LASIK vs Contacts Cost: The Real 10-Year Math (2026)

The short version. If you wear daily disposables, LASIK pays for itself somewhere between year six and year ten. If you wear monthly lenses, it takes eighteen to twenty-nine years, which for most people means never. That is the entire financial case, and almost nobody presents it that way because almost everybody writing about it is selling one of the two.

We do not sell contact lenses and we do not perform laser surgery. Dr. Bollar fits lenses and refers patients for surgery when it suits them. That is the position this is written from.

The arithmetic

We can do this properly because we already publish verified contact lens prices. Those are real numbers pulled from retailer product pages, not estimates. At the cheapest listed prices, a year of lenses for both eyes costs:

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

For LASIK we will use roughly $4,500 for both eyes. We want to be straight about that figure: it comes from industry-reported averages of about $2,250 an eye, and we could not find an audited survey from the American Academy of Ophthalmology or ASCRS to confirm it. Treat it as the right order of magnitude rather than a precise number, and get a real quote before deciding anything.

Cumulative spend	Monthlies	Dailies	LASIK
After 5 years	$785 to $1,235	$2,280 to $4,065	$4,500
After 10 years	$1,570 to $2,470	$4,560 to $8,130	$4,500
After 20 years	$3,140 to $4,940	$9,120 to $16,260	$4,500

Read the dailies column against the LASIK column. A daily disposable wearer at the expensive end passes $4,500 in about five and a half years. At the cheap end it takes about ten. Over twenty years that same wearer spends two to three and a half times what the surgery costs.

Now read the monthlies column. A monthly lens wearer takes eighteen to twenty-nine years to reach the same point. If you are forty when you ask this question, you may well never get there.

This is why blanket advice about LASIK is useless. The answer depends almost entirely on which lens you are already wearing.

What we deliberately left out

These figures are lens cost only. Real contact lens ownership also includes an annual exam and fitting, and solution and cases for reusable lenses. We have left them out because we could not find an authoritative national figure for either, and we would rather show you a clean number you can trust than pad it with estimates.

The direction of that omission is worth understanding: adding exams and solution makes contacts more expensive, which moves the crossover point earlier. So the years above are the most conservative case for surgery. LASIK wearers still need periodic eye exams, so exam costs do not disappear entirely, but the solution line does.

Three things the price comparison does not capture

1. LASIK does not stop you needing reading glasses

This is the most oversold point in the entire category, and if you take one thing from this article, take this one.

LASIK reshapes the cornea. Presbyopia, the reason people start holding menus at arm’s length in their forties, is caused by the crystalline lens inside the eye stiffening with age. Surgery on the cornea does nothing to that lens. In the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s own words, a nearsighted person who has LASIK fully corrected for distance “become[s] more like a normal person who is subject to needing reading glasses.”

There is a particular irony here that patients are rarely told. Many nearsighted people can read comfortably without glasses their whole lives by simply taking their correction off. Correct that nearsightedness surgically and you give that up. You will likely be buying reading glasses in your forties either way.

2. Roughly four in ten people report new visual symptoms afterwards

The FDA ran its own patient-reported outcomes studies, PROWL-1 and PROWL-2, precisely because manufacturer trial data was not capturing what patients actually experienced. Among patients who had no such symptoms before surgery, at three months afterwards:

43 to 46 percent reported new visual symptoms such as halos, starbursts or glare
About 28 percent reported new dry eye symptoms

Set against that, only 1 to 4 percent were dissatisfied with their vision and 1 to 2 percent were dissatisfied with the surgery overall. Both facts are true at once, and most coverage of LASIK reports only one of them. New symptoms are common. Regret is rare. Most people who develop halos decide the trade was worth it. You should know it is a trade.

Worth knowing too: the FDA proposed a standardised patient-labelling checklist for LASIK in July 2022, having found that some patients were not receiving or understanding the risk information. As of today that guidance is still a draft and has never been finalised. Do not assume the consent form you are handed covers everything.

3. On infection risk, the surgery may actually be the safer long-term choice

This surprises people, and it is the one place where the honest answer favours surgery.

Microbial keratitis is a serious corneal infection and the main sight-threatening risk in both contact lens wear and LASIK. A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Cataract and Refractive Surgery compared the two directly:

At one year, the risk is statistically similar.
At five years, daily soft lens wear showed about 11 more cases per 10,000 than LASIK.
Extended-wear lenses, the kind slept in, showed about 81 more cases per 10,000 than LASIK at five years.

The mechanism is simple. LASIK’s infection risk is concentrated in one surgical window and then essentially ends. Contact lens risk accrues every single night you handle a lens, for as long as you wear them.

Keep this in proportion. Both are rare events. Baseline annual incidence runs roughly 2 to 4 cases per 10,000 for daily-wear soft lenses removed nightly, against around 20 per 10,000 for lenses slept in. Contacts are not dangerous. But if you have been told surgery is the risky option and lenses are the safe one, that is not what the literature says over a twenty-year horizon.

The pricing you will encounter is not always honest

You will see LASIK advertised for a few hundred dollars an eye. Treat those advertisements as close to meaningless, and we can point at a regulator rather than an opinion for that.

In January 2023 the Federal Trade Commission settled an action against LasikPlus over advertisements offering LASIK “as low as $250” an eye. The FTC found that only 6.5 percent of people who came in for a consultation qualified for that price in both eyes. Everyone else was quoted $1,800 to $2,295 per eye — and only after a lengthy dilated eye examination, at which point they were sitting in the chair with blurred vision and a sunk afternoon. The FTC’s own blog called it “dilate-and-switch.” The settlement was $1.25 million, and in October 2024 the FTC distributed $1.1 million in refunds across 12,077 valid claims. A parallel order was entered against LCA Vision for the same conduct.

The practical defence is simple: get the full per-eye price in writing before you agree to a dilated examination, and do not make a decision the same day you are quoted.

Ways the real price comes down

FSA and HSA money is eligible. This is confirmed directly in IRS Publication 502, which lists laser eye surgery to correct defective vision as an includable medical expense. Paying with pre-tax dollars is effectively a discount at your marginal rate, and it is the largest single saving most people can access.
Vision plans discount it even though they do not cover it. EyeMed publishes 15 percent off standard LASIK pricing or 5 percent off already-promotional pricing, plus up to $1,000 off custom LASIK. VSP lists named partner offers including $1,000 off at LasikPlus, TLC and LVI. Check your plan before you get quoted, not after.
Be careful with clinic financing. Deferred-interest plans of the kind commonly offered here, CareCredit among them, apply the full interest rate retroactively to the entire original amount from the purchase date if you do not clear the balance in the promotional window. On a $4,500 procedure at around 33 percent APR, missing that deadline is expensive in a way most people do not anticipate.

Who should not be doing this arithmetic at all

Cost is irrelevant if you are not a candidate, and a meaningful number of people are not. The FDA’s own guidance rules out or cautions against surgery for people with corneas that are too thin, unstable prescriptions that changed within the past year, large pupils, pre-existing dry eye, keratoconus, autoimmune conditions such as lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, immunodeficiency, anyone under 18, and anyone who is pregnant or breastfeeding. Contact and combat sports participation is also a flag, as are certain occupations that bar refractive surgery outright.

If a clinic tells you that you are a candidate and your optometrist has previously mentioned thin corneas, dry eye or a changing prescription, get a second opinion from somebody who is not selling the procedure.

If you are ruled out for LASIK, that is not the end of it. PRK creates no flap and is often the answer for thinner corneas, at the cost of a slower and more uncomfortable recovery. ICL implants a lens rather than reshaping the cornea, is removable, and is generally the route for higher prescriptions or corneas too thin for any laser. The FDA expanded EVO ICL’s approved age range from 21–45 to 21–60 in February 2026, which makes it relevant to a considerably larger group than it used to be.

So what should you do

If you wear daily disposables and you are under about 35, the financial case for surgery is genuinely strong. You will likely spend more on lenses than the surgery costs, and you will do it while accumulating infection risk every year. Get a real quote and a candidacy assessment.

If you wear monthly lenses, the money argument mostly is not there. Choose surgery because you want to stop dealing with lenses, not because you have been told it pays for itself. On these numbers it probably will not.

If you are over about 45, understand clearly that you will be buying reading glasses either way, and that if you are nearsighted you may be giving up comfortable unaided near vision to get unaided distance vision. For some people that is a good trade. For others it is a bad surprise.

Whatever you decide, get the price in writing before the dilating drops go in.

This is general information, not medical advice, and nothing here substitutes for an examination. Contact Lens HQ does not sell contact lenses and does not perform or refer for commission on refractive surgery. Reviewed by Dr. Teresita Bollar, OD.