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TL;DRApothekenverkaufspreis (AVP), also called the Apothekenabgabepreis, is the price at which a pharmacy dispenses a medicine to the patient, the top of the German pharmaceutical price cascade. For prescription-only (verschreibungspflichtige) medicines it is fixed nationwide (Preisbindung) by the Arzneimittelpreisverordnung (AMPreisV) under §78 AMG.
Because the AVP is set by regulation rather than by the individual pharmacy, the same prescription medicine costs the same in every German pharmacy. The legal foundation is §78 AMG, which empowers the Bundesministerium für Gesundheit to fix price margins (Preisspannen) for wholesale and pharmacy resale by ordinance, and requires a uniform pharmacy dispensing price (einheitlicher Apothekenabgabepreis) for medicines that may only be sold through pharmacies. The margins themselves are set in the AMPreisV. This entry uses the standard German price abbreviations professionals see on a package or in a database: APU, EK, VK, FB and RAB.
The AVP is the last step of a three-stage cascade. Each stage adds a regulated margin to the price handed on by the stage before it. The figures below are verified verbatim against the current AMPreisV at gesetze-im-internet.de; because they change with each reform, always confirm the live value at the statute before quoting it.
| Stage | Price level | What is added | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Manufacturer | Abgabepreis des pharmazeutischen Unternehmers (ApU / APU), the ex-manufacturer list price | Set uniformly by the marketing authorisation holder; the starting point of the cascade | §78 Abs. 3 AMG (uniform manufacturer price) |
| 2. Wholesale | Apothekeneinkaufspreis (AEP), the pharmacy purchase price, printed as EK | On the APU (ex-VAT): a fixed 73 cent plus VAT, and additionally up to 3.15 percent, capped at 37.80 euro (ex-VAT) | §2 AMPreisV |
| 3. Pharmacy | Apothekenverkaufspreis (AVP), the pharmacy retail price, printed as VK | On the AEP: 3 percent plus 9 euro, plus 21 cent (Notdienstfonds), plus 20 cent (pharmaceutical services), plus VAT | §3 AMPreisV |
So the cascade runs APU to AEP (EK) to AVP (VK). The wholesale margin is a small percentage with a hard cap, which is why wholesale earns little on high-priced medicines. The pharmacy margin is dominated by a fixed dispensing fee (Festzuschlag), currently 9 euro per prescription package, so the pharmacy earns roughly the same fee whether the pack costs 15 euro or 1,500 euro. Value-added tax on medicines in Germany is charged at the standard rate, currently 19 percent, and is the final component of the AVP.
For a prescription-only finished medicine the calculation follows a fixed order under the AMPreisV.
Two adjustments sit alongside this arithmetic and do not change the printed AVP but change who ultimately pays. On dispensing to a statutory fund, the pharmacy grants the fund a fixed Apothekenabschlag under §130 SGB V (1.77 euro per AMPreisV medicine), and the manufacturer grants the statutory Herstellerabschlag under §130a SGB V. Both reduce what the fund pays, not the shelf AVP.
These five abbreviations are the working vocabulary of German medicine pricing and appear together in every price database.
The patient's out-of-pocket share, the Zuzahlung, is calculated on the AVP, not on the AEP or the APU.
No. The nationwide price binding applies to prescription-only medicines. Under §78 Abs. 2 AMG the uniform dispensing price does not apply to non-prescription (OTC) medicines that are not dispensed at the expense of the statutory health insurance, so pharmacies set OTC prices freely and they vary from pharmacy to pharmacy. OTC medicines dispensed at a fund's expense, for example on a prescription for a child, remain within the AMPreisV.
The Rx price binding has been legally contested for EU mail-order pharmacies. In its judgment of 19 October 2016 (C-148/15, Deutsche Parkinson Vereinigung) the Court of Justice of the European Union held that applying the fixed German prices to EU-based mail-order pharmacies dispensing to German patients restricted the free movement of goods under Article 34 TFEU. Germany responded by re-anchoring the price binding for statutorily reimbursed prescription medicines in social law (SGB V) through the Vor-Ort-Apotheken-Stärkungsgesetz of 2020, rather than in the AMPreisV. The precise scope for cross-border dispensing remains a moving legal and political question.
The full cascade reaches the platform through the licensed ABDA article master data and surfaces in the price-information section of the article detail page, typically shown in the header as APU | EK | VK | FB | RAB for the article's PZN.
One honest limitation: pharmazie.com carries the AVP and the other cascade levels as licensed article master data, it does not recompute the AMPreisV margins itself, and it deliberately does not carry the competing standard price service. For the authoritative statutory margins, verify against the AMPreisV; for a binding reimbursement figure on a specific pack, verify against the fund's own settlement.
