Semaglutide Weight Loss Dosage Chart: Every Dose, Every Form

Search for a semaglutide dosage chart and you will be handed a ladder of milligrams — 0.25, 0.5, 1, 1.7, 2.4 — as though it were the chart. It is a chart. It belongs to one product, for one indication, and if what you are holding is an Ozempic pen, a Rybelsus tablet or a compounded vial, it is not yours.

Approved semaglutide products have distinct doses, formulations and indications. The current labels include weekly injections and daily tablets; compounded preparations are a separate category without FDA premarket approval. Identify the exact product on your prescription before reading a schedule.

Wegovy: the weight-management chart

This is the ladder most people mean. Wegovy's FDA label starts treatment at 0.25 mg once weekly for 4 weeks, then escalates every 4 weeks through 0.5 mg, 1 mg and 1.7 mg to a 2.4 mg once-weekly maintenance dose¹. Reaching the top takes about sixteen weeks of climbing — the same schedule the STEP 1 trial used to produce its roughly 15% average body-weight reduction over 68 weeks².

• •Weeks 1–4: 0.25 mg once weekly
• •Weeks 5–8: 0.5 mg once weekly
• •Weeks 9–12: 1 mg once weekly
• •Weeks 13–16: 1.7 mg once weekly
• •Week 17 onward: 2.4 mg once weekly

Two things this chart is routinely misread on. First, the label lists the maintenance dosage for weight reduction as either 1.7 mg or 2.4 mg, with 2.4 mg recommended¹ — so stopping at 1.7 mg because the last step was intolerable is a label-sanctioned destination, not a failure to finish. Second, there is now a rung above the standard chart: for adults who have tolerated 2.4 mg for at least four weeks and need further weight reduction, the label permits increasing to a maximum of 7.2 mg once weekly¹. That is a later option for a subset of patients, not a step everyone climbs. Which rung you finish on need not change what you pay, either: a plan billed by the month rather than the milligram, such as ShedRx with its single published monthly figure, costs the same at 1.7 mg as at 2.4 mg. The full titration story, including what to do when a step goes badly, is in the Wegovy titration schedule.

Ozempic: the same molecule, a lower ceiling

Ozempic is semaglutide too, and its early rungs look identical — 0.25 mg weekly, then 0.5 mg, then 1 mg. Then the charts part company. Ozempic's label allows a step to 2 mg once weekly as its maximum maintenance dose³. There is no 2.4 mg on an Ozempic pen and no higher dose to titrate toward.

That ceiling is doing all the work in the comparison people actually want to make. Ozempic's approved use is blood-sugar control in type 2 diabetes rather than weight management, and its top dose is below Wegovy's recommended 2.4 mg standard weight-management dose. Anyone reading a Wegovy chart while holding an Ozempic pen is reading a chart with a rung their pen does not have — we lay the whole difference out in Ozempic dosing for weight loss.

The oral charts: three named products, different formulations

Rybelsus tablets use 3 mg, 7 mg and 14 mg strengths. The current shared label also lists Ozempic tablets at 1.5 mg, 4 mg and 9 mg. Both are approved for glucose control in adults with type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular risk reduction in eligible adults with type 2 diabetes at high risk. They are not approved as weight-management substitutes for Wegovy and are not substitutable milligram for milligram.⁴

Wegovy tablets have a separate weight-management indication and a 1.5 → 4 → 9 → 25 mg daily escalation, with 30 days at each starting step before the 25 mg maintenance dose. The Wegovy label also includes cardiovascular risk reduction for eligible adults.¹ These instructions cannot be transferred to another tablet simply because a strength or brand name looks familiar.

Read the oral Wegovy guide and Rybelsus and Ozempic tablets guide for the formulation distinctions. Our oral semaglutide morning routine explains fasting, water and other medicines. Telehealth sellers add variants of their own on top of both: Alan Meds sells semaglutide four ways — standard injection, microdose injection, oral tablet and microdose dissolving tablet — so its figures only line up with each other once you check which of the four a given price belongs to, and the cheap ones are the microdoses. AgelessRx runs the same split, pricing a "Microdosing Semaglutide" tier separately from its standard injectable GLP-1 rate — read the label on the tier, not just the number under it.

Compounded vials: confirm the complete instructions

A compounded vial does not acquire an FDA-approved dose schedule by containing semaglutide. The prescriber sets the treatment plan and the dispensing pharmacy must provide instructions for the exact preparation. Milligrams describe drug amount; milliliters describe liquid volume; syringe markings are not a universal semaglutide dose.⁶

Before using a vial, ask the pharmacist to confirm the prescription in milligrams, the labeled concentration, the volume to administer and the correct supplied syringe markings. Repeat this check if the pharmacy, concentration, vial or syringe changes. Do not prepare an injectable from a powder using an online water-volume recipe. A forum chart cannot verify identity, sterility, concentration or suitability for injection.

Our milligrams versus units explainer explains why the numbers cannot be carried between products. The unit converter and reconstitution calculator are arithmetic references, not pharmacy instructions or a way to establish a safe preparation. If the written directions are missing or inconsistent, resolve them with the pharmacist and prescriber before injecting. Semaglutide with B12 discusses another reason labels need to be read carefully; liquid color cannot establish its contents or concentration.

Why the compounded chart is the one regulators worry about

The conversion step is not a theoretical hazard. In July 2024 the FDA issued an alert about dosing errors with compounded injectable semaglutide, following adverse-event reports in which patients sought medical attention and some were hospitalized⁶. The agency named the mechanism precisely: patients unfamiliar with drawing from a vial, instructions written in "units" whose volume varies by concentration, and confusion between milliliters, milligrams and units⁶.

The examples are mundane, which is what makes them alarming. Patients directed to administer 5 units administered 50. A prescriber intending 0.25 mg — 5 units of a 5 mg/mL vial — wrote 25 units, and the patient took five times the intended dose and vomited severely. Another wrote 20 units instead of 2, affecting three patients who each received ten times the intended dose⁶. Reported overdose effects ranged from nausea and vomiting through fainting and dehydration to acute pancreatitis and gallstones — and because semaglutide's half-life is roughly a week, an overdose is not something that resolves overnight⁶.

These FDA reports illustrate medication-error risks; they do not establish a complete rate or a single cause for every adverse event. The practical response is pharmacy-confirmed instructions for the actual prescription and device, rather than independent arithmetic from a generic chart.

What no dosage chart tells you

A chart is a ladder, and a ladder implies a pace that most people do not keep. Three things sit outside it.

The steps are minimums, not deadlines. Every four weeks is how fast you may climb, not how fast you must. Delaying an increase because the last one was rough is an ordinary adjustment a prescriber can make¹, and it is the single most useful thing to know about titration — the practical management of that is in semaglutide dosing and side effects.

The chart does not select your maintenance dose. Approved maintenance options differ by product, indication and age. Do not treat a starting or escalation dose as an approved long-term dose for a different product; your prescriber must choose an appropriate regimen. Some plans, though, decide the destination for you before a prescriber does: Lemonaid Health holds its compounded price steady across doses, but its lowest tier is a microdose capped at a quarter of the standard maintenance dose, and a mandatory monthly membership is billed on top of the drug. Others take price out of the decision: NewSelf charges the same at every dose, so stepping up never raises the bill.

And the chart is not a price list. A compounded vial dosed at 0.25 mg lasts five times longer than the same vial dosed at 1.25 mg, which is why cost per month and cost per milligram diverge sharply as you climb — something worth understanding before you commit, and which our cheapest semaglutide providers list works through on real published prices. Two things distort that comparison before you even start: an advertised figure may belong to a microdose rather than a standard dose, and it may be an annual-plan rate rather than a month-to-month one — Gala Health publishes figures that are both. The structural fix is a seller that charges one price at every rung of the ladder, and a few do: Pepti advertises the same $99 at 0.25 mg and at 2.4 mg, though its own production data carries a per-dose ladder it does not display, and Auren Rx runs its microdose program as a separately priced product rather than as the cheap end of the standard one — so its $149 microdose rung and its $199 standard rung are not two rungs of one ladder at all. TMates prints one monthly price for every dose from 0.25 mg to 2.4 mg, injection or oral, and only a longer prepay moves it. WeightCare holds its month-to-month price flat at every dose as well. Citizen Meds goes the other way, publishing a price for each step that roughly triples from the starter month to the top dose. VitaStir sells a month-by-month kit whose price also rises with every step, and every patient starts on the first rung.

If you take one thing from all four charts: find your concentration or your product first, and read the ladder second. Every serious error described on this page happened the other way round.