Generic Liraglutide: The Cheapest Real GLP-1 in the US

Almost every article about GLP-1 medications and money says the same thing: there is no generic, you are stuck with list prices above $1,000 a month, and the earliest relief is years away.

That is true of semaglutide. It is true of tirzepatide. It is not true of liraglutide — and liraglutide is a real, FDA-approved GLP-1 receptor agonist with a cardiovascular outcomes trial and a weight-management indication, not a compounded workaround or a research chemical.

This is the guide to what actually exists, what it costs, and the trap that catches people at the pharmacy counter.

This is not medical advice. It describes approvals, prices and supply. Where it touches dosing it is summarizing the FDA-approved prescribing information; follow your own prescription and your provider’s directions.

Is there really a generic GLP-1?

Yes, and there are two distinct kinds, because liraglutide is sold under two brand names.

Victoza is liraglutide for type 2 diabetes, dialable up to 1.8 mg a day. Saxenda is liraglutide for weight management, dialable up to 3 mg a day. Same molecule, same 6 mg per mL concentration, same 3 mL prefilled pen. Different approved products.

A generic copies one specific reference product. So a generic approved against Victoza is a diabetes product that stops at 1.8 mg, and a generic approved against Saxenda is a weight-management product that reaches 3 mg. They are not interchangeable, and a pharmacist cannot swap one for the other.

Who makes generic liraglutide in the US?

The authoritative answer is the FDA’s own National Drug Code directory, which records which products are actually listed as being marketed — a different question from who holds an approval. Reading it on September 11, 2026 [1]:

Referencing Victoza (diabetes, maximum 1.8 mg per day)

Company	Application	First listed as marketed	Cartons
Hybio Pharmaceutical	ANDA215503	2024-06-21 (1 pen); 2024-12-24 (2, 3 pens)	1, 2, 3 pens
Teva Pharmaceuticals USA (authorized generic)	NDA022341	2024-06-24	2, 3 pens
Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA	ANDA215503	2024-12-24	2, 3 pens
Meitheal Pharmaceuticals	ANDA218115	2025-04-02	2, 3 pens
Lupin Pharmaceuticals	ANDA215421	2025-10-02	2, 3 pens
Orbicular Pharmaceutical Technologies	ANDA217590	2026-01-21	2, 3 pens
Cipla USA	ANDA217590	2026-01-22	2, 3 pens
NorthStar Rx	ANDA218115	2026-03-01	2, 3 pens
Biocon Pharma	ANDA215245	2026-04-25	2, 3 pens

Referencing Saxenda (weight management, up to 3 mg per day)

Company	Application	First listed as marketed	Cartons
Teva Pharmaceuticals	ANDA214568	2025-08-28	5 pens
Cipla USA	ANDA217234	2026-02-25	3, 5 pens
Orbicular Pharmaceutical Technologies	ANDA217234	2026-02-26	3, 5 pens
Biocon Pharma	ANDA217063	2026-03-27	3, 5 pens

Notice that several companies appear under the same application number. That is normal: one company develops and holds the application, another distributes in the US under its own label. Orbicular and Cipla share ANDA217590; Meitheal and NorthStar Rx share ANDA218115; Hikma and Hybio share ANDA215503.

So the labeler count overstates the competition. Thirteen listed products come from eight generic applications — five referencing Victoza (ANDA215503 Hikma, ANDA218115 Nanjing King Friend, ANDA215421 Lupin, ANDA217590 Orbicular, ANDA215245 Biocon) and three referencing Saxenda (ANDA214568 Teva, ANDA217234 Orbicular, ANDA217063 Biocon) — plus Teva’s authorized generic under Novo Nordisk’s own NDA022341. Read “nine companies sell generic Victoza” as nine labels, not nine independent factories.

Drugs@FDA gives the approval dates behind those applications, which run earlier than the launch dates companies announce: ANDA215503 on 2024-12-23, ANDA218115 on 2025-04-02, ANDA215421 on 2025-07-22, ANDA214568 on 2025-08-27, ANDA217590 on 2026-01-14, ANDA217063 and ANDA217234 both on 2026-02-24, and ANDA215245 on 2026-03-11. The same records carry the therapeutic-equivalence codes: every Victoza-referenced generic is AP1 and every Saxenda-referenced generic is AP2 [13].

Those two codes are the technical reason for the pharmacy-counter problem described further down. Drugs in different numbered therapeutic-equivalence groups are not substitutable for one another even at an identical concentration, so a pharmacist holding an AP1 pen cannot fill a prescription that requires an AP2 one, however identical the 6 mg/mL liquid inside them is.

One date in the table does not line up with those approvals, and it is worth naming rather than smoothing over. The NDC directory gives Hybio a marketing start of June 21, 2024 for a single-pen presentation filed under ANDA215503, six months before Drugs@FDA records that application as approved [1][13]. Hybio’s two- and three-pen cartons start on December 24, 2024, alongside Hikma’s. The first generic liraglutide a US patient could actually buy was Teva’s authorized generic on June 24, 2024.

Notice also that Teva appears twice, with two unrelated products. Teva markets an authorized generic of Victoza (NDC 0480-3667) and, separately, an abbreviated new drug application generic of Saxenda (NDC 0480-7250). “Teva makes generic liraglutide” tells you nothing about which one you are getting. Only the application number or the NDC settles it.

How this happened

The sequence matters because it explains why prices moved when they did.

June 24, 2024 — Teva launched an authorized generic of Victoza, the first generic GLP-1 product in the US market. An authorized generic is Novo Nordisk’s own approved product sold without the brand name, so it arrives early but is typically priced only modestly below the brand. Teva cited Victoza annual sales of $1.656 billion as of April 2024 [2]. The press release itself gives no price; the launch list prices reported at the time by diaTribe and by the Pediatric Endocrine Society were $469.60 for a two-pen pack and $704.40 for a three-pen pack, described as roughly a 16% to 17% discount to brand Victoza’s then-typical cash price [12].

December 23, 2024 — The FDA approved the first true generic referencing Victoza, granted to Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA. The agency’s announcement noted that liraglutide injection was on the drug shortage list and that it prioritizes generic applications for drugs in shortage. It also noted that the first generic in the whole GLP-1 class had been approved the previous month — a generic referencing Byetta (exenatide) [3]. Hikma launched immediately and cited IQVIA data putting US sales of liraglutide injection at roughly $1.3 billion for the 12 months ending October 2024 [4].

April 2, 2025 — Meitheal Pharmaceuticals launched its liraglutide injection, noting that branded Victoza was in active shortage on both the FDA and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists lists as of March 24, 2025. It was Meitheal’s first injector-pen product [5].

August 28, 2025 — Teva announced FDA approval and same-day launch of a generic version of Saxenda: the first generic GLP-1 approved specifically for weight loss. Teva cited Saxenda annual sales of $165 million as of June 2025 — a striking drop from Victoza’s $1.65 billion, showing how far weight-management prescribing had already migrated to semaglutide and tirzepatide [6].

January to April 2026 — A wave of additional products reached the market from Orbicular, Cipla, NorthStar Rx and Biocon, on both the Victoza and Saxenda sides [1].

Independent competition — several unrelated manufacturers, not one authorized generic — is what actually pushes a price down. Liraglutide now has that on the diabetes side and is building it on the weight-management side.

What does it cost?

These are cash prices published by GoodRx and captured on September 14, 2026, for a single ZIP code. They change daily and differ by pharmacy, so treat them as a shape rather than a quote. GoodRx is used here as one published, checkable price source, not as a recommendation; SingleCare, Cost Plus Drugs, a pharmacy’s own cash price and your insurer’s negotiated rate can all come out lower or higher, and this site has no commercial relationship with any of them. Note too that the single cheapest GoodRx quote below required a paid GoodRx Companion subscription, which the free coupon price does not, and that “retail” on a discount-card site usually means that site’s own average rather than a price you could walk in and be charged.

Generic liraglutide, Victoza-equivalent (diabetes)

Package	GoodRx average retail price	GoodRx coupon price
2 pens, 18 mg/3 mL	$615.85	$112.19 (verified 2026-09-14)
3 pens, 18 mg/3 mL	$924.00	$154.01

Two things about that table matter more than the numbers in it. The left-hand column is what GoodRx itself labels an average retail price, not the price at any one pharmacy: GoodRx states “Save 81.78%” against $615.85, which reconciles exactly with the $112.19 coupon price. And GoodRx is not consistent with itself — its own editorial page on Victoza costs gives a different average retail pair for the same two packages, $464.86 and $711.39 [7a]. Any figure taken from GoodRx should name the page it came from.

GoodRx also advertises this product at $101.90, but that is a GoodRx Companion paid-subscription price rather than the free coupon price, and GoodRx’s page attaches it to the Walgreens coupon rather than to CVS or Target. The standard GoodRx price shown at Walgreens on the same page was $217.71, against a $305.19 retail for that pharmacy [7]. GoodRx stamps these coupon prices “last updated on 09/13/26”.

Generic liraglutide, Saxenda-equivalent (weight management)

Package	GoodRx average retail price	GoodRx coupon price
5 pens, 18 mg/3 mL	$717.63	$372.45 (verified 2026-09-14)

Again $717.63 is GoodRx’s own average retail figure, not a single pharmacy’s price: GoodRx states “Save 48.10%”, which reconciles exactly with $372.45 [8]. Individual pharmacy rows on the same page ran much higher — one showed a $729.42 coupon price against a $1,202 retail at that pharmacy. Across pharmacies and ZIP codes the cash price for this carton spans roughly $372 to $1,240, which is a range rather than a point figure and should be read as one. For brand Saxenda, GoodRx separately carried an average retail price of $1,267.51 and a brand coupon price of $1,323.56 [8a].

A five-pen carton covers roughly one month at the 3 mg maintenance dose, since each pen holds 18 mg.

For reference, GoodRx’s average retail price for the most common version was $1,348.34 for Mounjaro and $1,212.00 for Ozempic when this page was checked, before any manufacturer savings offer [7b][8b].

The same drug at three other cash sellers

GoodRx is not the only route, and the other three published very different numbers on the same day.

• Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs lists the Victoza-referenced generic at $87.80 and $129.20 on two separate listings, for what its pages call “a 1 count supply of 18 mg/3 mL”, with its markup published on the page ($72.00 or $108.00 manufacturing, plus a 15% markup, plus $5.00 pharmacy labor; shipping charged separately at checkout) [15]. We are not converting that into a monthly cost: whether the price applies per pen or per box of two or three pens could not be confirmed from the page, and a related Cost Plus card listing quotes “$172.61 for 1 Pen (9 Ml)”, which cannot be right as written since one pen holds 3 mL.
• SingleCare listed a cash price of $400.18 for a single 18 mg/3 mL pen against $63.10 with its discount card. Its own editorial pages put a month of the Victoza-equivalent generic at about $1,023 without insurance falling to $276 at CVS with the card, and a month of the Saxenda-equivalent generic at about $1,700 falling to $496 at Walgreens [16]. Those are discount-card tiers, not self-pay retail, and SingleCare’s no-insurance baselines run far above GoodRx’s for the same packages.
• Amazon Pharmacy showed a retail price of $495.66 for liraglutide 18 mg/3 mL pen injector, alongside the line “Most customers pay around $11 for this medication. Insurance providers set prices” [17]. That $11 is an average of insured copays, not a cash price, and quoting it as one would be the single most misleading number on this page.

And the manufacturer’s own anchor: NovoCare states that brand Saxenda has a list price of $1,349.02 for a month at the 3 mg dose [18]. NovoCare also invites eligible patients to request an offer to pay “as little as $25, or save up to $200 per Saxenda prescription for up to 12 months” — that is a savings-card tier requiring commercial insurance that already covers Saxenda, not a self-pay price, and it cannot turn a plan exclusion into coverage. Novo’s own site contradicts itself here: its main Saxenda support page says the Saxenda Savings Offer was discontinued for new enrollees as of June 30, 2023.

What pharmacies pay, which is the firmer number

Cash prices move; acquisition costs are surveyed. CMS publishes the National Average Drug Acquisition Cost, its survey of what US retail pharmacies actually pay wholesalers. In the file effective August 19, 2026 [14]:

Product	NADAC per mL
Generic liraglutide, 3-pen carton	$32.00
Generic liraglutide, 2-pen carton	$33.82
Generic liraglutide, 5-pen carton	$47.69
Brand Saxenda	$87.14
Brand Victoza, 3-pen carton	$87.81
Xultophy 100/3.6	$85.90

At label dosing that works out — by our arithmetic, not CMS’s, since NADAC publishes only a per-mL rate — to about $288 for 30 days of generic liraglutide at the 1.8 mg diabetes dose (9 mL) and about $715 for 30 days at the 3 mg weight-management dose (15 mL), against roughly $790 for 30 days of brand Victoza. Four weekly doses of Wegovy 2.4 mg came to about $1,306 and of Mounjaro 5 mg to about $1,077 on the same file. These are what pharmacies pay, not what patients pay, but no cash price can sit below them for long.

The same dataset shows the competition working. The generic two-pen carton was $48.74 per mL in the file effective February 18, 2026 and $33.82 six months later, a fall of about 31%; the five-pen carton went from $73.74 in January 2026 to $47.69 [14].

The weight-management side is clearly less competitive than the diabetes side right now — four labels on three generic applications, against nine labels on five applications plus an authorized generic, and prices that reflect it. If the pattern from the diabetes side repeats, that gap should narrow as more Saxenda-referenced generics establish supply.

The mistake that costs people money

Here is the failure mode, taken from real patient reports.

A prescriber writes “liraglutide.” At a pharmacy that stocks the diabetes version, that gets filled as generic Victoza — a 1.8 mg pen — for a low price. At a pharmacy that reads it as the weight-management product, it gets filled as generic Saxenda — a 3 mg pen — at several times the cost. One patient in the r/liraglutide community described exactly this: a prescription written for liraglutide that a mail pharmacy insisted could only be filled as generic Saxenda, “literally more than triple the price” [9].

Two practical consequences:

1. The prescription has to match the indication and the dose you need. If you need to reach 3 mg, the 1.8 mg pens cannot get you there no matter how cheap they are.
2. Ask the pharmacist to price the exact product, by NDC, before you fill. And ask them to price the brand too — some insurance plans put the brand on a lower tier than the generic, which sounds backwards and happens anyway.

Is it actually in stock?

Mixed, and this is the weak point of the whole story.

As of September 14, 2026 the FDA lists Liraglutide Injection as Currently in Shortage, first posted July 18, 2023. Inside that listing [10]:

• Hikma — all presentations Available (revised 2026-09-03)
• Meitheal — all presentations Available (revised 2026-08-27)
• Novo Nordisk Victoza (NDCs 0169-4060-12 and -13) — Limited Availability, reason given as a shipping delay, no estimated end date
• Novo Nordisk Saxenda (NDC 0169-2800-15) — Limited Availability, “Product will be available until discontinuation in January 2027”
• Teva-distributed liraglutide (NDCs 0480-3667-20 and -22) — Available

The FDA’s separate discontinuation database records the Saxenda notice, dated 2026-08-25, and also carries a Teva posting dated 2026-05-14 for NDC 0480-7250-46 — the generic Saxenda [11]. Confusingly, the FDA’s NDC directory lists that same product with a marketing end date of 2027-09-30 and does not show it as withdrawn [1]. The FDA also displays a banner on the shortage database saying it is “currently experiencing technical difficulties” and that some information may not reflect current supply.

What patients experienced maps onto that mess. In late May and early June 2026, people in the r/liraglutide community reported they could not fill five-pen cartons of the 3 mg product while the two-pen and three-pen 1.8 mg cartons stayed on the shelf. Several eventually found the Cipla-labeled five-pen carton at retail Walgreens locations after transferring their prescriptions [9].

The practical takeaway is unglamorous: if you are on liraglutide 3 mg, call ahead before your refill week, and be prepared to move the prescription between chains, because different pharmacy chains use different wholesalers.

Does the generic work as well as the brand?

An FDA-approved generic must contain the same active ingredient at the same strength in the same dosage form, and must meet the agency’s bioequivalence standards. The approved generic labels carry the same indications, the same boxed warning about thyroid C-cell tumors, the same warnings and precautions, and the same dosing schedule as the reference brand. Teva’s generic Saxenda label, for instance, carries the full adult and adolescent indication and the same escalation schedule as Saxenda: a once-daily injection starting at 0.6 mg, stepped up by 0.6 mg at weekly intervals to a maintenance dose of 3 mg daily [6]. Liraglutide is a daily drug throughout; only the dose increases are weekly.

Some people report feeling a difference after switching. That is worth raising with a prescriber, since it can have other explanations — a different point in the weight-loss curve, a changed eating pattern, a pen stored differently — and since anything that feels like a loss of effect should be evaluated by a clinician rather than self-managed.

The honest catch

Liraglutide is the cheapest real GLP-1 in America. It is also the least effective of the ones people are choosing between, and the hardest to stick with.

In the head-to-head STEP 8 trial, average weight loss at 68 weeks was 6.4% on liraglutide 3.0 mg against 15.8% on weekly semaglutide 2.4 mg, and 27.6% of the liraglutide group quit versus 13.5% of the semaglutide group — despite nearly identical rates of gastrointestinal side effects. A daily injection is 365 shots a year instead of 52.

If cost is what stands between you and any GLP-1 at all, that trade may be obviously worth making. If you already have affordable access to a weekly drug, it probably is not. Either way, the decision belongs with a healthcare provider who knows your history — this article’s job is only to make sure you know the option exists, because most coverage of this drug class acts as though it does not.

Sources

1. FDA National Drug Code Directory — liraglutide products, openFDA API, data updated 2026-09-11
2. Teva Announces Launch of Authorized Generic of Victoza (liraglutide injection 1.8 mg), 2024-06-24
3. FDA Approves First Generic of Once-Daily GLP-1 Injection to Lower Blood Sugar in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes, 2024-12-23
4. Hikma receives FDA approval and launches the generic version of Victoza, Liraglutide, in the US, 2024-12-26
5. Meitheal Pharmaceuticals Announces Approval and Launch of Liraglutide Injection in the United States, 2025-04-03
6. Teva Announces FDA Approval and Launch of Generic Saxenda (liraglutide injection), 2025-08-28
7. Liraglutide (Victoza) prices — GoodRx, retrieved 2026-09-14
8. Liraglutide (Saxenda) prices — GoodRx, retrieved 2026-09-14
9. r/liraglutide — “U.S. Generic Saxenda Shortage Is Bad”, 2026-05-27
10. FDA Drug Shortages — Liraglutide Injection, current shortage record
11. FDA Drug Shortages — Liraglutide Injection, discontinuation record
12. Generic Victoza Now Available in the U.S. — diaTribe, 2024 (launch list prices, corroborated by the Pediatric Endocrine Society’s Drugs and Therapeutics committee note of 2024-08-09)
13. Drugs@FDA application, approval-date and therapeutic-equivalence records for liraglutide, openFDA drugsfda endpoint, retrieved 2026-09-14
14. NADAC (National Average Drug Acquisition Cost) 2026 — liraglutide, Victoza, Saxenda, Xultophy, Wegovy, Ozempic, Mounjaro and Zepbound records, files effective 2026-01-21, 2026-02-18 and 2026-08-19, CMS
15. Liraglutide 18 mg/3 mL solution pen-injector — Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, two listings, retrieved 2026-09-14
16. Liraglutide prices and liraglutide generic cost without insurance — SingleCare, retrieved 2026-09-14
17. LIRAGLUTIDE 18 MG/3ML PEN INJ — Amazon Pharmacy, retrieved 2026-09-14
18. Saxenda (liraglutide) injection 3 mg list price explained — NovoCare, Novo Nordisk, retrieved 2026-09-14

Additional GoodRx pages cited inline: [7a] How Much Does Victoza Cost Without Insurance? · [7b] Mounjaro prices · [8a] Saxenda prices · [8b] Ozempic prices, all retrieved 2026-09-14.