Contrave is one of the widest price gaps on this site. The same 120-tablet monthly supply of naltrexone and bupropion extended-release costs $99 through the manufacturer’s own home-delivery program and up to $835.65 at a chain pharmacy counter. That is an eightfold spread on an identical bottle, and which price you pay depends entirely on which door you walk through.
This guide covers published cash prices checked on September 2, 2026: the CurAccess program price, the telehealth route and its consult fee, what retail pharmacies charge, whether a generic exists yet (it does not), and what the two component generics cost separately, which is a number worth knowing even though it is not a substitution anyone can make on their own. Prices vary by pharmacy, so treat the retail figures as national reference points.
What Does Contrave Cost Without Insurance?
Contrave is dosed up to two tablets twice a day, so a standard month is 120 tablets. Every figure below is for that quantity of the 8 mg / 90 mg strength, checked on September 2, 2026.
| Route | Low | Typical | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| CurAccess home delivery, cash payer | $99.00 | $99.00 | $99.00 |
| Get CONTRAVE Now telehealth, first month | n/a | $144.00 | n/a |
| Manufacturer cash price at retail pharmacy | n/a | $199.00 | n/a |
| Retail pharmacy with a discount card | $613.45 | $618.60 | n/a |
| Retail pharmacy, average retail price | n/a | $835.65 | n/a |
| Per tablet, CurAccess vs. average retail | $0.83 | n/a | $6.96 |
| Component generics separately (not a substitute) | $28.87 | $34.80 | n/a |
The manufacturer’s CurAccess Patient Support Program is the headline number and the one most people miss. Contrave.com states that the price is $99 per month with free shipping, that the program is offered by partner pharmacies, and that if you have no insurance or your insurance does not cover Contrave, you will pay no more than $99. Prescriptions are transferred to one of the partner mail-order pharmacies, currently Ridgeway Mail Order Pharmacy in Victor, Montana or Professional Arts Pharmacy in Lafayette, Louisiana.
Retail is a different world. Drugs.com’s price guide, which quotes cash prices for people not using insurance, lists 120 tablets at $618.60, or $5.16 a tablet. SingleCare puts the average retail price at $835.65 for the same 120 tablets and its own card price as low as $613.45. Those two independent reads agree closely on the coupon price and disagree on the counter price, which is why we publish $613 to $836 as a range rather than a single number. As a general caution with discount-card sites, the per-chain rows they display shift between visits and are not reproducible by a reader clicking through; the average retail and “as low as” figures are the stable ones.
Sitting in between is a third, less publicized price. Contrave’s own savings-card terms state that for patients without insurance, or whose insurance does not cover Contrave, “the cash price of $199 for 120 tablets will be offered.” That is the manufacturer’s fallback retail price and is worth naming at the pharmacy counter if you are not using home delivery. Drugs.com separately describes the savings card as paying $20 to $199 per 30-day fill of 120 pills or fewer.
What Drives the Price
The channel, not the drug. This is the entire story. The $99 program routes prescriptions through a handful of partner mail-order pharmacies. The $613 to $836 prices are what the ordinary retail supply chain charges. The tablets are identical.
Whether a prescription is written for 120 tablets. Contrave titrates upward over four weeks, so early fills may be smaller and cheaper. Every price on this page is for the full maintenance month, and a partial first month should cost less.
Brand-only status. There is no generic to fall back on, so the usual cash-payer escape hatch does not exist here. More on that below.
The prescriber fee. GetContrave.com, the manufacturer’s telehealth route, advertises Contrave at $99 a month plus a one-time $45 physician consultation fee on all new orders, refunded in full if you are not approved. That is the cheapest published path from “no prescriber” to “medication at the door” that we found.
Insurance status, but backwards. Because CurAccess is capped at $99 for cash payers, being uninsured is not the disadvantage it usually is. A person with a plan that excludes weight-management drugs and a person with no plan at all pay the same $99.
No Generic Exists Yet, and Three Sources Agree
This matters enough to state carefully, because “generic Contrave” is a heavily marketed phrase online.
We checked it three ways as of September 2026. The CMS National Average Drug Acquisition Cost file, which prices nearly every generic actually dispensed in the United States, returns no naltrexone-bupropion entry at all, in a dataset that lists both component molecules on their own. Contrave’s own FAQ page states there is no generic equivalent to Contrave on the market today. The Drugs.com price guide says Contrave is available as a brand-name drug only and that a generic version is not yet available.
The practical consequence for a cash payer is that the $99 manufacturer program is not merely the best price. It is close to the only price that is not several hundred dollars.
The Component Generics, and Why That Is Not a Shopping Decision
Contrave combines two very old, very cheap molecules in an extended-release tablet. Bought separately as ordinary generics, they cost almost nothing.
Cost Plus Drugs prices naltrexone HCl 50 mg at $22.94 for a 30-count, against a $102 retail comparison it publishes on the same page, and bupropion HCl SR 150 mg at $5.93 for a 30-count. Depending on how the bupropion is dosed, the two together land somewhere around $29 to $35 a month. The 2026 CMS acquisition-cost file tells a similar story from the wholesale side: a naltrexone 50 mg tablet has a national average acquisition cost of $1.13919 and a bupropion SR 150 mg tablet just $0.08238, so a pharmacy’s raw cost for both is well under $40 a month.
Set that against $99 through the manufacturer or $835.65 at average retail and the arithmetic is obvious. The reason we are reporting it rather than recommending it is equally obvious, and the manufacturer says it best: the individual medications of naltrexone and bupropion are not the same dose or formulation used in Contrave, and are not approved for weight loss when used on their own. Contrave delivers 8 mg of naltrexone and 90 mg of bupropion per tablet in an extended-release format, which is not what a 50 mg naltrexone tablet or a 150 mg bupropion SR tablet does.
Whether any of that is clinically appropriate is a conversation for a prescriber and nothing else. What a cash payer can usefully take from it is a sense of scale: the ingredients are pennies, the formulation and the brand are the price.
Cash Price vs. Insurance
Contrave is a textbook case of the cash price beating the insurance route for many people. Weight-management drugs are among the most commonly excluded categories in commercial formularies, and coverage usually requires prior authorization when it exists at all.
If your plan does cover it, the manufacturer’s savings card can bring a commercially insured copay down to as little as $20 per fill according to Drugs.com’s summary of the offer, and Contrave.com says insurance may reduce out-of-pocket costs to as little as $0 through the home-delivery partner program. If your plan does not cover it, or you have no plan, the CurAccess price is $99 flat, which is lower than most people’s uncovered retail experience by a factor of six.
Note that both manufacturer programs process your prescription as a cash transaction, so payments will not count toward a deductible or, for Medicare Part D beneficiaries, toward true out-of-pocket totals. If you are weighing a prior-authorization fight against simply paying $99, that trade-off is worth doing on paper first. Our guide to negotiating medical bills covers how to push back when a pharmacy or clinic quote does not match a posted price.
How to Pay Less
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Start with CurAccess, not the pharmacy counter. The manufacturer’s own program caps a cash payer at $99 a month with free shipping. Enrolling means creating an account with a partner pharmacy and having your prescriber transfer the prescription, which takes a phone call or a fax.
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If you must fill locally, name the $199 cash price. Contrave’s savings-card terms state that uninsured patients, or patients whose insurance does not cover the drug, will be offered a cash price of $199 for 120 tablets. That is roughly a third of what discount-card pricing produces at the same counter.
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Compare the two discount networks before paying retail. If neither manufacturer route works for you, the coupon networks are the fallback, and they price the same bottle differently on the same day. Our GoodRx vs. SingleCare comparison explains how to check both in a couple of minutes.
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Budget the consult separately. The $45 telehealth fee on GetContrave.com is a one-time charge per new order, not a subscription, but you will need periodic prescriber contact to stay on the medication. A sliding-scale community health center can be cheaper than any flat telehealth fee if your income qualifies; see our guide to free clinics and sliding-scale care.
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Price the whole ladder before committing. At $99 a month, Contrave costs about $1,188 a year. Generic phentermine runs closer to $120 a year in drug cost, and the GLP-1 class starts around $149 to $349 a month from the manufacturer. Knowing where each option sits before the prescription is written is worth more than any coupon.
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Check any retail quote against a benchmark. If a pharmacy asks $700 or more for 120 tablets, that is the average-retail end of the range, not a fair cash price. Our fair price checker gives you a reference number to argue from.
Bottom Line
Budget $99 a month for Contrave through the manufacturer’s CurAccess home-delivery program, plus a one-time $45 consult if you use its telehealth route, as of September 2026. Filling it at a chain pharmacy instead costs $613 to $836 for the same 120 tablets unless you invoke the manufacturer’s $199 cash price. No generic exists, so there is no cheaper version of this exact medication to switch to.
Where Contrave lands on the wider weight-loss cost ladder is the useful comparison. It is roughly ten times the cost of generic phentermine, similar to or slightly below Qsymia, and well under the GLP-1 injectables. If the conversation eventually turns surgical, our bariatric surgery cost guide prices that end of the range.