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The White House will slash prices for obesity drugs for patients by hundreds of dollars after striking a landmark deal with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.
At an event at the White House on Thursday, Donald Trump and administration officials said the list price for shots of Novo’s Ozempic and Wegovy would drop from at least $1,000 a month to $350 when bought through TrumpRx, the president’s new website that is scheduled to launch in early 2026.
Denmark-based Novo said the agreement would hurt its revenues and have a “negative, low single-digit impact on global sales growth in 2026”, the company said. However, the deal includes a three-year exemption from potential Trump tariffs, it added.
Lilly’s chief executive Dave Ricks said the company is not changing its financial outlook. “There will be a step down in pricing immediately as we get into early parts of 2026, but the [sales] volume will build from there,” Ricks said on a call with reporters.
The price of Lilly’s weight-loss drug Zepbound would drop to an average of $346 a month from about $1,086, the White House said. The company said the price cut only applies to the lowest dose of the treatment, which corresponds to less weight loss for patients.
To win the drugmakers’ participation, the US Food and Drug Administration awarded the duo accelerated regulatory review for their hotly anticipated oral weight-loss medicines.
Investors hope weight-loss pills will broaden the sales to more people and will be cheaper to manufacture. The White House said Lilly’s pill would cost $346 a month when purchased through TrumpRx, and future pills would be priced at $149 a month.
The White House said it was also lowering the cost of weight-loss drugs for Americans enrolled in the government healthcare plans Medicare and Medicaid.
The administration said this would save money for states, which have been spending millions of dollars as weight-loss drugs have become more popular. Medicare patients would have to pay $50 a month for these drugs starting around July 2026, the White House said.
The longer-term consequences of these deals will be manageable for Novo and Lilly, analysts said on Thursday. The list prices for the weight-loss drugs Trump highlighted are different from the net prices drugmakers negotiate with insurance companies.
This means the cost savings to patients might not be as dramatic as the White House said, according to analysts.
Novo and Lilly were already facing pressure on pricing from pharmacy companies, Evan Seigerman, head of healthcare research at BMO, said on Thursday. While the deal with Trump poses an initial blow to pricing, the two companies will make up for that lost revenue with more patients in the years ahead, he said.
The duo will gain a large new pool of potential patients in Medicare, he said, which covers more than 67mn older and disabled people.
The deal follows months of wrangling with drug companies, which were reluctant to cave to Trump’s demands to lower prices. The president has repeatedly prioritised lower costs for weight-loss drugs he calls the “fat shot”.
Thursday’s announcement is likely to be seen as a political win for Trump. Nearly 12 per cent of US adults are using weight-loss drugs, the research group Rand said in an August report.
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said weight-loss drugs changed his relationship with food. Elon Musk has also applauded them on social media.
Novo’s deal with Trump comes as the company has lost its lead in the US weight-loss market to rival Lilly.
In November 2024, Novo’s weight-loss prescriptions totalled 877,500 compared to 781,000 for Lilly, according to perception tracker Iqvia.
This month, Lilly’s prescriptions totalled 1.3mn versus 891,800 for Novo. To keep pace in the weight-loss market, Novo is bidding against Pfizer to buy Metsera, a small biotech specialising in new weight-loss drugs.
