How to get NAD+: rank the routes by what they ask of you
Almost every guide to this question is organised by seller. That is the wrong axis for NAD+, because all the sellers exist and none of them is hiding. What differs is what each route demands from you before you get anything: an appointment and a deposit, a clinician willing to write something unusual, or a card number and a shipping address.
So this page ranks routes by friction, from the one that asks least of your knowledge to the one that asks least of your wallet, and it is honest about the fact that those are opposite ends. Nothing here is a recommendation to obtain the compound. It is a description of what each door actually costs to walk through.
One disclosure before the routes. We earn a commission on the cheapest route below, explained in full on our affiliate disclosure, and that route is also the one with no clinician attached. Both of those facts are on this page for the same reason.
Route one: book an infusion appointment
Asking how to get NAD+ IV therapy has the simplest answer of anything on this page: search locally, call, book. Infusion bars, med spas and longevity practices advertise it openly, the booking process resembles booking a facial, and no specialist knowledge is required of you at any point. That is the whole appeal, and it is real.
The friction lands elsewhere. A session is a block of hours rather than minutes, so it is scheduled rather than walked into. Clinics generally sell a loading course of several sessions before any maintenance schedule, which means the sum you commit to is a multiple of the number on the price list, and the per-session figure is normally quoted rather than published. The arithmetic against a vial is on our NAD+ price page.
The part worth knowing before you sit down is what is in the bag and where it came from. FDA's notice to compounders, content current as of 30 October 2024, states the agency is aware of compounders using food-grade NAD+ sold by repackagers to make intravenous products, and reports adverse events after NAD+ injectable drugs including "severe chills, shaking, vomiting and fatigue with some requiring medical treatment", consistent with excessive endotoxins. Ask which pharmacy prepared it, whether the material is pharmaceutical grade, and whether the certificate includes bacterial endotoxins testing. Those three questions take a minute and are the only friction in this route worth adding deliberately.
Route two: a prescriber and a compounding pharmacy
This is the highest-friction route and the only one with a professional accountable for the preparation. It requires a clinician willing to prescribe, which is where most attempts stop, because there is no approved NAD+ product to prescribe and therefore no labelling, no approved indication and no dosing consensus to lean on. Many prescribers will decline for exactly those reasons, and declining is a defensible position rather than an obstruction.
What makes the route possible at all is a regulatory detail worth stating precisely, because a great deal of published copy gets it backwards. Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide appears in category 1 of FDA's list of bulk drug substances nominated for compounding under section 503A, in the list updated 14 May 2026. Category 1 means the agency does not intend to take action against a compounder using the substance provided its guidance conditions are met, while the evaluation is pending. It is a non-enforcement position, not an approval, and it is not permanent.
The payoff is the sourcing rule that comes with it. A pharmacy compounding from a bulk substance must use material accompanied by a valid certificate of analysis and manufactured by an FDA-registered establishment, as set out on FDA's bulk drug substances page. That is the difference you are paying and queuing for. Our page on NAD+ without a prescription works through the legal boundaries in more detail.
Route three: telehealth and wellness programmes
Telehealth sits between the first two routes and behaves inconsistently, so it needs checking rather than assuming. Some programmes will arrange a compounded preparation through a pharmacy after a consultation, which is route two with a video call in front of it. Others will send you an oral precursor supplement and describe it in NAD+ language, which is a different product entirely.
The way to tell them apart before paying is to ask what will physically arrive and who prepared it. A programme supplying a compounded preparation will name the pharmacy without hesitation. A programme supplying capsules will get vague, because the marketing has been doing work the product does not do. Neither is dishonest by default; the vagueness is what tells you which one you are dealing with.
We assess subscription health programmes constantly on this site, and the pattern is consistent across compounds: the ones worth the money describe the supply chain plainly. Our methodology sets out how we score that.
Route four: order a research vial
The lowest-friction route by cost and time is a research-chemical supplier. NAD+ is sold as a lyophilized powder labelled for laboratory research use only, not for human consumption, and that label is the legal basis of the sale rather than boilerplate. At the supplier we link, one listing exists: NAD+ 1,000 mg at $104.00, or $52.00 with the code PEPTIDEDECK, which is $5.20 per 100 mg. Quantity tiers of three, five and ten units take 3, 5 or 10 percent off list, nothing published says the code stacks with them, and free shipping begins at $250.
Checkout takes minutes and nothing gatekeeps it. What arrives is a sealed vial and no paperwork you would recognise from a pharmacy: no leaflet, no instructions, no dosing guidance, no follow-up, because supplying any of those would contradict the research-use basis the sale depends on. That absence is not a service failure, it is the structure of the transaction.
The friction in this route is entirely front-loaded onto you, and most of it is verification. Open the certificate before ordering and look for bacterial endotoxins or LAL testing reported in endotoxin units, not just an HPLC purity percentage, and check the lot number on it against the vial you receive. A sample can be 99 percent pure and still carry the contamination FDA's notice describes. Our supplier checklist runs through the rest of it.
What the evidence base looks like before you choose a route
It would be dishonest to rank the routes without saying what is known about the thing at the end of them. Human data on infused NAD+ is thin. The clearest published study we could find is a pilot in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience in 2019, which tracked plasma and urine changes during a six hour intravenous infusion and found, to the authors' own surprise, no change in plasma NAD+ or its metabolites until after two hours had passed.
That is a pharmacokinetic observation about where infused material goes, not a finding about whether anybody felt better. It is also worth noting that the author list included people affiliated with a centre that administers NAD+ infusions, which is normal in a small field and is the kind of thing worth knowing when a study is quoted at you in a consultation.
The practical upshot is that no route on this page is buying you a settled answer. The clinic is not selling proven benefit and neither is the vial. What the routes differ on is who is responsible if the material is contaminated, and that difference is real regardless of what the compound does.
The routes ranked by friction
The table puts the four routes in order from least demanding to most demanding, with the cost running roughly in the opposite direction. Read the accountability column before the effort column.
| Route | What it asks of you | What you walk away with | Who is accountable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Infusion appointment | A booking, a deposit, and hours of chair time per session | A prepared infusion and supervision while it runs | The practice and its clinicians |
| Telehealth programme | A consultation fee and a subscription, sometimes | Either a compounded preparation or precursor capsules | Depends entirely which of the two it is |
| Prescriber and compounding pharmacy | Finding a clinician willing to prescribe, which is the hard part | A preparation made under FDA's bulk sourcing rule | The prescriber and the pharmacy |
| Research vial | A card, an address and your own verification work | A sealed 1,000 mg vial at $52.00 with the code, nothing else | Nobody clinical, at any point |
Research-vial pricing verified on the product page on 20 August 2026. Clinic and prescription pricing is described structurally because no representative published figures were verifiable.
Where readers realistically land
Most people who arrive at this question have already priced a clinic and flinched, and most who write to us afterwards have landed on the vial. That is a description of behaviour rather than an endorsement of it, and the honest framing is that they have traded away the entire accountability chain to do it.
If you take that route, take the verification with it, because it is the only protection in the transaction. Grade in writing. A lot-matched certificate. Endotoxin testing named on it. If you want the chain instead, route two exists for this compound in a way it does not for most of what we cover, and it is worth one conversation with a clinician before you decide it is out of reach.