Lisinopril is one of the most prescribed medicines in the United States, and at wholesale a tablet costs a pharmacy between one and six cents. Hydrochlorothiazide, the water pill often prescribed alongside it or built into the same tablet, is cheaper still.
That makes this an unusual cost guide. There is no version of lisinopril that is genuinely expensive to make, so almost every dollar a cash payer hands over is dispensing fee, labor, and markup. The useful question is which of the four or five cheap routes is cheapest for your exact strength, and how to avoid the two versions of this drug that actually cost real money. Every figure below was researched on September 3, 2026.
What Does Lisinopril Cost Without Insurance?
Acquisition costs come from the CMS National Average Drug Acquisition Cost survey, with generic and Qbrelis rows effective August 19, 2026, hydrochlorothiazide 50 mg effective August 26, 2026, and the brand Zestril row effective March 18, 2026. Cash prices come from Drugs.com, Cost Plus Drugs, and Walmart’s published program list, all read September 3, 2026.
| Option | Low | Average | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| CMS NADAC acquisition cost, one generic lisinopril tablet | $0.01424 (2.5 mg) | $0.01832 (10 mg) | $0.05413 (30 mg) |
| Drugs.com cash price, 30 lisinopril tablets | $4.49 (5 mg) | $4.74 (10 mg) | $10.06 (40 mg) |
| Cost Plus Drugs, 30 lisinopril tablets (plus $5.25 shipping) | $5.38 (10 mg) | $5.55 (20 mg) | $5.66 (40 mg) |
| Walmart Prescription Program, lisinopril, 30-day supply | $9.00 | $9.00 | $9.00 |
| Drugs.com cash price, 30 hydrochlorothiazide tablets | $4.62 (25 mg) | $4.62 (25 mg) | $6.14 (12.5 mg capsule) |
| Walmart Prescription Program, hydrochlorothiazide, 30-day supply | $4.00 | $4.00 | $4.00 |
| Drugs.com cash price, 30 lisinopril-HCTZ combination tablets | $8.96 (12.5-10) | $9.27 (12.5-20) | $9.33 (25-20) |
| Walmart Prescription Program, lisinopril-HCTZ 20/25 mg, 30-day supply | $4.00 | $4.00 | $4.00 |
| Brand Zestril, 30 days | $375.73 (NADAC) | $383.94 | $392.15 (Drugs.com) |
| Qbrelis 1 mg/mL oral solution, one 150 mL bottle | $674.31 (NADAC) | $684.58 | $694.84 (Drugs.com) |
The arithmetic on the acquisition rows is worth doing yourself. A 10 mg lisinopril tablet costs a pharmacy $0.01832, so a once-daily 30-day supply is about 55 cents of actual drug. At 20 mg it is 77 cents a month, at 40 mg $1.38, and at 30 mg $1.62. A 25 mg hydrochlorothiazide tablet is $0.01165, which is 35 cents a month. Nothing you pay at a counter for either of these is mostly medicine.
The sources broadly agree on the generic, which is the sign of a commodity. Drugs.com puts 30 tablets between $4.49 and $10.06 depending on strength, Cost Plus lands between $5.38 and $5.66, and Walmart charges a flat $9. Where they disagree is on what an unhelped counter price looks like: Cost Plus publishes a $33.90 retail comparison for the 10 mg. Treat anything above about $15 as a signal to shop rather than a fact about the drug.
What Drives the Price
Brand versus generic, and nothing else comes close. CMS acquisition data prices a Zestril 10 mg tablet at $12.52 and a generic lisinopril 10 mg tablet at $0.01832. Same molecule, same strength, roughly 680 times the money. Drugs.com prices Zestril at a flat $1,176.46 for 90 tablets at every strength from 2.5 mg to 40 mg, which tells you the price has nothing to do with how much drug is in the pill.
The form the drug comes in. Qbrelis is lisinopril in a liquid, made for people who cannot swallow tablets, and it is the single most expensive way to take this medicine. One 150 mL bottle costs a pharmacy $674.31 in the August 2026 CMS data and lists at $694.84 on Drugs.com. There is no generic version.
Dispensing and labor, not the drug. Cost Plus publishes its own breakdown on the 10 mg tablet: $0.33 of manufacturing cost, $0.05 of 15% markup, and $5.00 of pharmacy labor, plus $5.25 of standard shipping charged at checkout. About 93% of that order is not medicine.
Which pill your prescription is written for. This is the counterintuitive one. On Walmart’s published program list, the lisinopril-hydrochlorothiazide 20/25 mg combination tablet costs $4 for 30 days while plain lisinopril costs $9. One pill containing two drugs is cheaper than one pill containing one drug, purely because of which tier the retailer put it in.
Strength. Generic pricing rises with dose but stays trivial. Lisinopril 40 mg costs about three times what 2.5 mg costs at wholesale, which is the difference between 43 cents and $1.38 a month. Note that 40 mg does not appear on Walmart’s program list at all, so the $9 price does not apply to it.
Cash Price vs. Insurance
Lisinopril is a clean case where paying cash often beats running the prescription through a plan. If your copay is $10 or $15, a $5.38 mail order or a $4 combination 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. On the expensive end of the same cabinet the math reverses, which is why our Entresto cost guide and Eliquis cost guide treat the deductible question very differently.
Brand Zestril and Qbrelis are where cash payers get into trouble. Both are priced in a range where an uninsured fill is a serious bill, and neither has a cash route that meaningfully closes the gap. If a pharmacy quotes you a three-figure price for plain generic lisinopril, 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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Check the combination pill before the single pill. If your prescriber has you on both lisinopril and hydrochlorothiazide, the 20/25 mg combination tablet is in Walmart’s $4 for 30 days and $10 for 90 days tier, while the two drugs bought separately would cost $9 plus $4. Ask whether the combination is appropriate for you before you fill two prescriptions.
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Price a transparent mail pharmacy. Cost Plus Drugs lists $5.38, $5.55, and $5.66 for 30 tablets of the 10, 20, and 40 mg strengths, plus $5.25 shipping per order. Ordering 90 at a time spreads that shipping charge across three months.
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Run a free discount card if you fill locally. Card prices on cheap generics move around and no two pharmacies quote the same number, so check more than one. 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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Verify the retailer program list rather than assuming. Walmart’s Prescription Program has two tiers, $4 for 30 days and $9 for 30 days, and lisinopril is in the more expensive one. Lisinopril 40 mg is not on the list at all. Ask the pharmacy to check your exact strength against the current list before you transfer anything.
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Ask for a 90-day prescription. Every route here charges its fixed costs per fill. Drugs.com prices 90 lisinopril 10 mg tablets from $5.71 against $4.74 for 30, so tripling the quantity costs about 20% more, and Walmart’s 90-day price is $24 rather than three times $9.
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Budget for the visit, not the pills. Blood pressure medication is the cheap part of managing blood pressure. A free or sliding-scale clinic can handle the checkups and refills at little or no cost, and our blood work cost guide covers what the kidney and potassium panels run as a cash payer. If a clinic or hospital bills you more than expected, our guide to negotiating medical bills covers what to do next.
What It Costs to Switch to Losartan
A dry, persistent cough is the best known reason people stop taking an ACE inhibitor like lisinopril, and the usual next step is an ARB such as losartan. Patients often assume the switch means moving to a more expensive drug. It does not.
In the CMS acquisition data effective August 19, 2026, a lisinopril 10 mg tablet is $0.01832 and a losartan 50 mg tablet is $0.03244. The raw drug cost of a month on losartan is 97 cents against 55 cents, a difference of about 42 cents. At retail, Walmart prices both at $9 for a 30-day supply and $24 for 90 days on the same program list.
So the cost of the switch is not the medicine. It is the office visit needed to get the new prescription written, plus whatever monitoring your prescriber orders afterward. Our doctor visit cost guide covers what that appointment runs as a cash payer, and our losartan cost guide has the full price ladder on the other side of the switch, including brand Cozaar and the losartan-hydrochlorothiazide combination.
Bottom Line
Budget $4 to $10 a month for generic lisinopril without insurance, under $5 for plain hydrochlorothiazide, and $4 to $9 for the combination tablet depending on where you fill it. Those routes land within a few dollars of each other, so the decision is mostly about convenience.
The two expensive ways to take this medicine are brand Zestril at roughly $376 to $392 for 30 days and Qbrelis oral solution at $674 to $695 a bottle. Neither is priced the way the generic is, and only one of them exists for a reason a tablet cannot solve. For the rest of a typical blood pressure cabinet, see our cost guides for amlodipine and metoprolol, and if you also take a cheap generic for cholesterol or thyroid, our atorvastatin cost guide and levothyroxine cost guide tell a nearly identical pricing story.