The Semaglutide Dosage Chart, and Which One Applies to You

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.

Semaglutide is sold in four meaningfully different forms in the United States, and they do not share a dose ladder, a ceiling, an indication, or even a unit of measurement. The whole of this page is the four charts and how to tell which one you are on.

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 sits below where Wegovy's maintenance range begins. 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: two tablets, and they are not the same drug

Swallowed semaglutide has two entirely separate charts, and conflating them is the most consequential mistake on this page.

Rybelsus comes as 3 mg, 7 mg and 14 mg tablets taken once daily. The 3 mg dose is a starting dose only — it is there to ease you in — and 7 mg or 14 mg are the maintenance doses⁴. Rybelsus is approved for type 2 diabetes, not for weight loss, and 14 mg is its ceiling.

Oral Wegovy is a 25 mg once-daily tablet, approved in December 2025 for chronic weight management⁵. It is the same molecule at a different dose with a different indication, and its ladder is a roughly twelve-week escalation to 25 mg rather than the four-step weekly climb of the injection.

So "the oral semaglutide dose" is either 14 mg or 25 mg depending on which tablet is in the bottle, and the products are not interchangeable. We separate them properly in the oral Wegovy pill and Rybelsus for weight loss. 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.

The compounded chart: same milligrams, different arithmetic

Here is where a dosage chart stops being a list and becomes a calculation.

A compounded vial is usually titrated on the same milligram ladder as Wegovy — a prescriber writes 0.25 mg, then 0.5 mg, and so on. But a vial is not a pen. There is no dial. You draw the dose with a U-100 insulin syringe, which is marked in units, not milligrams, and 100 units is simply 1 mL of liquid. The syringe has no idea what is dissolved in that millilitre.

What decides the answer is the vial's concentration — its total milligrams divided by the millilitres of bacteriostatic water it was reconstituted with. A 5 mg vial made up to 1 mL is 5 mg/mL. The same 5 mg vial made up to 2 mL is 2.5 mg/mL, and every unit figure on it doubles for an unchanged prescription.

This is why two people on an identical 1 mg dose can be drawing to marks that differ by a factor of ten, and why a chart posted in a forum without a stated concentration is not a chart at all. Our semaglutide units-to-mg chart and converter prints every dose at every common concentration, and the reconstitution calculator works backwards from the vial size to the water volume that sets it.

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 hospitalised⁶. 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 millilitres, 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.

Every one of those was an arithmetic error rather than a clinical misjudgement. It is the strongest argument there is for checking a compounded chart against the vial in front of you rather than against a chart you found.

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 says nothing about your destination. Some people do well at 1 mg and never need the top of the ladder. The maintenance dose is the one you tolerate consistently, not the highest one printed. 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.

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 board 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.

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.