Treatment Price Comparison Methodology
This page is the treatment-price slice of our full methodology. It answers what a “from” figure means, when a provider row has no price, and who should not use a comparison table as a prescription.
What are we comparing?
UK online pharmacies usually sell a treatment service: online consultation, prescriber review, the medicine if suitable, and delivery, as one monthly or pack fee. We compare that service fee across GPhC-registered pharmacies. We do not compare a “box of Wegovy” as if it were a supermarket SKU, and we do not invent a price to fill an empty cell.
This build has 26 treatment comparison pages. 2 include dose-tier bands (used where titration changes the month). 0 have at least one provider row with a verified priceFrom. The rest show “not on file” — that is an honest empty state, not a missing scrape.
How do we stay inside MHRA rules?
Prescription-only medicines must not be advertised to the public. Our pages are factual price-list and comparison material: what the service typically costs, what the fee usually includes, and that a consultation can decline you. We do not use discount codes on treatment comparison tables, we do not publish “buy now” for the medicine itself, and we do not rank pharmacies by who pays us. Referral links, where they exist, are labelled and use rel="sponsored".
Where do the numbers come from?
Provider prices are taken from the pharmacy’s own published treatment-service page and stored with a lastChecked date. Typical monthly ranges on the page are editorial bands across those providers — a map of the market, not a quote and not a statistical mean of every UK clinic. Dose-tier tables (for example Wegovy 0.25mg vs 2.4mg) exist so you compare the same stage of titration, not a starter month against a maintenance month.
NHS patient charges are a different dataset. England’s item charge, PPCs, and the HRT PPC are taken from NHSBSA figures effective 2026-04-01, last reviewed here on 2026-07-17. They are not private clinic prices.
What will you never invent?
We do not invent a provider price, an average, or a “typical saving”. If a pharmacy has not published a figure we can date, the row says the price is not on file. We do not emit aggregateRating on a treatment page. We do not treat an NHS contract as proof of a private service, or a private licence as proof of NHS supply. MCP tools that answer price questions read the same treatment index as these pages — they do not return mock checkout totals.
Who should skip these comparison pages?
Skip them if you need a clinician to choose a medicine — suitability is not a spreadsheet. Skip them if you may qualify for NHS supply: ask your GP first, because NHS treatment costs at most £9.90 per item in England where you are eligible, and is free in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Skip them if you want a ranking we will not publish. Skip any site that will sell a prescription-only medicine with no consultation; that is not a pharmacy service we will list as a price.
How fresh is a price?
Each treatment page states when editorial ranges were last aligned with published pharmacy prices. Pharmacies change fees without telling us. Always confirm the live checkout price and what is included (consultation, needles, sharps, cold chain, dose reviews) before you pay. Factual errors go on the corrections log. Pharmacy register provenance is the GPhC snapshot 2026-06-30 — see pharmacy methodology.