GLP-1 statistics, sourced and dated

Usage & prevalence

Current GLP-1 use peaks in middle age and skews toward people managing diabetes, heart disease, or their own weight, per a nationally polled KFF survey fielded in late 2025.

Current use by age

• 18–299%
• 30–4913%
• 50–6422%
• 65+9%

  Medicare excludes weight-loss-only prescribing

Current or past use, by condition

• Diagnosed with diabetes45%
• Heart disease29%
• Self-identified overweight/obese23%

Among current and past users, 56% say the drugs are difficult to afford, 27% of insured users still pay full cost out of pocket, 14% stopped because of cost, and 13% stopped because of side effects. Most (76%) got their prescription from a doctor; 17% from an online provider and 9% from a medical spa or aesthetic clinic — the clearest dated figure we found for telehealth’s share of the prescribing channel, though it measures self-reported source, not a claims-based share of all scripts written.

Diagnosed-diabetes population, by age (2024)

A separate, nationally representative CDC survey of adults with diagnosed diabetes found 26.5% used a GLP-1 injectable in 2024, ranging as follows:

• 18–3425.3%
• 35–4928.9%
• 50–6433.3%
• 65+20.8%

Clinical trial efficacy, by drug

Headline mean body-weight reduction from each drug’s pivotal trial. These are not head-to-head comparisons — trial populations, durations, and placebo responses differ — so read this as “what each drug showed in its own trial,” not a ranking. Retatrutide is not FDA-approved as of this writing; it is shown for context only, shaded to mark it as investigational.

• Semaglutide 2.4mg14.9%

  STEP 1, NEJM 2021 · N=1,961 · 68 weeks — vs. 2.4% placebo

• Tirzepatide 15mg22.5%

  SURMOUNT-1, NEJM 2022 · N=2,539 · 72 weeks — vs. 2.4% placebo

• Oral semaglutide 25mg13.6%

  OASIS 4 · N=307 · 64 weeks — treatment-policy estimand, vs. 2.4% placebo

• Orforglipron 17.2mg12.4%

  ATTAIN-1 · N>3,100 · 72 weeks — first non-peptide oral GLP-1; FDA approved April 2026

• Retatrutide 12mg28.3%

  TRIUMPH-1 · primary endpoint — vs. 2.2% placebo — NOT FDA-approved; pipeline data only

Side effects: FDA-label incidence rates

Pulled directly from each drug’s current FDA prescribing label on DailyMed — the adverse-reaction rate reported in the pivotal placebo-controlled trial pool, not an estimate. See our side-effects guide for what to do about each one.

Market & spending

2025 US sales, leading brands

• Mounjaro39.1B

  +67.1% year over year

• Zepbound22.9B

  +188.7% year over year

• Wegovy18.6B

  +29.2% year over year

Medicaid GLP-1 spending, gross ($ billions)

• 20191B
• 20249B

Medicaid gross spending on GLP-1s rose roughly ninefold from 2019 to 2024, alongside an eightfold increase in prescriptions. Medicare Part D gross spending reached $27.5 billion in 2024, a fivefold increase since 2019. Both figures are gross, before manufacturer rebates — actual net cost to public payers is materially lower.

Global market size: a genuine disagreement between forecasters

Named analyst desks disagree meaningfully on where this market is headed, which is worth showing rather than hiding behind a single confident number:

• Morgan Stanley Research: ~$79B (2025) growing to ~$190B by 2035
• Goldman Sachs Research: Revised down to ~$95B by 2030 (from a prior $130B estimate)

Persistence: how many people are still on treatment later

This is the least flattering number set on this page, and one most competitor content skips. A JAMA Network Open cohort (patients who started 2018–2023) found 64.8% of non-diabetic weight-loss patients and 46.5% of patients with type 2 diabetes had discontinued within one year.

Separately, Prime Therapeutics’ own book of business shows persistence improving sharply in more recent cohorts — from 33.2% at one year (2021 starters) to 60.9% (H1 2024 starters) — likely reflecting the end of the 2022–2024 supply shortages and better dose-management practice, not a change in the drugs themselves:

• 2021 cohort33.2%
• H1 2024 cohort60.9%

Even so, Prime’s longer-run data shows only 15% still on treatment at two years and just 8% (roughly 1 in 12) at three years for obesity treatment. The JAMA and Prime figures come from different cohorts and time periods and are not directly comparable — we show both, dated, rather than pick one.

Insurance coverage

Employer coverage of GLP-1s for weight loss, by company size

• 200–999 workers16%
• 1,000–4,999 workers30%
• 5,000+ workers43%

  up from 28% the prior year

As of KFF’s January 2026 count, 13 state Medicaid programmes cover GLP-1s for obesity specifically under fee-for-service — this count has moved both up and down over the past two years as states add and roll back coverage, so treat it as a snapshot, not a stable figure. Medicare Part D still cannot cover a GLP-1 prescribed solely for weight loss by federal statute; see our cost and coverage guide for the Medicare GLP-1 Bridge programme and how each pathway actually works.

Demographics (diagnosed-diabetes population, 2024)

The CDC’s national survey data covers GLP-1 injectable use among adults with diagnosed diabetes specifically — it does not represent the broader weight-loss-only population, where the KFF polling above is the better source.

By race and ethnicity

• Hispanic31.3%
• Black, non-Hispanic26.5%
• White, non-Hispanic26.2%
• Asian, non-Hispanic12.1%

By BMI category

• Healthy weight16.7%
• Obesity32.4%

What we deliberately left out

A few figures came up repeatedly in our research but failed our sourcing bar, so we left them out rather than publish an estimate:

• A single “% of GLP-1 prescriptions written via telehealth” figure. We found no primary claims-based study framed exactly this way. The closest verifiable number is the 17% self-reported “online provider” figure cited above.
• Compounded-market size and a “% of users who tried a compounded product” figure. Both traced only to secondary aggregation we could not confirm against a named primary report.
• SURMOUNT-2’s exact efficacy figures. We could only confirm these via investor-relations reporting of the Lancet publication, not the paper itself, so we left SURMOUNT-2 off the chart above pending direct verification.
• Generic market-research-firm CAGR figures (several circulate publicly) that disagree with each other by more than 2x and don’t disclose methodology — we cite only named analyst desks (Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs) instead.

This page is general education, not medical advice. Talk to your own healthcare provider about your situation before starting, stopping, or changing any medication.