Allopurinol is the rare prescription where the honest answer to “what does it cost” is “almost nothing, if you ask.” A pharmacy pays about five cents for a 300 mg tablet. A cash payer who uses a mail-order pharmacy or a discount card pays five to fifteen dollars a month. A cash payer who does neither can be charged nearly ninety dollars for the same ninety tablets.
This guide covers the 100 mg and 300 mg tablets that make up almost all allopurinol prescriptions, the 200 mg strength that behaves nothing like the other two, and how the second-line alternative febuxostat and its brand Uloric compare on price. Acquisition figures come from the CMS National Average Drug Acquisition Cost file with an August 19, 2026 effective date, the most recent vintage published as of September 2026.
What Does Allopurinol Cost Without Insurance?
| Version and quantity | Low | Average | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Generic allopurinol 300 mg, 30 tablets | $5.93 | $8.41 | n/a |
| Generic allopurinol 300 mg, 90 tablets | $14.96 | $15.55 | $87.44 |
| Generic allopurinol 100 mg, 30 tablets | $5.59 | $6.42 | n/a |
| Generic allopurinol 100 mg, 90 tablets | $5.96 | n/a | $10.77 |
| Generic allopurinol 200 mg, 90 tablets | $357.10 | n/a | $508.89 |
| Generic febuxostat 40 mg, 30 tablets | $8.14 | $43.40 | n/a |
| Generic febuxostat 80 mg, 30 tablets | $9.93 | $31.57 | n/a |
| Brand Uloric 40 mg, 30 tablets (pharmacy acquisition cost) | $315.94 | n/a | n/a |
Low figures on the 30-tablet rows are Cost Plus Drugs prices read September 4, 2026. The $14.96 low and the $87.44 high on the 90-tablet row are SingleCare’s card price and stated average retail for that fill, read the same day. Average and high figures elsewhere come from the Drugs.com allopurinol and febuxostat price guides. The Uloric row is the August 19, 2026 NADAC unit cost of $10.53129 per tablet multiplied out to 30, and Medicare Part D independently paid an average of $554.10 per Uloric claim in 2024.
The two numbers worth carrying away are $15.55 and $87.44. Both are a 90-day supply of the same 300 mg tablet, on the same day, in the same country. The difference is entirely in how the prescription was filled.
What Drives the Price
Where you fill it, not what you take. Allopurinol has no brand competitor left worth pricing, no patent, and no supply constraint. Medicare Part D covered 9.7 million allopurinol claims for 2.36 million beneficiaries in 2024 at an average of $9.91 per claim. When a cash quote comes back near $87, that is pharmacy markup on a five-cent tablet, not a drug cost.
The strength you were prescribed. This is the one genuine trap on this drug. The 100 mg tablet costs a pharmacy $0.03170 and the 300 mg costs $0.05464, but the 200 mg costs $1.91444, thirty-five times the 300 mg. Drugs.com shows the same pattern at retail, listing 90 of the 200 mg tablets at $357.10 to $508.89 while 90 of the 300 mg run $15.55. The 200 mg is simply an uncommon strength with few manufacturers behind it. If your prescription is for 200 mg, it is worth asking whether the same daily dose can be built from 100 mg or 300 mg tablets.
Quantity. Per-tablet cost falls steeply with fill size. Drugs.com listed 20 of the 100 mg tablets at $5.70, 30 at $6.42, and 180 at $7.68 to $17.30. The dispensing fee is most of the bill, so you are paying for the transaction rather than for the pills.
Which gout drug you are on. Allopurinol and febuxostat are both daily urate-lowering drugs, and both are generic now, but they are not priced alike. Generic febuxostat costs a pharmacy $0.21142 for a 40 mg tablet and $0.28100 for 80 mg, four to five times the allopurinol tablet, and Medicare Part D averaged $110.60 per febuxostat claim against $9.91 per allopurinol claim in 2024. Brand Uloric is a different order of magnitude again at $10.53129 per tablet in the acquisition file. Which drug is right for you is a clinical decision. What the numbers tell you is what to ask about before the prescription is written rather than after.
Whether you need the intravenous version. Injectable allopurinol, sold as Aloprim, is used in a hospital setting rather than at a pharmacy counter, and Drugs.com listed a single 500 mg vial at $2,443.80 to $3,283.80. It is the same molecule as a five-cent tablet. This is a good illustration of why a hospital bill and a pharmacy bill for the same drug are not comparable documents.
Cash Price vs. Insurance
Paying cash for allopurinol almost always beats using insurance. A typical generic copay of $10 to $15 sits above the $5.59 to $8.41 you can pay outright at a cost-plus pharmacy, and well above the per-day cost of a 90-day fill. On a drug this cheap, the paperwork of a claim costs more than the medicine.
Two caveats. First, cash spending generally does not count toward your deductible or out-of-pocket maximum, which matters only if you expect to hit either one in the same year. Second, if a pharmacy is quoting you an amount near the average retail figure, that is not the market price and there is no reason to accept it. Our fair price checker will tell you whether a quote sits inside a normal range.
Note also that the flat-price retailer programs that cover many maintenance generics do not cover this one. We read Walmart’s Prescription Program drug list, effective March 24, 2025, on September 4, 2026 and confirmed with a coordinate-level extraction that allopurinol, febuxostat and colchicine appear in none of its tiers, while levetiracetam, lamotrigine and topiramate do. For gout, the cheap routes are mail order and discount cards.
How to Pay Less
Use a cost-plus mail-order pharmacy for the maintenance drug. Cost Plus Drugs listed generic allopurinol at $5.59 for 30 of the 100 mg tablets and $5.93 for 30 of the 300 mg on September 4, 2026, plus $5.00 shipping per order. Its own retail comparison for the 100 mg tablet was $11.40 for the same 30. Because shipping is charged per order rather than per drug, this route works best if you consolidate several prescriptions.
Buy 90 days at a time. SingleCare’s card price of $14.96 for 90 of the 300 mg tablets works out to about 17 cents a day. Allopurinol is a drug you take indefinitely, so the per-fill dispensing cost is the thing to minimize.
Run a discount card against the pharmacy’s cash price on the exact strength. Neither wins every time, and card prices at individual chains shift between sessions, so treat a specific chain quote as an estimate rather than a published rate. Our comparison is at /save/goodrx-vs-singlecare/.
Check the strength before you check the pharmacy. If you were quoted a three-figure price for a 90-day supply, look at whether the bottle says 200 mg. That single fact explains more high allopurinol quotes than any pharmacy markup does.
Price the alternatives in the room, not at the counter. If your prescriber is weighing febuxostat, the cost difference is $8.14 to $43.40 for 30 against $5.59 to $8.41 for allopurinol, and brand Uloric is off the scale entirely. A prescriber who knows the numbers can factor them in. Again, this is cost information only, not a recommendation about which drug to take.
If the obstacle is the visit rather than the drug, use a sliding-scale clinic. Urate-lowering therapy needs periodic lab monitoring and an active prescriber, and lapsed follow-up is a common reason people stop. Federally qualified health centers charge on an income-based scale; see /save/free-clinics-sliding-scale/. If an emergency room visit for a flare has already produced a bill, /save/how-to-negotiate-medical-bills/ covers what to do with it.
The Bottom Line
Allopurinol should cost a cash payer between $5 and $16 for a month, and roughly $15 for three months if you buy in bulk with a card or a mail-order pharmacy. Anything materially above that is a signal to move the prescription or to check whether you were written for the 200 mg strength.
Allopurinol prevents flares rather than treating them, so most people managing gout are pricing two drugs at once. Our guide to colchicine covers the flare side, and prednisone and meloxicam cover the other drugs commonly used during an attack.