Florida › Research › Does price depend on location?
Does the price of your prescription depend on which location you visit, or which company runs it?
We priced the same 15 common generic medications through the LowerScript card's pricing network at every participating pharmacy location we could find in two Florida counties, on one day, and compared prices location by location and company by company.
The question
Shoppers are told to "shop around" for prescription prices. But shop around how? Does it matter which branch of a pharmacy company you go to, or only which company? We set out to measure it directly: for a fixed 15-item basket of common generics, priced through the card's pricing network on 18 September 2026, does the price for the same medication change from one location to another within the same pharmacy company — and how big is the difference between companies?
What we found
Miami-Dade County
242 participating pharmacy locations returned a price for the full 15-item basket, across 7 distinct pharmacy companies. For every one of the 15 medications, each company's price was the same at every one of its locations. The 15-item basket totaled from $146.25 to $526.44 depending on the company — a 3.6× spread — and that same $146.25–$526.44 range showed up in every one of the 10 areas of the county we checked separately, not just countywide.
| Pharmacy company (anonymized) | 15-item basket total |
|---|---|
| Company A | $146.25 |
| Company B | $281.88 |
| Company C | $302.55 |
| Company D | $384.75 |
| Company E | $484.66 |
| Company F | $526.44 |
| Company G | $526.44 |
Letters A–G are assigned by ascending basket total for Miami-Dade only (A = lowest) and carry no meaning beyond this table. No pharmacy company is named. See per-medication prices for Miami-Dade →
Hillsborough County
138 participating pharmacy locations returned a price for the full 15-item basket, across the same 7 distinct pharmacy companies (Hillsborough's companies are relabeled independently below — its "Company A" is not necessarily the same real company as Miami-Dade's "Company A"). Again, every company's price for every medication was the same at every one of its locations. The 15-item basket totaled from $146.25 to $586.26 — a 4.0× spread. All of Hillsborough's locations fell into a single area in our data, so there is no separate area-vs-county comparison to make here (see Method).
| Pharmacy company (anonymized) | 15-item basket total |
|---|---|
| Company A | $146.25 |
| Company B | $281.88 |
| Company C | $302.55 |
| Company D | $384.75 |
| Company E | $484.66 |
| Company F | $526.44 |
| Company G | $586.26 |
Letters A–G are assigned by ascending basket total for Hillsborough only. Two ZIP codes (33547, 33565) had no participating pharmacy priced within 5 miles. See per-medication prices for Hillsborough →
The single biggest per-medication spread in either county was montelukast 10 mg × 30: $7.31 to $60.17 in Miami-Dade (8.2×) and $7.31 to $76.88 in Hillsborough (10.5×). The smallest was glipizide 5 mg × 30 in both counties: $9.00 to $18.32 (2.0×).
What this means for you
- For this basket, on this date, in these two counties: which pharmacy company you use was the whole story. Which of that company's locations you visit was not.
- That doesn't mean every medication, every date, or every county works the same way — check your own list. Check today's price for your medications and your ZIP →
- In our sample, one company (Company A in each county) had the lowest price on all 15 medications, while the order of the other companies changed from medication to medication. Prices and rankings move over time and differ by medication, so check your own list before you fill.
Method
- Source
- Prices returned through the LowerScript card's pricing network via our price-check service, one call per medication per participating location.
- Date and time
- Collected 2026-09-18T21:16:47.426Z (Miami-Dade) and 2026-09-18T22:04:12.879Z (Hillsborough).
- Basket
- 15 items, one strength and quantity each: metformin 500 mg × 60; lisinopril 10 mg × 30; amlodipine 5 mg × 30; atorvastatin 20 mg × 30; losartan 50 mg × 30; hydrochlorothiazide 25 mg × 30; glipizide 5 mg × 30; simvastatin 20 mg × 30; omeprazole 20 mg × 30; levothyroxine 50 mcg × 30; sertraline 50 mg × 30; montelukast 10 mg × 30; albuterol HFA inhaler 90 mcg × 8.5; gabapentin 300 mg × 90; metoprolol tartrate 25 mg × 60.
- Locations and ZIPs
- Miami-Dade: 80 ZIP codes searched (5-mile radius from each ZIP's Census ZCTA centroid), 1,233 price requests, 242 unique locations with a price for all 15 items. Hillsborough: 55 ZIP codes searched, 855 price requests, 141 unique locations returned a price, 138 of them for all 15 items (3 priced fewer than 15).
- "Same location" rule
- A location counts once, however many ZIP searches found it, using the pharmacy name + street address + postal code (lower-cased, trimmed). A separate, coarser count that groups by pharmacy name + ZIP only (used elsewhere on this site for store counts) gives smaller numbers — see Reconciliation below.
- Pharmacy companies
- 7 distinct pharmacy companies were found in each county. Real company names are never published in this study; see the chain-neutrality note below.
- Area comparison (Miami-Dade only)
- The county's 242 locations fall into 10 named areas; every area with a complete set of full-basket locations showed the identical $146.25–$526.44 range as the county overall. Hillsborough's location data does not yet distinguish areas within the county (a known limitation — see Limits), so no area-vs-county comparison is possible there.
- Reconciliation
- Miami-Dade's coarser pharmacy-name-plus-ZIP count is 230 stores; the finer, name-plus-address count used throughout this study is 242 locations. The 12-location difference is branches of the same-named company sharing one ZIP code — for example two locations of one company two blocks apart, in the same ZIP, count as one "store" under the coarser rule but two locations under the rule this study uses. Hillsborough: 141 unique locations returned a price, but only 138 priced all 15 basket items; the other 3 are counted in the per-medication company tallies but excluded from the whole-basket total.
- Chain neutrality
- Consistent with LowerScript's standing rule for reviewed content, no pharmacy company is named, ranked, praised or criticized anywhere on this page. Real company names are held internally for our own analysis and are never rendered here.
Limits
- Whether this pattern holds for other medications, other strengths or quantities, other dates, other counties, or other discount-card programmes — we did not test those, and this page makes no claim about them.
- Whether the card price is the cheapest option available to you for a given fill — compare it with any manufacturer coupon, Medicare Part D or Marketplace plan cost, or 340B/community-clinic price you may have access to.
- Whether the card beats the posted cash price at each pharmacy — that comparison (against Florida's MyFloridaRx postings) was still pending a manual data pull as of this study and is not included here.
- Miami-Dade carried two data-quality notes from collection: two of the county's 10 areas (Coral Gables/Coconut Grove and Doral/Airport) contain only 2 ZIP codes each, a small sample for an area-level figure, though it did not change the area-vs-county finding above.
- Hillsborough's location data does not yet sort locations into named areas within the county (a known collector limitation), so unlike Miami-Dade we cannot show the range holding area-by-area there — only countywide.
- A price shown here is not a guarantee of stock, and prices change; use "Check today's price" above for a current number.
Downloads
Download the full source data (CSV, English) · Ver esta página en español →
Who did this, and how
Sources
- [1] LowerScript research run, Miami-Dade and Hillsborough counties, 2026-09-18 — full source data (CSV); card prices via the card's pricing network.
- [2] LowerScript, Prescription prices in Miami-Dade County.
- [3] LowerScript, Prescription prices in Hillsborough County.
LowerScript is a prescription discount program, not insurance. Savings up to 80%; savings vary by medication, dosage and pharmacy. General information, not medical advice.