Doxycycline's 2013 price spike and the decade-long fall that followed

In the first weekly file of the federal government's drug cost survey, dated late November 2013, retail pharmacies were paying an average of $3.36 for a single generic 100 mg doxycycline hyclate capsule, according to CMS NADAC data¹. In October 2026 the figure was 11 cents.

That is a 97 percent decline. At the 2013 rate, a 100-capsule bottle cost a pharmacy $335.73 in ingredient cost. At the October 2026 rate it cost $10.64.

Doxycycline, an antibiotic that has been sold as a generic for decades, became one of the best-known examples of the generic price spikes of 2013 and 2014. The spike itself happened just before the public NADAC series begins, so our data pick up the story at the top. GxRadar's analysis of CMS NADAC files through October 2026 shows how slowly the price came back down, and the federal record from that period shows what officials and investigators said at the time.

What happened in 2013

Supply was already tight. On Jan. 18, 2013, FDA reported a shortage of some forms of doxycycline hyclate, "caused by increased demand and manufacturing issues," according to a June 2013 CDC health advisory⁶. CDC said at the time that FDA was reporting shortages from some, though not all, manufacturers of some doses and forms.

Prices rose sharply that year. At a Nov. 20, 2014, hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging⁷, titled "Why Are Some Generic Drugs Skyrocketing in Price?", written testimony from a University of Minnesota pharmacy economist reported that nearly 20 percent (27 of 280) of widely used generic drugs had an annual price increase of 50 percent or more in 2013. At the top of that list, measured by price per day of therapy, were doxycycline hyclate 100 mg capsules, with an annual increase of 2,048 percent. Another written statement in the same hearing record⁷ said the active ingredient for doxycycline had been in shortage because of plant closures.

Our series opens after that run-up. The NADAC for the capsule held near $3.35 through January 2014, according to the 2014 files², and then began to fall.

How GAO measured the wider wave

In August 2016 the Government Accountability Office published GAO-16-706⁸, a study of Medicare Part D generic prices from early 2010 through mid-2015. GAO defined an extraordinary price increase as a rise of 100 percent or more, measured from the first quarter of one year to the first quarter of the next. It found that 315 of the 1,441 established generics it followed had at least one such increase.

Doxycycline hyclate 100 mg capsules appear in the report's appendix list of drugs with extraordinary increases, marked in two separate years, along with the 100 mg tablet and the 50 mg capsule. GAO noted that competition is the primary driver of generic prices, and that stakeholders pointed to "raw material shortages, production difficulties, consolidation among manufacturers" and "a backlog of new generic drug applications awaiting federal review" as factors. GAO did not assign a cause to any single drug. Our earlier piece on the generic price spikes of 2013 to 2015 covers the report in more detail.

The long way down

Our table uses October of each year, plus the two earliest months. Each figure is GxRadar's monthly median of the weekly NADAC per-capsule rate for generic-classified doxycycline hyclate 100 mg capsules, from the yearly NADAC datasets on data.medicaid.gov⁴.

Each of the first four years took 40 to 52 percent off the price. It fell 52 percent from October 2014 to October 2015, 41 percent the next year, 42 percent the year after, and 46 percent from October 2017 to October 2018, when the 2018 files³ showed 22 cents. After that the declines got much smaller, with one year (2023 to 2024) showing a slight rise.

It took until December 2020 for the capsule to fall below one-twentieth of its late-2013 price. The lowest monthly figure in the series, 9.8 cents, came in December 2024. Since then the monthly figure has stayed between about 10 and 13 cents. CMS began calculating monthly generic rates as a three-month moving average with the December 2024 updates, a measure it called temporary (the backstory is in The 2024 NADAC swings), according to its NADAC methodology⁵, which smooths later months.

Where new approvals fit

FDA's records show an old product with a long gap in approvals. GxRadar counted 20 ANDAs in the agency's Drugs@FDA data¹⁰ whose original approval covered doxycycline hyclate 100 mg capsules. Eleven were approved between 1973 and 1986. None were approved from 1987 through 2015. Nine more were approved from June 2016 through December 2025, and 10 of the 20 are still listed as marketed.

By June 2016, when FDA approved the first new capsule ANDA in three decades, the NADAC had already fallen 73 percent from its November 2013 level, to about 90 cents. Most of the decline in our series came before the new wave of approvals. NADAC is a survey of invoice prices (see how NADAC is calculated), so our data cannot say which suppliers were selling in a given month, and we do not try to assign the decline to any single cause. Our explainer on why generic prices fall as competitors enter describes the general mechanism.

A high price that lingers is not the usual outcome for drugs that go into shortage. When FDA's drug shortages task force studied drugs that went into shortage from 2013 to 2017, it found that "only 18 percent had a sustained price increase," defined as a rise of 50 percent or more that began during the shortage and lasted six months, according to its 2019 report on root causes⁹. Our look at generics that cost pharmacies more today than in 2014 includes a related case, digoxin, whose NADAC rose more than eightfold between the November and December 2013 files.

Doxycycline on the shortage list today

The capsule is not on FDA's current shortage list, though several other antibiotics are; those are covered in Why antibiotics keep running short. As of Oct. 30, 2026, the openFDA drug shortages data¹¹ that feed our shortage tracker carried two doxycycline hyclate entries, both with the status "To Be Discontinued." A tablet entry was first posted Jan. 12, 2026, and a delayed-release tablet entry on July 30, 2026. Each covers two presentations and cites "discontinuation of the manufacture of the drug." The full monthly capsule series is on our doxycycline page, and the 47-drug basket is on our prices page.