Affordability and pricing

Home / Sustainability / Access to healthcare / Affordability and pricing


What is affordability and pricing at AstraZeneca?

We drive accessibility of medicines for diverse, equitable and inclusive patient groups, through company policy and programming, including core pricing principles and access programmes.

We are committed to addressing barriers to access and affordability. Our industry, policymakers and payers need to work together to identify solutions. Through collaborations, partnerships and stakeholder coalitions we are working to ensure essential and innovative medicines become more widely available.





Our approach


AstraZeneca has adopted four key pricing principles that are designed among other things to support our affordability efforts globally:

  • Sustainability: of both the healthcare system and our research-led business model
  • Value: reflects the clinical benefit of our medicines to patients and the broader impact on society, along with the positive economic impact to the healthcare system by reducing the need for additional medical intervention
  • Access: collaboration with payers and providers on solutions to enable sustainable access to our medicines
  • Flexibility: in pricing to reflect variation in health system needs and ability to pay

Tiered pricing

We believe tiered pricing is a key enabler for broader and accelerated patient access in LMICs. We do this by linking the cost of medicines with government and patient ability to pay based on macroeconomic indicators of local affordability (such as Gross National Income per capita, national healthcare budgets and other relevant health economics considerations).

Value based agreements

Value-based agreements, across multiple therapy areas, enable patient access while reducing uncertainty for payers (clinical or economic) by linking access, reimbursement or price to real-world clinical benefit or other agreed terms.

We work closely with governments, private and public payers, and in some cases individual patients, to create patient access opportunities using local real-world data tailored to address unmet needs.




Discover more about affordability and pricing

We are working to identify barriers to access and are innovating to deliver our life-changing medicines in a sustainable and equitable way, through global, regional and local partnerships.