Amlodipine is one of the most prescribed medicines in the United States and one of the cheapest things a pharmacy stocks. A tablet costs a pharmacy about a penny at wholesale, which means a month of the drug itself is roughly the price of a postage stamp.
So the money in this prescription is not in the molecule. It is in which version of amlodipine you happen to be holding. The plain tablet is a single-digit drug. The branded liquid is a $630 drug. The brand-name combination pill is a $460 drug. Same active ingredient, three orders of magnitude apart. Every figure below was researched on September 3, 2026.
What Does Amlodipine Cost Without Insurance?
Acquisition costs come from the CMS National Average Drug Acquisition Cost survey, with the 5 mg and 10 mg generic rows effective September 2, 2026 and the 2.5 mg, brand Norvasc, Katerzia and combination rows effective August 19, 2026. Cash prices come from Drugs.com, Cost Plus Drugs, SingleCare and Walmart, all read September 3, 2026.
| Option | Low | Average | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| CMS NADAC acquisition cost, one generic tablet | $0.01012 (5 mg) | $0.01027 (2.5 mg) | $0.01503 (10 mg) |
| Discount card at retail, 30 tablets of 10 mg | $3.90 | $3.90 | $3.90 |
| Drugs.com cash price, 30 tablets | $4.57 (5 mg) | $4.67 (10 mg) | $8.68 (10 mg) |
| Drugs.com cash price, 90 tablets | $5.59 (10 mg) | $7.18 (5 mg) | $10.45 (10 mg) |
| Walmart Prescription Program | $8.00/mo (90-count at $24) | $9.00/mo (30-count) | $9.00/mo |
| Average retail cash price, 30 tablets of 10 mg | $65.86 | $65.86 | $65.86 |
| Generic combination tablet, 30 (amlodipine-olmesartan) | $7.07 | $17.99 | $28.22 |
| Katerzia oral suspension, one 150 mL bottle | $630.08 (CMS) | $651.58 (Drugs.com) | $651.58 |
| Brand Norvasc, 30 days | $260.93 (5 mg) | $268.50 (5 mg) | $367.20 (10 mg) |
The arithmetic on the NADAC rows is worth doing yourself. A 5 mg tablet costs $0.01012, so a once-daily 30-day supply is about 30 cents of actual drug and a 90-day supply is about 91 cents. At 10 mg it is $0.01503 a tablet, or 45 cents a month. Nothing you pay at a counter is mostly medicine.
The sources disagree sharply about what plain retail costs, and the gap is the whole story. SingleCare states a $65.86 average retail price for 30 of the 10 mg tablets, while Drugs.com lists the same 30 tablets at $4.67 to $8.68 and Cost Plus Drugs publishes a $207.00 retail comparison for 30 of the generic Azor combination. SingleCare’s own per-pharmacy rows on the same page spanned single digits to hundreds of dollars across five chains, and those rows move between sessions, so treat them as a picture of the spread rather than as prices you can count on. The honest cross-source range is roughly $4 to $66 for a month of the plain tablet, and where you land inside that range is decided almost entirely by whether you used any discount at all.
What Drives the Price
Formulation, and nothing else comes close. The tablet, the branded liquid and the branded combination pill are all amlodipine. In the August 2026 CMS data they cost about one cent, $4.20 per mL and $15.32 per tablet respectively. Liquids exist because some people genuinely cannot swallow tablets, but they are priced like specialty drugs.
Brand versus generic. A 5 mg Norvasc tablet costs $8.69759 in CMS acquisition data while a 5 mg generic amlodipine tablet costs $0.01012. That is roughly 860 times the money for the same molecule at the same strength.
Whether the pill is a combination. Every amlodipine combination product costs more per tablet than amlodipine does, because you are also buying the second drug plus a formulation premium. The generic combinations are still cheap in absolute terms. The brands are not.
Whether you use any discount at all. The single largest swing available to you is the gap between an unhelped counter price and a card, a program price, or a transparent mail pharmacy. On this drug that gap is roughly $60 a month on a prescription whose ingredients cost 30 cents.
Strength and quantity. Generic pricing barely moves with dose. Drugs.com lists 90 of the 10 mg tablets at $5.59 to $10.45 against $4.67 to $8.68 for 30, so tripling the quantity often costs a dollar or two. Fixed dispensing costs dominate everything else.
The Combination Pill Question
A lot of people taking amlodipine are actually taking it inside a two-in-one tablet: amlodipine-benazepril (brand Lotrel), amlodipine-valsartan (brand Exforge) or amlodipine-olmesartan (brand Azor). Whether you should ask about splitting that back into two cheap generics is a real cash-pay question, and the popular answer turns out to be wrong more often than not.
Start with the pure drug cost, where the case for splitting looks strongest. In CMS data effective August 19, 2026, an amlodipine-olmesartan 5-20 mg tablet costs $0.22570, while a 5 mg amlodipine tablet ($0.01012) and a 20 mg olmesartan tablet ($0.08105) cost $0.09117 together. Over 30 days that is $6.77 for the combination against $2.74 for the pair. Amlodipine-valsartan 5-160 mg runs $0.27577 a tablet against $0.12244 for amlodipine plus valsartan 160 mg, or $8.27 against $3.67 a month. Amlodipine-benazepril 5-10 mg is the closest of the three at $0.10242 against $0.07512, or $3.07 against $2.25.
So the combination carries a genuine ingredient premium of roughly $1 to $5 a month. The problem is that a second prescription costs a second dispensing fee, and dispensing fees are larger than the premium. The Cost Plus Drugs page for the generic Azor combination shows its price built from $1.80 of manufacturing, $0.27 of markup and $5.00 of pharmacy labor, for $7.07 per 30 tablets. Splitting that into two fills would add another $5.00 of labor before you saved a cent.
Walmart’s program makes the same point more bluntly. On the Prescription Program drug list effective March 24, 2025, amlodipine 2.5, 5 and 10 mg costs $9 for a 30-count and $24 for a 90-count, and benazepril 20 and 40 mg, lisinopril and losartan sit in the same $9 tier. No amlodipine combination pill appears on that list at any price, and neither does plain valsartan or olmesartan. So an amlodipine plus benazepril pair costs $18 for 30 days or $48 for 90 days there, against $7.07 for a single generic combination tablet by mail or $12.70 to $28.22 for 30 on Drugs.com. Two pills is the more expensive answer.
Where splitting wins enormously is if you are still on the brand. Brand Azor costs $15.32433 to $19.63458 a tablet in CMS acquisition data effective July 1, 2026, or roughly $460 to $589 for 30 days, and brand Exforge runs $10.65075 to $15.39419 a tablet effective January 7, 2026, or $320 to $462 a month. The generic version of the identical combination is $7.07 to $28.22. That is the conversation worth having with a prescriber, not the one about pill counts.
Cash Price vs. Insurance
Amlodipine is a clean case where paying cash often beats running the prescription through a plan. If your copay is $10 or $15, a $3.90 card price or a $4.57 mail-order fill wins outright, and you skip the pharmacy benefit entirely.
The usual tradeoff applies. Money spent outside your plan does not count toward your deductible or out-of-pocket maximum, and a discount card cannot be stacked with insurance on the same fill. On a drug that costs less than a coffee, that lost deductible credit is rarely worth chasing.
The liquids are where the math reverses. Katerzia and Norliqva are branded products with no generic equivalent, priced at $630.08 and $482.30 per 150 mL bottle in CMS acquisition data effective August 19, 2026, with Drugs.com listing Katerzia at $651.58. At that level a plan’s coverage matters enormously, and the Katerzia copay program listed on its Drugs.com price page is open only to commercially insured patients, which is exactly the wrong shape of help for a cash payer. If you cannot swallow tablets, ask the prescriber whether a compounding pharmacy or a different agent is an option before you accept a three-figure monthly bill.
If a pharmacy quotes you a two-figure or three-figure price for plain generic amlodipine, run it through our fair price checker before you pay. That quote is a contract artifact, not a market price.
How to Pay Less
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Run a free discount card before you fill anything. SingleCare’s amlodipine page, prices updated September 3, 2026, showed a $3.90 card price for 30 of the 10 mg tablets against a $65.86 stated retail average. That is the cheapest verified route on this drug. Our comparison of GoodRx vs. SingleCare explains how to check both on the same prescription and why an online quote can move between visits.
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Read the actual Walmart drug list, not the web page. The $4 Prescriptions page shows only the $4 and $10 tables, and amlodipine is not in them. The PDF drug list linked from that page, effective March 24, 2025, puts amlodipine in the $9 per 30-day and $24 per 90-day tier. That is still a good price with no card and no membership, but it is not $4, and pharmacy staff quoting the headline number may not know the difference.
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Price a transparent mail pharmacy, especially for combination pills. Cost Plus Drugs lists the generic Azor combination at $7.07 for 30 tablets against a $207.00 retail comparison, and publishes the breakdown that gets it there. Combination products are where mail order beats a retail counter by the widest margin.
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If you take a brand-name combination, ask about the generic version of that same combination. Not about splitting it into two pills. Brand Azor and Exforge run several hundred dollars a month while the identical generic combination runs single digits to about $28. Our lisinopril cost guide and losartan cost guide cover what the other half of a typical two-drug regimen costs on its own.
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Ask for a 90-day prescription. Every route here charges its fixed costs per fill. Drugs.com lists 90 of the 10 mg tablets from $5.59 against $4.67 for 30, and Walmart’s 90-day price is $24 against $9 for 30 days, so the per-month cost falls on both.
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Budget for the monitoring, not the pills. The prescription is the cheap part of treating high blood pressure. A free or sliding-scale clinic can handle the visits and refills at little or no cost, and if a clinic or hospital bills you more than expected for that visit, our guide to negotiating medical bills covers what to do next.
Bottom Line
Budget $4 to $9 a month for generic amlodipine tablets without insurance, and treat anything above about $15 as a signal to shop rather than a fact about the drug. A free discount card, a transparent mail pharmacy and Walmart’s program all land inside that band.
The three expensive ways to take this medicine are brand Norvasc at $261 to $367 for 30 days, the Katerzia and Norliqva liquids at $482 to $652 a bottle, and a brand-name combination tablet at roughly $320 to $589 a month. All three have far cheaper equivalents, and the combination question is worth pricing both ways rather than assuming two pills beat one. For the other half of a typical blood pressure regimen, see our metoprolol cost guide, and if a statin was added at the same visit, our atorvastatin cost guide tells a nearly identical pricing story. If your prescriber also ordered heart testing, our EKG cost guide covers that bill.