Liraglutide Dosage Calculator
Once-daily GLP-1 receptor agonist approved as Victoza (type 2 diabetes) and Saxenda (weight management).
Written by Kashif Khan, who builds and maintains this site and is not a clinician. Every figure links to its primary source.
FDA-approved
Approved 25 January 2010 as Victoza and 23 December 2014 as Saxenda. Supplied as a 6 mg/mL solution in a prefilled pen — not a powder.
Key facts
- Molecular weight
- 3,751.2 Da97% homologous to native human GLP-1, with a C16 palmitic acid chain on Lys26.
- Half-life
- About 13 hours, which is why it is dosed daily rather than weekly
- Also sold as
- Victoza, Saxenda
Approved titration schedule — Saxenda (weight management)
Escalates weekly, not every 4 weeks. The label sets a stopping rule: review at 16 weeks and discontinue if the patient has not lost at least 4% of baseline body weight.
Source: SAXENDA (liraglutide) injection — FDA prescribing information
How good is the evidence?
Long-established, with over a decade of approved use and published cardiovascular outcome data.
Missing a dose resets the schedule
Liraglutide is the one drug here where a gap does not simply resume. The Saxenda label instructs that if more than 3 days have elapsed since the last dose, you reinitiate at 0.6 mg daily and follow the escalation schedule again, to reduce the gastrointestinal reactions that come with restarting at a dose you are no longer tolerant to.
That follows from the pharmacokinetics rather than from caution. A half-life of about 13 hours means the drug is effectively cleared between daily doses — over three days there is nothing left to build on, whereas a weekly drug with a five-day or week-long half-life still has a substantial fraction present when the next dose is late. It is the clearest illustration on this site of why the dosing interval and the half-life are the same conversation.
Storage after the first injection
Before first use, the pen is refrigerated at 2°C to 8°C (36°F to 46°F). After initial use, it may be kept for 30 days at controlled room temperature, 15°C to 30°C (59°F to 86°F), or in the refrigerator.
Thirty days is a third answer to the same question, alongside Ozempic's 56 days after first use and Wegovy's 28 days before cap removal. Three in-use windows for three pens holding two molecules, none of them interchangeable, and none of them derived from anything other than that specific product's stability data.
The stopping rule no weekly GLP-1 label publishes
Saxenda's label sets a deadline that the weekly GLP-1 labels do not carry: assess response after 16 weeks on the maintenance dose, and discontinue if the patient has not lost at least 4% of baseline body weight, because such patients are unlikely to achieve and sustain clinically meaningful weight loss with continued treatment.
It is worth knowing precisely because it is so rare. Escalation here is complete by week 5 rather than week 17, so by 16 weeks there is no titration left to blame a non-response on — which is what makes a stopping rule definable at all. On the weekly drugs, where escalation runs for months, no comparable criterion has been published, and the absence is a gap in the evidence rather than a judgement that everyone should continue.
Common questions
Sources
Every number on this page comes from one of the documents below. Where no reliable source exists, the page says so instead of filling the gap.
- FDA labelFDA / DailyMedVICTOZA (liraglutide) injection — FDA prescribing information
- FDA labelFDA / DailyMedSAXENDA (liraglutide) injection — FDA prescribing information
- FDA labelFDA / DailyMed· 2026-05OZEMPIC (semaglutide) injection — FDA prescribing information
- FDA labelFDA· 2026-03WEGOVY (semaglutide) injection and tablets — FDA prescribing information