Frequently Asked Questions

NADAC stands for National Average Drug Acquisition Cost. It is a weekly benchmark commissioned by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that estimates the average price retail community pharmacies pay to acquire prescription drugs, based on a voluntary invoice survey. Most state Medicaid programs use NADAC as the ingredient-cost component of pharmacy reimbursement. Full primer: Understanding NADAC pricing.

CMS publishes a new NADAC file weekly, typically on Wednesdays. We ingest each release the same day CMS posts it, so directories, trend figures, and detail pages across the site reflect the latest file within hours — no manual republish required.

NADAC is built from real pharmacy invoices, not from publisher list prices. That makes it materially different from AWP and WAC, which are list prices set by manufacturers or pricing compendia. See NADAC vs AWP and NADAC vs WAC for a side-by-side.

NADAC explicitly excludes specialty pharmacies, mail-order, long-term care, hospital inpatient/outpatient, and 340B-priced inventory. Drugs whose U.S. dispensing is concentrated in those channels — most biologics and many oncology agents — can be sparse in NADAC or absent altogether. Detail: methodology.

NADAC is the most transparent public proxy for retail pharmacy acquisition cost, but it is a survey-based estimate, not a transaction record. Expect roughly a one-week lag between invoice activity and publication. NDCs with light survey response can lag actual market moves by an additional cycle or two. We document each known limitation on the methodology page.

Use the search bar in the top navigation. It accepts full or partial NDCs (with or without dashes), proprietary names, generic names, and manufacturer names. The autocomplete will surface the most likely match. Direct URLs work too: /drug/<ndc>.

Alternatives on a drug page are NDCs that share the same nonproprietary name and carry a generic classification (G) or brand-via-ANDA classification (B–ANDA) in the CMS file. They are sorted by current NADAC ascending so the cheapest option surfaces first. Bioequivalence in this context means the FDA has reviewed the products as therapeutically substitutable — see generic drug prices for the nuance.

Inside any drug market with at least four competing manufacturers we apply a standard interquartile-range test. A low outlier is a manufacturer pricing under Q1−1.5·IQR; a high outlier is one pricing over Q3+1.5·IQR. Markets with fewer than four manufacturers don't produce a stable IQR, so no flag is shown for those. See the methodology → outlier detection section.

CSV export and API access are paid. See /pricing for the current plan matrix.

Yes. The REST API exposes drug, drug-market, manufacturer, therapeutic-class, and time-series endpoints with the same data the UI uses. Authentication is by API key from your dashboard. Reference: /api-docs; getting-started guide: /docs.

Paid plans can export any visible table as CSV. The API returns JSON. If you need a different format (Parquet, ndjson, scheduled S3 drops), get in touch — we do bespoke deliveries for analyst teams.

Yes. Authenticated users can build a watchlist of NDCs, manufacturers, drug markets, and therapeutic classes, and configure email alerts when NADAC moves beyond a percentage threshold week over week.

Pharmacy buyers benchmarking acquisition cost, Medicaid program analysts maintaining reimbursement models, payer and PBM contracting teams, GPO category managers, drug-pricing researchers, journalists, and consulting analysts. If you'd like a walkthrough of how the platform fits your workflow, contact us.

Generic markets are volatile by design. New ANDA approvals introduce competition that drops prices. Shortages, raw-material disruptions (especially for injectables), and label-holder changes can spike them. NADAC also moves when the mix of pharmacies responding to that week's survey changes, even without underlying invoice movement.

Each point on the line is one weekly NADAC publication. The y-axis is price per pricing unit — EA (each), ML (milliliter), or GM (gram), depending on the drug. Gaps in the line indicate weeks the NDC was absent from NADAC (usually because survey response was below CMS's publication threshold). The percentage-change pills next to the chart are computed against the closest available data point at each lookback window.

No. NADAC Intelligence is an independent analytics product. All source data is public — NADAC from CMS, NDC metadata from the FDA NDC directory, recalls from openFDA — with full attribution on /data-sources.