What Contact Lenses Actually Cost

We do not sell contact lenses. That is the whole reason this page exists. Every other contact lens price comparison you will find is published by somebody who wants to sell you the lens at the end of it. Below is what five retailers were charging on the day we checked, taken from their own product pages, with the cheapest marked whether or not it pays us anything.

The table above is missing something worth up to $250

We should say this before you act on the prices, because it can reverse the answer entirely.

Three of the four manufacturers only pay their rebate if you buy the lenses from the eye doctor who prescribed them. CooperVision’s 2026 terms exclude 1-800 Contacts, Costco and internet retailers by name. Bausch + Lomb requires receipts from the prescribing practitioner. Alcon says to buy from the doctor who prescribed them. Only Acuvue allows online purchase, and only through its own store.

Those rebates run to $250 on an annual supply. Every price in the table above is from an online retailer, so for most brands, none of them qualify.

Which means the honest comparison is not the one this page makes on its own. It is your optometrist’s price minus the rebate against the online price with no rebate — and on an annual supply that can land in your optometrist’s favour even when their sticker price is higher.

The catch is that hardly anyone claims it. Johnson & Johnson’s own witness told the Senate Judiciary Committee that 6 to 8 percent of Acuvue wearers redeem their rebate. We wrote up every manufacturer’s 2026 rebate, and how to actually get paid →

What these numbers actually tell you

The lowest number in the table is not always the lowest price

Lens.com is listed cheapest on eleven of the twelve lenses above, and we have left it there because that is what its product page says. It is also the one retailer here we would tell a friend to be careful with. Truth in Advertising documented more than $100 in “taxes and fees” appearing at checkout on top of the advertised price, disclosed behind a small grey icon. Its very lowest advertised prices additionally require buying four or eight boxes at once and mailing in for a rebate paid as a prepaid card, which customers report in volume being denied or never arriving. The Better Business Bureau rates Lens.com F and records that it has not responded to a single one of the 27 complaints filed against it. A class action filed in Illinois in February 2024 alleges the fee inflates advertised prices by 30 to 50 percent.

We are not telling you to avoid them. We are telling you to read the checkout total before you agree to it, at Lens.com and everywhere else. The notes under the table say what each retailer leaves off its product page.

The same box swings by 50 to 95 percent

This is the finding that matters most, and almost nobody acts on it. A 90-pack of Acuvue Oasys 1-Day ranged from $77.24 to $112.19 on the same day — 45 percent more for a box that came off the same production line. Bausch + Lomb Ultra ranged from $39.14 to $67.99, a 74 percent spread. The worst was Acuvue Oasys 2-Week: $100.74 at the cheapest, $196.34 at the dearest. Nearly double, for an identical product.

There is no quality difference and no fitting difference. It is the same lens in the same box from the same manufacturer. If you have been reordering from the same place out of habit for years, that habit has a price, and now you can see it.

Dailies cost three to four times what monthlies cost

Per box, a 90-pack of dailies looks comparable to a 6-pack of monthlies. Per year they are not close. Two eyes get through roughly eight boxes of 90 dailies a year, but only four boxes of six monthlies. At the cheapest prices we found:

• Monthly lenses: about $157 to $247 a year
• Daily disposables: about $456 to $813 a year

That is a difference of several hundred dollars annually, and it is the single biggest lever on what you spend. Dailies are genuinely better for some eyes — if you have allergies, dry eye, or you wear lenses only a few days a week, the case for them is strong. But nobody should switch to dailies without knowing they are signing up for roughly triple the annual cost.

The rebate figures are not the price

Several retailers advertise a much lower number than the one in our table. Lens.com, for example, shows Dailies Total 1 at around $41 a box rather than the $77.24 we recorded. That lower figure requires you to buy eight boxes at once and then successfully mail in a rebate form worth $290.

Manufacturer rebates are real money and worth claiming. But a price you only get after a large upfront purchase and a paperwork round-trip is not the same as a price you pay at checkout, so we record what you actually hand over on the day. Redemption rates on mail-in rebates are notoriously incomplete, and the retailer knows that when it advertises the number.

Three retailers we could not price, and why that is worth knowing

1-800 Contacts does not show a price on its product pages at all. You choose a pack size, click through, and enter your prescription before any number appears. That is a deliberate design decision, and it is worth knowing before you start the flow.

Walmart does not sell contact lenses at one price per box. Each individual lens power is its own listing with its own price, so a −2.00 box and a −7.00 box of the same lens can cost different amounts. There is no single Walmart price to compare. Most of the listings we checked were also out of stock.

Costco Optical is genuinely competitive — the one lens we could price, Precision1, came in cheapest of any retailer at $67.87 a box. But it requires a paid membership, and its site blocks automated price checks, so we could not verify the rest. If you are already a member, check them directly before ordering anywhere else.

How to pay less, in order of how much it saves

1. Reconsider dailies. Several hundred dollars a year. Ask your optometrist whether a monthly silicone hydrogel would suit your eyes just as well.
2. Shop the box, not the shop. Fifty to ninety percent on the identical product. Takes ten minutes.
3. Claim the manufacturer rebate. Typically $75 to $290 on an annual supply, but you have to buy the full quantity and actually mail the form.
4. Use FSA or HSA money. Contact lenses are an eligible expense, which effectively discounts them by your marginal tax rate.
5. Check your vision plan. Most plans carry a contact lens allowance that a lot of people never use before it resets.

Which retailer should you actually use?

Price is one input. We ranked all eight major sellers on the things you cannot see from a price table — what they charge at checkout versus what they advertise, how long you have to return an unopened box, whether they take your insurance, whether they answer complaints, and whether a regulator has ever had to step in.

Every major contact lens retailer, ranked →

How we do this

We check each retailer’s own product page and record the price shown to a shopper, per box, for the pack size listed. We do not take prices from coupon sites, affiliate roundups or press releases. Where a retailer would not show a price without a prescription or a power selection, we record nothing rather than guess — a blank is more honest than an estimate.

Prices move. This table is reviewed quarterly and carries the date it was last checked. If you find a price here that no longer matches the retailer, tell us and we will correct it.

Reviewed by Dr. Teresita Bollar, OD. Contact Lens HQ does not sell contact lenses. Some links on this page earn us a commission; none of them affect what is listed, how it is ordered, or what we say about it.