Prescription Drug Prices Just Saw the Biggest Decline Ever

If you are feeling down about the most recent report on inflation, we may have just what the doctor ordered.

Prescription drug prices just recorded their largest annual decline in American history, according to the consumer price index report released by the Department of Labor on Wednesday.

The index for prescription drug prices fell 1.2 percent in September and was down 4.5 percent from a year earlier. In its historical comparison table, the government supplied a wonderfully concise verdict: “S-EVER,” meaning the smallest annual change ever recorded. For a falling price index, that means the biggest decline on record.

As recently as July, the annual decline was 3.1 percent, the steepest since March 1963, when prices fell 3.2 percent. September’s figures have carried us beyond that Kennedy-era comparison and into record territory.

This is a substantial development in a country where expensive medicine has long seemed as permanent a feature of American life as politicians promising to do something about it.

A Prescription for Consumer Health

President Trump made lowering drug prices a central promise of his second administration. His most-favored-nation approach sought to bring American prices into line with the lowest prices paid in comparable wealthy countries. Americans had spent years paying more for medicines also sold abroad, an arrangement Trump treated as another bad deal Washington had allowed to become customary. We were subsidizing the development and distribution of drugs for the rest of the world, just as our trade deficits were subsidizing their industrial development.

Of course, Trump’s enemies announced that this would be simply impossible. On May 21, 2025, The Atlantic published an article by Rogé Karma headlined “Trump’s Plan to Cap Drug Prices Doesn’t Exist.” Public Citizen declared the executive order “very unlikely to result in lower prices for U.S. patients and taxpayers.” The objections concerned both the administration’s legal authority and its expectation that manufacturers could be persuaded to accept lower prices.

These objections never made much sense. If the policies of other countries can result in lower prescription drug prices, surely the U.S. could lower prices. The underlying objection was something more sinister. Namely, the conviction that nothing President Trump does can be good. Since lowering drug prices is good, there was no way for the pundits to accept that he could lower them.

Trump was undeterred. His May 2025 executive order directed the administration to pursue international price targets and direct purchasing arrangements. That July, he sent letters to 17 leading manufacturers demanding steps to bring American prices down. The first agreement, with Pfizer, followed in September. The work was getting done.

By the end of August this year, the White House reported agreements with 26 manufacturers representing 89 percent of the branded drug market. The deals include lower prices for state Medicaid programs and international pricing commitments for new medicines. TrumpRx, launched in February, gives patients access to discounted cash prices through participating manufacturers.

President Donald Trump introduces the new TrumpRx.gov website at the White House on February 5, 2026. (SAUL LOEB / AFP via Getty Images)

The supposedly nonexistent and impossible policy has acquired a fairly substantial existence. And now it is doing exactly what President Trump said it would.

Drug Prices Are Actually Down

How will Trump’s critics survive this? It’s likely they will try to ignore it or claim that President Trump’s policies had nothing to do with the record-setting price decline. The more creative sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome—especially those who are indirectly in the pay of pharmaceutical companies—may even try to claim that lower drug prices are bad.

All that griping probably will not matter politically. One of the persistent problems faced by American households—ever-rising drug problems—has been solved during Trump’s second term.

Keep in mind that this is not just slower inflation for drug prices. It’s actual deflation. September’s prescription-drug reading means prices were actually lower than a year earlier. The broader medicinal-drugs category, including nonprescription medicines, was down 3.4 percent, also a record annual decline.

Trump promised to make medicine cheaper. He pursued a series of agreements intended to accomplish that. Americans are now seeing the sharpest annual decline in prescription drug prices the government has ever recorded.

The experts are welcome to keep arguing over the prescription. The price is coming down.