Most pages in this cluster have to explain why no authoritative dose figure exists. This one has the opposite job. Chorionic gonadotropin has a current FDA-approved label with precise regimens, a reconstitution table and a defined route.
It is still not a simple page, for two reasons that are both worth reading.
What the label states
The NOVAREL label (Ferring Pharmaceuticals) specifies intramuscular use only, and gives figures in USP Units.
Prepubertal cryptorchidism not due to anatomical obstruction — four alternatives:
- 4,000 USP Units three times weekly for three weeks
- 5,000 USP Units every second day for four injections
- 15 injections of 500 to 1,000 USP Units over a period of six weeks
- 500 USP Units three times weekly for four to six weeks; if unsuccessful, a further course beginning a month later at 1,000 USP Units per injection
Selected cases of hypogonadotropic hypogonadism in males — two alternatives:
- 500 to 1,000 USP Units three times a week for three weeks, then the same dose twice a week for three weeks
- 4,000 USP Units three times weekly for six to nine months, then 2,000 USP Units three times weekly for a further three months
Induction of ovulation in an anovulatory patient appropriately pretreated with menotropins: 5,000 to 10,000 USP Units one day after the last menotropins dose. The label notes that 10,000 USP Units is the figure recommended in the menotropins labelling.
These are reported here as what the label states. Nothing on this page is a recommendation, and decisions about administering anything to a person belong with a clinician.
The first unusual thing: the label hedges its own numbers
Before listing any of those regimens, the label says this: the dosage employed in any particular case depends on the indication, on the age and weight of the patient, and on the physician's preference — and that "the following regimens have been advocated by various authorities."
That sentence is worth stopping on. On this site's six-tier grading, an FDA label is tier 1, the top of the scale, because a labelled dose normally rests on dose-finding trials submitted for approval. Here an approved label is explicitly reporting accumulated clinical convention rather than asserting a single studied figure.
It does not make the figures unreliable — they are in a reviewed, approved label, and the label is the authoritative document for the product. But it does mean that a page citing "the FDA-approved hCG dose" is claiming more precision than the label claims for itself. The honest description is: regimens that the label reports as advocated, within an approved product.
This is the first instance in this catalogue of a tier-1 source qualifying itself that way, and it is a useful correction to a tidy hierarchy. The dosage index grades the kind of source behind a figure; it cannot grade how confidently that source speaks. Reading the label rather than the tier is what catches this.
The second unusual thing: the units
hCG is dosed in USP Units — a potency measure defined against a reference standard, not a mass. This is the same class of unit as an insulin unit, and it puts hCG in a small group of entries in this catalogue whose figures cannot be placed alongside milligram quantities without a conversion nobody has supplied.
There is a reason for it beyond convention. Human chorionic gonadotropin is a glycoprotein hormone: two subunits with attached carbohydrate chains, considerably larger and more structurally complex than the short synthetic sequences that make up most of this catalogue. A glycoprotein's biological activity is not reliably predicted by its weight, which is precisely why potency units exist.
The reconstitution table on the label shows how that plays out in practice:
| Diluent volume (bacteriostatic water) | 10,000 IU vial | 5,000 IU vial | Label's note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 mL | 10,000 IU/mL | 5,000 IU/mL | Entire dose administered at once |
| 10 mL | 1,000 IU/mL | 500 IU/mL | Multiple-dose administration, refrigerated between doses |
Two vials, two diluent volumes, four concentrations spanning twenty-fold. The reconstitution arithmetic and the diluent work exactly as they do elsewhere; only the unit has changed.
The weight-loss question, which the label answers before anyone asks it
The NOVAREL label does something unusual with its INDICATIONS AND USAGE section: before naming any indication, it uses capital letters to rule one out.
It states that hCG has not been demonstrated to be effective adjunctive therapy in the treatment of obesity, and that there is no substantial evidence that it increases weight loss beyond that resulting from caloric restriction, that it causes a more attractive or "normal" distribution of fat, or that it decreases the hunger and discomfort associated with calorie-restricted diets. Its clinical pharmacology section adds, again in capitals, that hCG has no known effect on fat mobilization, appetite or sense of hunger, or body fat distribution.
FDA's consumer guidance says the same thing in plainer language: hCG "is not approved for use without a prescription for any purpose. It is not approved for weight loss", and on the diet claims, "the data simply do not support this; any loss is from severe calorie restriction. Not from the HCG." That page was content-current as of 13 July 2020.
What the label database actually contains, which is the finding
We queried DailyMed for "chorionic gonadotropin" on 16 September 2026. It returned 16 records. Classified by dosage form:
| Kind of record | Count |
|---|---|
| Injection kits — human prescription chorionic gonadotropin | 2 |
| Injection kit — veterinary combination product (P.G. 600) | 1 |
| Oral liquids, drops and sprays — multi-ingredient homeopathic preparations | 13 |
The 13 carry names like E-HCG Fat Release System, Diet Drops, HCG With Slimming Herbs and HCG Select Female Vitality Formula, and combine nominal hCG with L-carnitine, garcinia cambogia, cyanocobalamin, ornithine and glandular extracts.
So the US label database holds roughly four times as many records for the use the prescription label excludes in capital letters as for the uses it is approved for. The approved label and FDA's consumer guidance both say the weight-loss application is unsupported; the database's contents are overwhelmingly that application.
That is not a claim about whether any particular product is harmful, and this page does not make one. It is a claim about proportion, and it is reproducible: the query is one line, and the dosage-form column in the results is what sorts it.
Where hCG sits in this catalogue
It is one of five compounds here with an approved label, alongside semaglutide, tirzepatide, bremelanotide and elamipretide — and it is the only one of them whose label describes its own regimens as advocated rather than established. It is also the only one dosed in potency units.
Both of those make it a useful test case for reading a dose claim rather than a tier. The full index of what this site has opened, with the tier behind each figure, is the peptide dosage chart.