Peptide dosage chart: reported doses for every compound we cover

Each row is one compound. The dose column gives the low and high end of what appears in the research literature and in the protocols people post publicly, with the unit written out as mcg, mg or IU. The frequency column says how often that dose is repeated, which ranges from once weekly for the GLP-1 class to one to three times daily for the short-acting growth hormone secretagogues. The route column lists how it is given, with subcutaneous injection first where it is the most common.

The research level column is the one to read first. It runs from preclinical (animal or cell data only) through limited and well-studied to extensive, which covers approved drugs and compounds with multiple human randomized trials. A dose range sitting next to a preclinical label was never tested in a person. Those numbers come from forum convention or from scaling rodent doses, and the compound page says so in its first paragraph.

The category column groups compounds by what people use them for: weight management, growth hormone, healing, skin and hair, cognitive, sleep, longevity, sexual health and so on. It is a navigation aid, not an efficacy claim. Clicking through to the compound page gives the full picture, including the half-life, the reconstitution amounts and the cautions that a one-line chart cannot hold.

A single number implies a source and a consensus, and for most of these compounds neither exists. Semaglutide has a labeled dosage with five defined steps. BPC-157 has a few rodent studies at doses per kilogram and a decade of people guessing at human equivalents. Giving both a single figure would make them look equally established, which is the opposite of the truth.

Ranges also reflect how peptides are actually used. Ipamorelin is listed at 100 to 300 mcg because 100 mcg is near the saturation point for a growth hormone pulse and 200 to 300 mcg is what people use when running it alone without a GHRH analog. Both are real protocols with different logic behind them. Collapsing that into one number would hide the reasoning that matters more than the number.

Where a compound has an approved dose, the chart range still brackets what people do with it. Tesamorelin is approved at 2 mg daily as Egrifta, and the chart shows 1 to 2 mg because community protocols often halve it for cost. The compound page explains which end of the range has human data and which is a cost-saving guess.

Micrograms (mcg) and milligrams (mg) are both mass. One mg is 1000 mcg. Most healing, cognitive and growth hormone peptides are dosed in the hundreds of mcg, and most weight management peptides are dosed in mg. The thousandfold gap is the single most common source of a dangerous dosing error: reading 250 mcg as 250 mg, or mixing a vial labeled in mg and drawing as if it were mcg.

International units (IU) are a biological activity measure used for HGH and a few other hormones. For somatropin, 1 mg is about 3 IU, but that conversion does not transfer to any other compound. The chart lists HGH at 1 to 4 IU per day because that is how it is labeled and sold, and you cannot convert ipamorelin or sermorelin into IU at all.

Syringe units are something else entirely. On a U-100 insulin syringe, 1 unit is 0.01 mL of liquid. Units measure volume, and the amount of peptide in that volume depends on how much water went into the vial. A dose of 250 mcg could be 5 units, 10 units or 25 units depending on reconstitution. This is why the chart gives doses in mass and never in units, and why the calculator exists.

The frequency column is almost entirely explained by how fast a compound disappears from the blood. Semaglutide has a half-life of about 7 days, tirzepatide about 5 days, retatrutide about 6 days and cagrilintide about 7 to 8 days. One injection a week keeps blood levels nearly flat for all four, which is why they are dosed weekly and why each dose step takes about a month to fully settle.

At the other end, sermorelin has a half-life of 10 to 20 minutes, CJC-1295 without DAC about 30 minutes, and ipamorelin about 2 hours. These are pulse generators: each injection triggers one growth hormone release and is gone. That is why they appear at one to three doses a day, usually timed to bedtime or post-training when somatostatin is low. CJC-1295 with DAC is the exception in its class, with a 6 to 8 day half-life that puts it at once or twice weekly.

A short half-life in plasma does not always mean a short effect. BPC-157 is estimated at under 30 minutes in blood, Semax at a few minutes, and GHK-Cu at under an hour, yet all three are dosed once or twice daily rather than hourly because their tissue and gene expression effects outlast the molecule. The half-life tells you how often the signal needs to be sent, not how long the response lasts. Our guide on how long peptides last goes through this compound by compound.

The math has three steps. First, find the concentration: the vial amount divided by the water added. A 5 mg vial reconstituted with 2 mL of bacteriostatic water is 2.5 mg per mL, which is 2500 mcg per mL. Second, divide the dose by the concentration to get the volume. For 250 mcg, that is 250 divided by 2500, or 0.1 mL. Third, multiply the mL by 100 to get units on a U-100 syringe: 0.1 mL is 10 units.

The same vial with 1 mL of water instead is 5 mg per mL, and 250 mcg becomes 5 units. With 3 mL it is about 1.67 mg per mL and 250 mcg is 15 units. Nothing about the dose changed. Only the water did, and the units followed. This is the reason every how-many-units question has to start with the vial size and the water volume.

Doing this by hand works fine for round numbers and goes wrong fast for doses like 1.7 mg at 2.5 mg per mL (68 units). The reconstitution calculator handles any vial, water volume and dose, and the insulin syringe units chart lays out the common combinations in a grid. The reconstitution guide covers the mixing itself.

For tirzepatide, semaglutide, retatrutide and cagrilintide, the dose range on the chart is the floor and ceiling of a schedule rather than a choice. Semaglutide shows 0.25 to 2.4 mg because the Wegovy label starts at 0.25 mg weekly for 4 weeks and steps through 0.5, 1.0 and 1.7 mg before reaching 2.4 mg, with each step held at least 4 weeks. Tirzepatide shows 2.5 to 15 mg because the Zepbound label starts at 2.5 mg and climbs by 2.5 mg no sooner than every 4 weeks.

The starting dose on these schedules is a tolerance dose, not a treatment dose. Semaglutide at 0.25 mg and tirzepatide at 2.5 mg exist to let the gut adapt to slower emptying before the dose that actually drives weight loss arrives. Retatrutide's phase 3 trials followed the same logic, starting at 1 or 2 mg and escalating toward 4, 8 or 12 mg. Cagrilintide's phase 2 started at 0.3 mg and stepped through 0.6, 1.2, 2.4 and 4.5 mg.

Because the schedule is the dosage, each of these compounds has its own chart page: the tirzepatide dosage chart, semaglutide dosage chart and retatrutide dosage chart each include a live units grid at the common vial concentrations. The three-way comparison puts the schedules side by side.

Some rows do not fit the mg-per-injection pattern. SNAP-8 is topical only, which is why its dose shows as zero in the data: it is reconstituted at 10 mg in 2 mL and applied to expression lines twice daily, never drawn into a syringe. GHK-Cu lists an injectable range of 1 to 2 mg daily but is far more often used topically at 0.5 to 3 percent, and AHK-Cu is mostly applied to the scalp at roughly a 1 percent solution. For these, the percentage matters more than the mg.

Nasal compounds have their own logic. Semax and Selank are dosed in mcg per spray or drop, with Russian 0.1 percent Semax drops delivering roughly 50 mcg per drop and 0.15 percent Selank drops about 75 mcg. VIP in the CIRS protocol is 50 mcg per spray, one spray per nostril, up to four times daily. The chart gives the per-dose mcg range, but the actual product is a spray bottle, not a vial and syringe.

Oral entries are a third exception. Semaglutide exists as a tablet (Rybelsus), BPC-157 and KPV are sold as capsules, and 5-Amino-1MQ is usually taken as 50 to 150 mg capsules while its injectable range is 5 to 25 mg. Oral and injected numbers for the same compound are not interchangeable, and the chart lists the injectable figure unless the compound page says otherwise. The oral vs injectable BPC-157 article covers the best-known case.

For approved drugs, the range comes from the prescribing information: Wegovy, Zepbound, Egrifta and the former Geref label for sermorelin. For compounds with human trials but no approval, it comes from the trial arms, which is why retatrutide reads 1 to 12 mg and cagrilintide 0.3 to 4.5 mg. For everything else, it is the range that recurs across published community protocols and vendor documentation, cross-checked against whatever animal pharmacology exists.

That third group is the largest and the least reliable. A compound like MOTS-c has mouse data at 5 to 15 mg per kilogram, which would scale to doses far above the 5 to 10 mg people actually inject, so the human range is a convention with no pharmacological anchor. The research level column is there to make that visible at a glance. When it reads preclinical or limited, treat the dose column as a description of what people do, not evidence that it works.

Each compound page lists its references, and this chart updates automatically when a compound file changes. If a new trial sets a different dose, the page and the chart move together. For the safety side of all this, including what the evidence does and does not support, start with are peptides safe and peptides for beginners.