Tymlos is Radius Health’s brand name for abaloparatide, a daily self-injected pen for osteoporosis. It is a bone-building (anabolic) drug rather than a bone-preserving one, which puts it in a small, expensive category with only one other pharmacy-counter competitor. You pick it up at a pharmacy and inject it yourself, so unlike the clinic-administered osteoporosis injectables there is no separate administration bill.
That also means the price is a straight pharmacy price, and a cash payer can actually shop it. The catch is that there is nothing to shop it against. Abaloparatide has no generic, and unlike almost every other retail pharmacy drug it does not even appear in CMS’s acquisition-cost survey. Everything below was researched on September 3, 2026.
What Does Tymlos Cost Without Insurance?
Two independent sources price the pen and they land within about 11% of each other. Drugs.com lists a cash price of $2,935.02 for the 3120 mcg / 1.56 mL pen. CMS’s Medicare Part D Spending by Drug data for 2024 shows a weighted average of $1,690.96 per dosage unit, and since the dosage unit here is a milliliter, a 1.56 mL pen works out to $2,637.90.
Each pen is a 30-day supply at the labeled dose of 80 mcg once daily, so one pen equals one month. That makes the math unusually clean.
| Tymlos (abaloparatide) cost item | Low | Typical | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| One 1.56 mL pen, 30-day supply | $2,637.90 | $2,786.00 | $2,935.02 |
| Per day of therapy | $87.93 | $92.87 | $97.83 |
| One year, 12 pens | $31,654.80 | $33,432.00 | $35,220.24 |
| Full two-year labeled course, 24 pens | $63,309.60 | $66,864.00 | $70,440.48 |
| Medicare Part D average spending per claim, 2024 | $2,909.12 | $2,909.12 | $2,909.12 |
| Medicare Part D average spending per beneficiary, 2024 | $15,586.42 | $15,586.42 | $15,586.42 |
| Radius Assist patient assistance, if you qualify | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Generic teriparatide pen at Cost Plus Drugs (different drug, same class) | $912.00 | $912.00 | $912.00 |
For a reality check on whether anyone pays these numbers, CMS’s 2024 Part D data shows $257.6 million in total Tymlos spending across 16,530 beneficiaries and 88,564 claims. Those are plan-negotiated amounts rather than cash prices, which is exactly why the Part D figure sits below the Drugs.com retail cash price.
What Drives the Price
There is no generic and no acquisition benchmark. Drugs@FDA lists Tymlos (NDA 208743) as the only approved abaloparatide product in the U.S. More unusually, CMS’s National Average Drug Acquisition Cost survey, which prices what retail pharmacies actually pay for tens of thousands of products, returns zero rows for abaloparatide or Tymlos. For most pharmacy drugs that survey is the single best cash-payer benchmark. Here it simply does not exist, so you are negotiating without knowing the pharmacy’s cost.
It is a two-year drug by label, not a maintenance drug. The Tymlos prescribing information states that safety and efficacy have not been evaluated beyond two years and that use beyond two years in a lifetime is not recommended. That is genuinely useful for budgeting, because the total course is a fixed, knowable number rather than an open-ended monthly bill.
The pen has a 30-day in-use clock. Store it refrigerated before first use, then keep it at room temperature for up to 30 days after the first injection. Miss doses or travel badly and you are throwing away a piece of a $2,900 device, not a $9 pill bottle. Fill dates matter more here than they do for almost anything else at a pharmacy counter.
It is a specialty product. Pens like this usually route through a specialty pharmacy rather than the corner drugstore, which limits how many places you can price-shop and often means mail delivery with a cold pack.
What comes after is a second bill. Anabolic drugs are typically followed by a bone-preserving drug to hold the density gains. That successor is usually far cheaper, but it is not free, and the handoff is worth pricing before you start. See Prolia, Reclast and alendronate for what those run.
Cash Price vs. Insurance
For Tymlos, insurance wins decisively and it is worth saying so plainly. Radius states on Tymlos.com that the drug is covered by 92% of commercial insurance plans and that most Medicare Part D patients have access to it. The Tymlos Patient Savings Card can bring eligible commercially insured patients to as little as $0 a month, with an annual cap on total assistance and a limited number of uses per calendar year.
That savings card is commercial-insurance-only. Tymlos.com states it is not available to patients in Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE, VA or other government programs. If you are uninsured, the card does nothing for you at any price, which is the single most common misunderstanding about drugs in this category.
The number that matters more for an uninsured reader is Radius Assist. It provides Tymlos at no cost to qualified patients, and its income threshold is 300% of the federal poverty level. That is a real program with real volume, not a token gesture, and it is the first thing to apply for rather than the last.
Medicare Part D patients face a different math problem. Since 2025, Part D has an annual out-of-pocket cap, so a full year of Tymlos will typically hit that cap and stop. CMS’s own 2024 data showing $15,586.42 in average spending per Tymlos beneficiary reflects the plan’s share, not yours.
How to Pay Less
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Apply to Radius Assist before you fill anything. The program provides Tymlos at no cost to qualified patients with household income below 300% of the federal poverty level who are legal residents of the contiguous U.S., Alaska, Hawaii or Puerto Rico. Approved patients get at least three months per shipment and up to 24 months of therapy, which is the entire labeled course. Commercially insured applicants must have neither coverage for nor access to other coverage for Tymlos. Medicare patients must not be in Medicaid, TRICARE, VA, IHS or full Low-Income Subsidy.
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Ask your prescriber to price generic teriparatide first. It is a different molecule in the same class, and it is the one anabolic osteoporosis drug with genuine cash competition. Cost Plus Drugs sells a 28-day teriparatide pen for $912.00, roughly a third of a Tymlos pen. That is a clinical conversation, not a substitution you can make at the counter, but it is the single biggest lever a cash payer has here. Our Forteo and teriparatide cost guide has the full breakdown.
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Call three specialty pharmacies, not one. With no NADAC row to anchor against, the spread between pharmacies on this drug is unknown and therefore worth testing. Ask each for the total cash price including any cold-chain shipping fee. Our comparison of GoodRx vs. SingleCare covers how discount cards behave on high-cost specialty pens, which is very differently from how they behave on generics.
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Get the fill dates right so you do not waste a pen. A pen is good for 30 days after the first injection. Do not start one right before travel, a procedure or anything that might interrupt daily dosing, and do not let a specialty pharmacy ship you two at once unless you have refrigerator space and a plan.
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Check the independent charitable foundations if you have Medicare. Osteoporosis funds at organizations like the PAN Foundation, HealthWell Foundation and Good Days cover cost sharing for people who cannot use manufacturer copay cards. Funds open and close during the year, so apply the day one opens.
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Do not let the surrounding care blow the budget. Bone density monitoring, calcium and vitamin D, and follow-up visits add up over two years. A free or sliding-scale clinic can handle the routine side, a DEXA scan has its own cash price worth checking, and if a hospital system ends up billing you for any of it, hospital charity care and our guide to negotiating medical bills apply. Our fair price checker helps you sanity-check the visit charges.
Bottom Line
Budget about $2,640 to $2,935 for each 30-day Tymlos pen as of September 2026, or roughly $88 to $98 a day. Because the label caps lifetime use at two years, the full course is a fixed target of roughly $63,000 to $70,000 of drug, which is a large number but at least a finite one.
On a pure cash basis, Tymlos is currently the most expensive way to buy an anabolic osteoporosis drug, because it is the one product in the category with no generic and no published acquisition cost. Generic teriparatide starts at $912.00 a pen at Cost Plus Drugs, and the bone-preserving drugs people move to afterward, including Prolia, Reclast and alendronate, cost a fraction of either. Evenity is the other anabolic option and is clinic-administered rather than self-injected, so it carries an administration fee that Tymlos does not. If menopause-related bone loss is the underlying story, hormone therapy and estradiol have their own, much smaller price tags.