Amoxicillin is one of the cheapest prescription drugs in the country, and the price you actually pay says almost nothing about the drug itself. Federal acquisition data effective August 19, 2026 prices an amoxicillin 500 mg capsule at 7.8 cents, which means a pharmacy’s entire drug cost for a 20-capsule fill is about $1.57. Everything above that is dispensing fee, packaging and margin.
That makes the useful question not “what does amoxicillin cost” but “what does this particular counter charge to hand it to me.” The answer ranges from about $6 to about $13 for the same capsules, and the gap widens sharply once clavulanate is added to make generic Augmentin. All figures below were researched on September 3, 2026.
What Does Amoxicillin Cost Without Insurance?
Prices below are cash prices, not insurance copays. Drugs.com figures come from its amoxicillin and amoxicillin/clavulanate price guides read September 3, 2026. Cost Plus Drugs figures are the rendered “Your Drug Price With Us” number for a 30-count supply, read the same day, with its flat $5.25 standard shipping shown separately in the High column. HealthWarehouse figures are its published per-capsule rate.
| Product and typical fill | Low | Average | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amoxicillin 500 mg capsules, 20 | $6.10 (Drugs.com) | $9.35 (midpoint) | $12.60 (HealthWarehouse per-capsule rate) |
| Amoxicillin 500 mg capsules, 30 | $6.72 (Cost Plus) | $7.02 (Drugs.com) | $11.97 (Cost Plus with shipping) |
| Amoxicillin 500 mg capsules, 100 | $13.49 (Drugs.com) | $13.49 (Drugs.com) | $13.49 (Drugs.com) |
| Amoxicillin 875 mg tablets, 20 | $7.49 (Drugs.com) | $7.49 (Drugs.com) | $7.49 (Drugs.com) |
| Amoxicillin 250 mg chewable tablets, 20 | $13.84 (Drugs.com) | $13.84 (Drugs.com) | $13.84 (Drugs.com) |
| Amoxicillin 400 mg/5 mL suspension, 100 mL | $7.68 (Drugs.com) | $7.68 (Drugs.com) | $7.68 (Drugs.com) |
| Amoxicillin-clavulanate 875-125 mg tablets, 20 | $18.38 (Drugs.com) | $19.48 (Drugs.com midpoint) | $20.57 (Drugs.com) |
| Amoxicillin-clavulanate 875-125 mg tablets, 30 | $11.80 (Cost Plus) | $17.05 (Cost Plus with shipping) | $20.95 (Drugs.com) |
| Brand Augmentin 125-31.25 mg/5 mL suspension, 100 mL | $594.66 (Drugs.com) | $594.66 (Drugs.com) | $594.66 (Drugs.com) |
Several rows carry one published figure in all three columns because only one source lists that exact fill. Where a row does show a spread, the spread is the real finding: the same 20 capsules of amoxicillin 500 mg range from $6.10 to $12.60 depending on where you fill.
The last row is not a typo. Brand-name Augmentin has effectively left the US tablet market, and the only strength Drugs.com still prices under the brand is a pediatric suspension at $594.66 for 100 mL. CMS acquisition data reflects the same retreat: the most recent published NADAC row for brand Augmentin is a 125-31.25 mg/5 mL suspension with an effective date of March 19, 2025, more than a year stale, while the generic amoxicillin-clavulanate rows all carry a current August 19, 2026 date.
What Drives the Price
The dispensing fee, not the drug
At 7.8 cents a capsule, the drug in a 20-capsule amoxicillin fill costs $1.57 wholesale. Cost Plus Drugs publishes its arithmetic openly: $1.50 of manufacturing cost, $0.22 of 15 percent markup, and a flat $5.00 pharmacy labor charge for a 30-count supply, which is how $6.72 gets built. Because the labor charge is flat, small fills look expensive per capsule and large fills look cheap. That is also why 100 capsules cost $13.49 while 20 cost $6.10.
Adding clavulanate
Clavulanate is what turns amoxicillin into Augmentin, and it is where the money is. NADAC effective August 19, 2026 prices the plain amoxicillin 875 mg tablet at 15.6 cents and the amoxicillin-clavulanate 875-125 mg tablet at 28.6 cents, roughly double. At retail the multiple is closer to three: $7.49 for 20 amoxicillin 875 mg tablets versus $18.38 to $20.57 for 20 of the combination tablets. The extended-release 1000-62.5 mg combination is worse still, at $71.22 for 28 tablets.
Form and formulation
Capsules and tablets are the cheap forms. Chewables and suspensions cost more to make and to dispense, which is why 20 amoxicillin 250 mg chewable tablets run $13.84 while 20 of the 500 mg capsules run $6.10. On the combination side, the 250-62.5 mg/5 mL suspension is an outlier at $28.46 for 75 mL, roughly triple the 200-28.5 mg/5 mL version at $9.91 for the same volume, according to the Drugs.com amoxicillin/clavulanate guide.
Which pharmacy you walk into
The spread between $6.10 and $13.23 for essentially the same fill is not explained by anything about the medicine. Cash prices for generics are set pharmacy by pharmacy, and the uninsured patient who does not compare is the one who funds the difference. This is the same dynamic covered in our antibiotics cost guide across the whole drug class.
Supply, when it bites
Availability moves prices for generics faster than anything else. As of September 3, 2026, the openFDA drug shortages endpoint returns no amoxicillin records at all, which is a meaningful improvement over the 2022 and 2023 pediatric suspension shortage. That is worth checking again if prices jump, because a shortage in one concentration can push prescribers to a more expensive one.
Cash Price vs. Insurance
Amoxicillin is the classic case where paying cash can beat using insurance. A generic copay of $10 or $15 is common, and several of the cash prices above come in under that. If your plan has a deductible you have not met, the cash price is almost certainly lower than what the pharmacy would run through the plan.
There is one real tradeoff. Money you pay in cash outside your insurance usually does not count toward your deductible or out-of-pocket maximum. On a $7 antibiotic that hardly matters. On a chronic medication it can. For a one-off antibiotic course, ask the pharmacist for both numbers and take the lower one.
The visit is the bigger number here, not the drug. Every oral antibiotic in the US requires a prescription, so the total cost of getting treated is the prescriber’s fee plus roughly $7. A cash doctor visit or an urgent care visit will typically cost several times what the medication does.
How to Pay Less
Do not assume Walmart’s $4 program covers it. It does not. The Walmart Prescription Program drug list PDF, effective 03/24/2025 and still the version linked from Walmart’s $4 Prescriptions page as of September 3, 2026, contains no antibiotics whatsoever. Its tiers cover diabetes, cholesterol, heart and blood pressure, mental health, digestion, pain, thyroid, vitamins, family planning and one respiratory inhaler. Amoxicillin is cheap enough elsewhere that this rarely costs you anything, but the assumption is widespread and wrong.
Ask for the larger bottle when the prescription allows it. Because the dispensing fee is flat, per-capsule cost falls fast with quantity. Drugs.com prices 20 capsules at $6.10 and 100 at $13.49, which is 31 cents versus 13 cents each. This only helps if your prescription is written for the larger count, so it is a question for the prescriber, not something to do at the counter.
Compare a discount card against the plain cash price. Discount cards routinely beat sticker prices on generics, and on a drug this cheap the difference between cards is small but the difference from doing nothing is not. Our GoodRx vs. SingleCare comparison explains how the two work and when each wins.
Price mail order against your corner pharmacy. Cost Plus Drugs charges $6.72 for 30 capsules plus $5.25 flat shipping, which is $11.97 delivered, and its shipping fee is per order rather than per drug. That makes it competitive only when you are filling more than one prescription at once, which is worth knowing before you assume mail order is automatically cheaper.
Get the prescription from the cheapest legitimate source. Since the visit usually costs more than the antibiotic, that is where the savings are. Federally qualified health centers and sliding-scale clinics charge based on income, and our guide to free clinics and sliding-scale care covers how to find one. Our fair price checker shows typical cash visit prices so you know when a quote is out of line.
If a bill already arrived and looks wrong, push back. A pharmacy charge is rarely the problem, but the associated visit charge can be. Our guide to negotiating medical bills walks through requesting the self-pay rate and getting an adjustment in writing.
The Bottom Line
A typical amoxicillin course costs about $6 to $13 as a cash payer in September 2026, against a wholesale drug cost of roughly $1.57. Generic Augmentin roughly triples that, to $18.38 to $20.57 for 20 of the 875-125 mg tablets, and brand Augmentin tablets have essentially exited the market.
Nothing about that math rewards shopping hard on the drug itself. It rewards two things: not paying the highest published cash price when the lowest is half of it, and controlling the cost of the visit that produces the prescription. If you are pricing a full course of treatment, our guides to doxycycline, cephalexin and azithromycin cover the other antibiotics prescribers reach for most.