National Average Drug Acquisition Cost
Insights & Intelligence

The National Average Drug Acquisition Cost (NADAC) is a weekly benchmark published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. It estimates the average price retail community pharmacies pay to acquire prescription drugs, drawn from a voluntary invoice survey. Most state Medicaid programs use NADAC as the ingredient-cost anchor for pharmacy reimbursement, which makes it one of the most consequential public datasets in U.S. drug pricing.

NADAC Intelligence ingests every weekly release, joins in the FDA NDC directory, normalizes manufacturer aliases, and turns the result into something you can actually navigate. Three workflows the platform is designed for:

• ●Benchmark a pharmacy or payer's acquisition cost against the national average for a specific NDC or drug market.
• ●Hunt for substitutes — surface the generic alternatives in a market and rank them by current NADAC.
• ●Track weekly moves on a watchlist of drugs, manufacturers, or therapeutic classes, with email alerts when prices cross a threshold.

Want the deep dive? Start with Understanding NADAC pricing, then check the methodology page for how every aggregate is computed.