Medicare Part D paid $27.0 billion for GLP‑1 medications in 2024

In the 2024 data year Medicare Part D recorded $27.0 billion in total drug cost for GLP-1 medications, over 21,295,250 claims for 4,000,621 beneficiaries.1 That is $1,266 per claim and $6,739 per beneficiary for the year. CMS publishes the file per drug and per geography; the GLP-1 total across 7 products is not a figure it publishes.

Ozempic at $13.0 billion, Mounjaro at $6.3 billion, Trulicity at $5.5 billion and Rybelsus at $1.9 billion lead the file.1 Ozempic alone is 48.1% of GLP-1 spending, and the top two together are 71.6%. Each of those products carries a diabetes indication, which is the whole explanation: in 2024 that was what Part D could pay for.

Wegovy ($301.2 million, 211,490 claims) and Zepbound ($387,343, 353 claims) are the products indicated for weight management, and together they are 1.1% of GLP-1 spending in the file.1 Statute barred Part D from covering drugs for weight loss, so what appears here reached patients through a different indication. That makes this year a clean baseline: it measures GLP-1 spending under Medicare when obesity was not a covered use.

Texas ($2.3 billion), California ($2.1 billion), New York ($1.9 billion), Florida ($1.8 billion) and Pennsylvania ($1.2 billion) lead the state file, $9.4 billion between them, out of $27.0 billion across 59 states and territories.1 The ranking follows Medicare enrolment closely, so the interesting comparison is cost per claim rather than total: the state totals answer "where are the beneficiaries", and it takes the per-claim figure to say anything about price or intensity.

The $27.0 billion is total drug cost as recorded on the claims: ingredient cost, dispensing fee and sales tax, summed across everyone who paid part of it — the plan, the beneficiary and any other payer.1 It is before rebates, and CMS does not publish rebates at drug level, so the net figure cannot be derived from this file by us or by anyone else. Every published GLP-1 spending figure built on this data has the same limit; ours states it.

The complete list, so the count can be checked rather than taken on trust. Names link to the page for that record where one is published.

From the CMS Medicare Part D Prescribers dataset, geography-and-drug file, we take the rows for the 2024 data year at the National geography level for each GLP-1 product and sum the total drug cost column.1 The per-state figures come from the same file at State level. The two agree to within rounding, which is the check we run on the ingest.

The year is the latest CMS has released, and it lags: Part D data is published about eighteen months after the calendar year it covers. That lag is a property of the source, not of this page, and it is why the figure is labelled by data year rather than by publication date.

Part D covers Medicare beneficiaries with drug coverage. It is a minority of GLP-1 use in the United States and skews old; commercial insurance and cash prescriptions are absent. Medicaid's side of the same question is on the Medicaid prescriptions page.

Each of these changes what the figure means. They are numbered so a quotation can name the one it breaks.

1. Total drug cost is what the Part D program recorded, before rebates, which CMS does not publish per drug.
2. The 2024 data year predates Medicare coverage of GLP-1s for obesity: the GLP-1 Bridge demonstration began 1 July 2026.
3. Medicare Part D covers a minority of GLP-1 use; commercial and cash prescriptions are not in this data.