What this guide is best for
Direct answer: Use this when a clinic has quoted a monthly fee and you want to know what is inside it.
Best used when: Labs and injections have published prices. Programme fees do not, and the gap is the clinic margin.
What the parts of a hormone programme cost
Key point: Labs and injections have published prices. Programme fees do not, and the gap is the clinic margin.
What a good provider should make clear: A written list of which labs, at what frequency, are covered by the fee.
Common mistake: Comparing monthly fees between clinics without checking which labs each one includes.
Questions to ask: Which specific lab panels does the monthly fee include, and how often are they repeated?
What the parts of a hormone programme cost
Opening intent: price the components of a hormone programme so a monthly membership fee can be judged against them
| Cost question | What matters |
|---|---|
| What are you really comparing? | Use this when a clinic has quoted a monthly fee and you want to know what is inside it. |
| What changes total cost? | Labs and injections have published prices. Programme fees do not, and the gap is the clinic margin. |
| Where people get burned | Comparing monthly fees between clinics without checking which labs each one includes. |
| What to ask before paying | Which specific lab panels does the monthly fee include, and how often are they repeated? |
Quick answer
Hormone clinics usually quote a monthly programme fee. That fee is not published anywhere and cannot be compared directly between clinics.
What can be compared is what sits inside it: the labs, the injections, the pellet placement. Those do have published prices.
Published prices for the lab work
National Medicare figures, office setting, calendar year 2024.
| Code | What it covers | Average submitted charge (office) | Average Medicare allowed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 84403 | Total testosterone | $148.21 | $25.19 |
| 84402 | Free testosterone | $170.57 | $24.87 |
| 82670 | Total estradiol | $160.59 | $27.30 |
| 84443 | Thyroid stimulating hormone | $95.90 | $16.44 |
| 85025 | Complete blood count | $37.12 | $7.59 |
| 80053 | Comprehensive metabolic panel | $61.45 | $10.33 |
Total testosterone was billed at $148.21 and allowed at $25.19. That is roughly a 5.9-times gap between list price and negotiated price.
If a clinic tells you its included lab panel is worth several hundred dollars, this is the table to hold that claim against.
Procedures: injection and pellet placement
| Code | What it covers | Average submitted charge (office) | Average Medicare allowed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 96372 | Injection under the skin or into muscle | $55.33 | $13.42 |
| 11980 | Hormone pellet placement under the skin | $274.77 | $86.79 |
Pellet placement was allowed at $86.79 against a billed $274.77, across 2,039 clinicians nationally.
Pellet programmes are often sold as a quarterly package. Ask what the package covers beyond the placement itself.
What this page cannot tell you
The medication itself is not priced here, and prices for compounded preparations are not published by any authority.
The FDA is explicit about the category: "Compounded drugs are not FDA-approved. This means that FDA does not verify the safety, effectiveness or quality of compounded drugs before they are marketed."
So a compounded product's price and its evidence base are both outside public data. Ask what is being prescribed and whether it is an approved product.
Questions to ask before you sign up
- Which lab panels are included, and how often are they repeated?
- Is the medication inside the monthly fee or billed separately?
- Is what you are prescribing an FDA-approved product or a compounded one?
- What is the cost of stopping after three months?
- Who reviews the results, and how quickly?
Common mistake: comparing two monthly fees without comparing what each one includes.
Red flags
A programme fee with no itemised contents. Lab panels described only as "comprehensive". Long prepaid contracts sold before the first result comes back.
Where these numbers come from, and what they are not
Source: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Medicare Physician & Other Practitioners — by Geography and Service, calendar year 2024 claims (file released 21 May 2026).
Method: we pull the published rows for each billing code, keep the average submitted charge and the average Medicare allowed amount, and print them unchanged. Nothing is modelled, averaged across codes, or adjusted.
- The submitted charge is what clinicians billed. It is list price. Almost nobody pays it.
- The allowed amount is what Medicare permitted, including the patient's coinsurance. It is a negotiated price.
- These are Medicare fee-for-service claims. The patients skew 65 and older.
- If you are paying cash or using commercial insurance, neither figure is your price. Use the gap between them as a bargaining range, not a quote.
- CMS hides any cell covering fewer than 11 patients, so some states are missing. We print "not published" there rather than guessing.
Common mistake: reading the allowed amount as "the real price" and expecting a clinic to match it. It is what one payer pays one set of clinicians.
What to do next
Ask two clinics for the itemised contents of their monthly fee, in writing, then price the difference against this table.
Educational only. Not medical advice. No endorsements or rankings.