acquisition cost. That's the price pharmacies pay to get the drug in the door. It is not the price a pharmacy charges you at the counter. Those two numbers are related but they are not the same, and we keep them separate on every page.

Who this is for

Cash-pay patients. If you're paying out of pocket and comparing quotes between pharmacies, knowing the acquisition cost gives you a reference point. It won't tell you what you should pay. It tells you roughly what the pharmacy paid, so you can judge whether a quote seems reasonable or wildly out of line.

Independent pharmacists. Owners and pharmacists-in-charge use NADAC to check reimbursement rates against acquisition cost, especially when a PBM contract looks off. Having the weekly data in a searchable format saves time versus pulling the CMS file yourself.

Journalists and researchers. If you're writing about drug pricing, NADAC is a primary source CMS itself uses in Medicaid reimbursement policy. We make it citable and easy to spot-check.

What this site is not

• Not a coupon site. We don't list discount cards, manufacturer coupons, or pharmacy membership deals. There are other sites for that.
• Not medical advice. We publish price data only. Nothing here covers dosage, what a drug treats, how it works, or whether it's right for you. Talk to a pharmacist or doctor for anything clinical.
• Not your retail price. Acquisition cost is a wholesale-side number. Retail price depends on the pharmacy's markup, your insurance or lack of it, PBM contracts, and other factors we don't have visibility into. We never claim to show you what you'll pay, and we never promise savings.

Where the data comes from

Every page traces back to a single source: the weekly NADAC file published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. We don't blend in other pricing databases or estimates. If CMS revises a number, our pages update on the next weekly pull.

Because NADAC is a survey-based average, it can lag real-world price shifts and it won't always match what a specific pharmacy paid. It's a national average, not a live quote from any one store. We say this on the data pages too, because it matters for how you use the number.

About Das Creative

RxTrueCost is a project of Das Creative LLC, a small US-based operation focused on building pipelines out of public data. We're not a pharmacy, a PBM, or an insurer. We have no financial relationship with drug manufacturers or wholesalers. Our only stake here is getting the public data in front of people in a form they can use.

If you find an error or a page that doesn't match the underlying CMS file, we want to hear about it. Accuracy on numbers is the whole point of this site.