Ask what the semaglutide dose is and the honest answer is a question back: which product, and by which route. Semaglutide is labelled in the United States under four brand names across two routes of administration, with five separate dose-escalation schedules, and the range between the smallest and largest labelled figure is not a matter of a step or two. It runs from 0.25 mg once weekly to 25 mg once daily.
This page reports what those labels state, with the document and date for each. It does not recommend anything and it is not a protocol. Our how to tell a label figure from a forum figure sets out what separates a label figure from a convention, and it matters here more than on almost any other compound this site covers.
Semaglutide dosage chart: the five ladders
| Product | Route | Schedule as labelled |
|---|---|---|
| Ozempic injection | Subcutaneous, once weekly | 0.25 mg for 4 weeks, then 0.5 mg; if more glycemic control is needed, 1 mg after at least 4 weeks, then 2 mg after at least 4 more |
| Wegovy injection | Subcutaneous, once weekly | 0.25 mg for 4 weeks, then titrated every 4 weeks; maintenance from week 17 at 1.7 or 2.4 mg by indication, with a 7.2 mg maximum for adult weight reduction |
| Wegovy tablets | Oral, once daily | 1.5 mg for 30 days, then titrated every 30 days; maintenance 25 mg once daily |
| Rybelsus tablets | Oral, once daily | 3 mg for days 1–30, 7 mg for days 31–60, then 7 mg or 14 mg from day 61 |
| Ozempic tablets | Oral, once daily | 1.5 mg for days 1–30, 4 mg for days 31–60, then 4 mg or 9 mg from day 61 |
Sources, all opened on 2026-09-09: the OZEMPIC injection label published on DailyMed 2026-06-10; the WEGOVY label covering both the injection and the tablets, published 2026-06-30; and the RYBELSUS and OZEMPIC tablets label published 2026-08-19. All three are Novo Nordisk Pharmaceutical Industries documents.
The Wegovy injection ladder is the one most often quoted as "the" semaglutide chart, so here it is week by week, exactly as the label's Table 1 sets it out (current version effective 2026-06-18, re-read 2026-09-22):
| Weeks | Once-weekly dosage, as labelled | Label's name for the step |
|---|---|---|
| 1–4 | 0.25 mg | Starting dosage |
| 5–8 | 0.5 mg | Escalation |
| 9–12 | 1 mg | Escalation |
| 13–16 | 1.7 mg | Escalation |
| 17 onward | 1.7 or 2.4 mg, depending on indication | Maintenance |
| After ≥4 weeks at 2.4 mg | Up to 7.2 mg (adult weight reduction only) | Maximum |
Two details in the label rarely survive being copied into a chart. It allows escalation to be delayed by four weeks when a step is not tolerated, so the week numbers are the fastest path rather than a fixed calendar. And the 7.2 mg ceiling is attached to one indication in one population — adults being treated for weight reduction — not to cardiovascular risk reduction or to adolescents, whose maintenance figures stop at 2.4 mg.
The 700-fold range, worked
The arithmetic is ours, and it is simple enough to check by hand. The smallest labelled semaglutide dose is Ozempic injection's 0.25 mg starting dose, taken once a week. The largest is the Wegovy tablet maintenance dosage of 25 mg, taken once a day — 175 mg across a week. That is a ratio of 700 to 1 between the two ends of the same molecule's labelling.
The comparison is not a trick played on the starting dose. Take the two maintenance figures instead: Wegovy injection's usual 2.4 mg weekly against Wegovy tablets' 25 mg daily, or 175 mg weekly, and the ratio is still roughly 73 to 1. The route is doing the work. Very little of an oral dose is absorbed, so the oral products compensate with an order of magnitude more material. The weekly injectable schedule itself is an engineering result rather than a property of the molecule class — the same albumin-binding trick appears in tirzepatide and in a dual agonist still working through its dose-finding in public.
What no label supplies is a conversion. There is no published factor for turning an oral milligram into an injected one, and the reason to be careful about inventing one is written into the labelling itself. The first oral GLP-1 drug that is not a peptide, orforglipron, shows the same problem in a sharper form: its trial registry and its label print the same arms under different milligram figures, as our orforglipron dosage record sets out.
The sentence that settles it
The label covering the two oral products opens its dosage and administration section with this:
RYBELSUS and OZEMPIC tablets are not substitutable on a mg-to-mg basis.
Same molecule. Same route. Same manufacturer. Same document. And the manufacturer states that the milligrams of one do not equate to the milligrams of the other — which is why the full prescribing information carries separate instructions for switching between them, and separate instructions again for switching from Ozempic injection to either tablet.
That sentence is the most useful thing on this page, because it disposes of a whole class of reasoning. If Novo Nordisk will not equate 4 mg of one of its oral tablets with 4 mg of the other, a milligram figure lifted from a forum, a vendor page or a compounding pharmacy and applied to a different presentation is not a dose. It is a number.
What the oral labels require beyond the number
Every oral semaglutide product carries the same administration conditions, and they are unusually demanding for a tablet:
- Taken on an empty stomach in the morning, with water only, and no more than four ounces of it.
- Swallowed whole — not split, crushed, chewed or dissolved.
- At least 30 minutes before any food, any other drink, or any other oral medicine.
These are not comfort instructions. They exist because absorption is the whole problem with oral semaglutide, and they are part of the dose in the way that "45 minutes before" is part of the PT-141 dose. A milligram figure reported without them describes a smaller exposure than the label intends.
Both oral labels also state that the starting dose does not work. Rybelsus at 3 mg and Ozempic tablets at 1.5 mg are each described in the label as not effective for glycemic control; they exist to be climbed off. Anyone quoting a starting figure as a maintenance dose is quoting a step the manufacturer says has no therapeutic effect.
Where the injectable strengths have moved
The Wegovy label's dosage forms section lists a 7.2 mg single-dose pen under the name WEGOVY HD, alongside the familiar 0.25, 0.5, 1, 1.7 and 2.4 mg strengths and the 9.6 mg multi-dose FlexTouch pen that delivers four 2.4 mg doses. A correction to this page's first version: when we first read the label we reported 7.2 mg as a listed strength and 2.4 mg as the ceiling of the maintenance dosage. Re-read on 2026-09-22, the dosage section itself goes further — for weight reduction in adults who have tolerated 2.4 mg for at least four weeks, "the dosage may be increased to a maximum dosage of 7.2 mg" once weekly. 2.4 mg is still the figure the label calls recommended; 7.2 mg is now a labelled maximum rather than just a pen that exists.
Semaglutide also appears inside an investigational combination, paired with an amylin analogue at 2.4 mg each; our cagrilintide page counts that programme and shows how little of it tests the partner compound on its own.
The distinction still holds in a narrower form — a labelled maximum is not the recommended maintenance dosage, and it is conditional on a prior step being tolerated — and it is worth holding onto, because a vial's contents and a dose are different quantities. Our page on reading a certificate of analysis covers the same gap on the research-supply side, where the number on the label describes what a vial is said to hold rather than what anyone administers.
Semaglutide half-life, as the labels state it
Every schedule above is built on one pharmacokinetic fact. Both injectable labels give semaglutide an elimination half-life of approximately one week. The Ozempic label adds that steady-state exposure is reached after 4 to 5 weeks of once-weekly dosing and that the drug is present in circulation for about five weeks after the last dose. The Wegovy label, covering higher doses, puts that tail at about 5 to 7 weeks after the last 2.4 mg or 7.2 mg injection or 25 mg tablet, and for the same reason advises discontinuing at least two months before a planned pregnancy.
| Label figure | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Elimination half-life | ~1 week | Ozempic and Wegovy labels |
| Time to peak (injection) | 1–3 days after the dose | Wegovy label |
| Subcutaneous bioavailability | 89% | Wegovy label |
| Steady state | After 4–5 weeks of weekly dosing | Ozempic label |
| Still circulating after last dose | ~5 weeks (Ozempic); ~5–7 weeks (Wegovy) | Both labels |
The four-week steps in every injectable ladder line up with that steady-state figure: each dose is held roughly until exposure has stopped climbing. The half-life is also why the oral products need a daily tablet — absorption, not elimination, is the constraint there. For how semaglutide's half-life compares with the short-lived research peptides, see our peptide half-life table.
How this compares with the rest of the catalogue
The 700-fold spread between the lowest and highest labelled weekly figure for this one molecule is the widest in this catalogue, and it sits entirely inside tier 1. It is the clearest single argument against a one-number-per-compound dosage table, which is the finding the dosage index is built around. Liraglutide, the daily analogue that came first, shows the opposite pattern — one molecule with two label ceilings, 1.8 mg and 3 mg — on our liraglutide dosage page.
What this page does not tell you
It does not tell you what to take. Every figure above is a report of what a US label states, with the document and the date attached, and every one of those labels is written for a prescriber and a patient in a clinical relationship. Semaglutide sold outside that channel arrives without the label, without the titration schedule and without the indication that determines which of the five ladders is the relevant one. GLP-1 medicines also carry a boxed warning and a contraindication in people with a personal or family history of medullary thyroid carcinoma or MEN 2 — which is on the label of every product named on this page, and on none of the vendor pages that quote the milligrams.
The FDA warning-letter tracker on this site records what happens when a seller supplies the numbers without the document they came from.