Rosuvastatin is the generic of Crestor, and like most old statins it is nearly free to make. A tablet costs a pharmacy between three and seven cents at wholesale. What a cash payer actually pays depends almost entirely on which of four or five distribution routes the prescription travels down.
The spread on this drug is unusually wide for something so cheap. The same molecule, on the same day, sits at three cents a tablet in federal acquisition data, at about nineteen cents a tablet at a transparent mail pharmacy, and at roughly nine dollars a tablet as brand Crestor. Every figure below was researched on September 3, 2026.
What Does Rosuvastatin Cost Without Insurance?
Acquisition costs come from the CMS National Average Drug Acquisition Cost survey, with generic rows effective August 26 and September 2, 2026 and brand Crestor rows effective August 19, 2026. Cash prices come from Cost Plus Drugs and Drugs.com, both read September 3, 2026.
| Option | Low | Average | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| CMS NADAC acquisition cost, one generic tablet | $0.03330 (5 mg) | $0.04489 (20 mg) | $0.06860 (40 mg) |
| Cost Plus Drugs, 30 tablets (plus $5.25 shipping) | $5.45 (5 mg) | $5.97 (20 mg) | $6.83 (40 mg) |
| Drugs.com cash price, 30 tablets | $5.89 (20 mg) | $10.48 (10 mg) | $12.55 (20 mg) |
| Drugs.com cash price, 90 tablets | $8.08 (5 mg) | $15.85 (10 mg) | $22.04 (20 mg) |
| Cost Plus retail comparison, 30 tablets 10 mg | $134.10 | $134.10 | $134.10 |
| Ezallor Sprinkle capsules, 30 capsules | $104.77 | $104.77 | $104.77 |
| CMS NADAC acquisition cost, brand Crestor, 30 days | $264.19 (40 mg) | $264.31 (20 mg) | $264.39 (10 mg) |
| Drugs.com brand Crestor, 30-day equivalent | $272.76 (5-20 mg) | $272.76 | $278.04 (40 mg) |
Do the NADAC arithmetic yourself, because it makes the rest of the page legible. A 10 mg generic tablet costs $0.03699, so a once-daily 30-day supply is $1.11 of actual drug and a 90-day supply is $3.33. At 20 mg the tablet is $0.04489, or $1.35 a month. At 40 mg it is $0.06860, or $2.06 a month.
Now the brand. A Crestor tablet costs $8.81297 at 10 mg in the same dataset, so 30 days is $264.39. That is roughly 238 times the acquisition cost of the identical generic strength. Drugs.com independently lists Crestor at $818.29 for 90 tablets, or $9.09 each, which lands within about 3% of the federal number. Two sources, one conclusion: the brand premium here is real and it is enormous.
The capsule formulation is a separate price tier
Rosuvastatin also exists as Ezallor Sprinkle, a capsule that can be opened rather than swallowed whole, sold in 5, 10, 20, and 40 mg strengths. Drugs.com lists it at $104.77 for 30 capsules, or $3.49 apiece, and the price is identical at every strength.
Against a generic tablet at three to seven cents in CMS acquisition data, that is a 50-to-100-fold difference for the same active ingredient. The capsule exists for a reason, and formulation choices are a clinical question rather than a shopping question. But it is worth knowing the price tag before the prescription is written, because nothing at the pharmacy counter will tell you that the difference is this large.
What Drives the Price
Brand versus generic. This is the whole story in one line: $8.81 a tablet for Crestor against $0.037 a tablet for generic rosuvastatin in the same August 2026 federal dataset.
Dispensing and labor, not the drug. Cost Plus publishes its own arithmetic on the 10 mg tablet: $0.57 of manufacturing cost, $0.09 of 15% markup, and $5.00 of pharmacy labor, plus $5.25 of standard shipping charged at checkout. About 89% of a 30-count order is not medicine.
Formulation. Tablets are pennies. The Ezallor Sprinkle capsule is $3.49 each. Nothing about the underlying molecule changed.
Quantity. Fixed costs dominate at these prices. Drugs.com’s 90-count cash prices run $8.08 to $22.04 depending on strength and supplier, against $5.89 to $12.55 for 30, so the third month is nearly free once you have paid the dispensing fee.
Which pharmacy you walk into. Published cash prices for the same 30 or 90 tablets vary by hundreds of percent between retailers, and the figures on discount sites move between sessions. There is no single national retail price for this drug, only the price your pharmacy has contracted for.
Cash Price vs. Insurance
Here is the part cash payers should understand about statins specifically. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force gave statin therapy a grade B recommendation in its August 23, 2022 final statement, for adults aged 40 to 75 with at least one cardiovascular risk factor and an estimated 10-year risk of 10% or greater. It gave a grade C for the 7.5% to under 10% band and an I statement, meaning insufficient evidence, for adults 76 and older.
Grades A and B are the ratings that attach no-cost preventive coverage inside ACA-compliant plans. If you have no plan, that rating does nothing for your wallet. You are buying a preventive medicine at retail that an insured neighbor may be getting for nothing, which is exactly why the cash price of the generic matters so much.
On the generic, paying cash almost always beats running it through a plan anyway. A $5.66 mail order beats a $10 copay outright and skips the pharmacy benefit. The tradeoff is the standard one: cash spending does not count toward your deductible or out-of-pocket maximum, and a discount card cannot be combined with insurance on the same fill.
Brand Crestor is different. AstraZeneca’s savings terms say you may be eligible if you are commercially insured and your plan does not cover the full cost, or if you are uninsured and responsible for your own prescription costs. The “as low as $3” price is described for eligible commercially insured patients with no step edits, prior authorization, or NDC block. The stated cap is a maximum savings of $150 per 30-day supply, $300 per 60, and $450 per 90 per calendar year. For an uninsured person facing roughly $273, that card takes about $150 off and leaves roughly $123, which is still more than twenty times the generic. The terms also exclude anyone on Medicare, Medicaid, Medigap, VA, DoD, or TRICARE coverage, and void card savings for Massachusetts residents when an AB-rated generic equivalent is available and for California residents when an FDA-approved therapeutic equivalent is available.
If a quote does not resemble anything on this page, check it against our fair price checker before paying.
How to Pay Less
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Start with a transparent mail pharmacy. Cost Plus Drugs lists $5.45, $5.66, $5.97, and $6.83 for 30 tablets of the 5, 10, 20, and 40 mg strengths, plus $5.25 shipping per order, against a $134.10 retail comparison it publishes for the 10 mg. Ordering 90 at a time spreads the shipping across three months.
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Compare a free discount card on your exact strength and quantity. Card prices for rosuvastatin move a lot by strength, count, and pharmacy, and the published figures change between visits. Our comparison of GoodRx vs. SingleCare covers how to check more than one on the same prescription rather than trusting a single quote.
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Ask for a 90-day prescription. Drugs.com’s 90-count cash prices are only modestly higher than its 30-count prices at every strength, so the per-month cost falls sharply once you triple the fill.
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Ask whether a tablet works instead of a capsule. Ezallor Sprinkle is $104.77 for 30 capsules against roughly $6 for 30 generic tablets at a mail pharmacy. That is a prescribing conversation, not a pharmacy one, so raise it at the appointment.
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If you need brand Crestor, read the card terms before you fill. The $3 headline applies to a narrower group than the page implies, and the uninsured benefit is capped at $150 per 30-day supply.
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Do not let the visit cost more than the drug. A statin requires a prescription, and FDA confirms there are still no approved nonprescription drugs using the ACNU pathway that a chronic-disease drug would need. A free or sliding-scale clinic can handle prescribing and refills cheaply, and our blood work cost guide covers the lipid panel. If a hospital-affiliated clinic bills you more than you can pay, see our guide to hospital charity care.
Bottom Line
Budget $5 to $13 a month for generic rosuvastatin without insurance. Anything much above $20 means you are paying for a distribution channel rather than for the medicine, and anything in the hundreds means you are holding a brand or capsule prescription.
The three expensive versions of this drug are brand Crestor at roughly $264 to $278 for 30 days, Ezallor Sprinkle at $104.77 for 30 capsules, and a plain generic filled at a counter with no card at all. All three are avoidable, and all three are avoided at the prescribing stage rather than the paying stage. For the other statin in this cluster, see our atorvastatin cost guide. If a statin alone has not been enough, our ezetimibe cost guide, Leqvio cost guide, and Praluent cost guide cover what gets added next and how much it costs, and our Jardiance cost guide covers a drug that often sits in the same cabinet.