Tirzepatide Dosage Chart: Titration, Maintenance, Units

If you’ve just been prescribed Zepbound or Mounjaro, the numbers can feel like a foreign language: 2.5 mg, 5 mg, 15 mg, “units,” four-week steps. This tirzepatide dosage chart lays out the whole climb in plain terms, so you know what dose comes next, why your doctor might park you at a lower one, and how to translate milligrams into the units marked on a compounded syringe.

This is educational information, not medical advice. Tirzepatide (sold as Zepbound and Mounjaro) is a prescription-only medicine that must be prescribed and supervised by a licensed clinician. Compounded or “research use only” versions are not FDA-approved and carry extra risks around purity and dosing. Talk to your doctor or pharmacist before you start, change, or stop any dose — don’t adjust your own schedule based on an article. Never try to source or self-administer a prescription drug outside of legitimate medical care.

Quick answer: Tirzepatide starts at 2.5 mg once weekly for four weeks, then steps up to 5 mg, 7.5 mg, 10 mg, 12.5 mg, and finally 15 mg, increasing no faster than every four weeks. The 2.5 mg dose is a starter, not a treatment dose. Maintenance is usually 5, 10, or 15 mg — whichever lowest dose gives you good results with tolerable side effects.

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The full tirzepatide dosage chart

Tirzepatide is a once-weekly injection, taken on the same day each week, any time of day, with or without food. The titration schedule is identical for Mounjaro (type 2 diabetes) and Zepbound (weight management). Here’s the standard tirzepatide dosing for weight loss and diabetes, side by side with the units you’d draw from a 10 mg/mL compounded vial.

A few things to read off this chart:

• 2.5 mg is a primer. It exists to let your gut adjust, not to drive weight loss. Most people barely move the scale here, and that’s expected.
• Four weeks is a floor, not a ceiling. “No faster than every four weeks” means you can stay longer at any step. Plenty of people sit at 5 mg or 10 mg for months.
• You don’t have to reach 15 mg. The highest dose isn’t the goal — the right dose is the lowest one that works for you.

If you want to see how a given dose maps onto your specific injection schedule, the calculator below does the mg-to-units arithmetic for you.

Here’s a quick way to sanity-check your dose and the units before you draw it up.

Suggested read: Liraglutide vs Semaglutide: Daily vs Weekly GLP-1

Why titrate slowly instead of jumping to a high dose?

Tirzepatide is a dual GIP and GLP-1 receptor agonist, and both pathways slow how fast your stomach empties. Ramp up too quickly and you get the classic side effects: nausea, reflux, constipation, the occasional bout of diarrhea. Stepping up gradually gives your digestive system time to recalibrate at each level.

In the SURMOUNT-1 obesity trial, the slow titration still produced large results — participants lost about 15% of body weight on 5 mg, 19.5% on 10 mg, and 20.9% on 15 mg over 72 weeks.¹ The lesson isn’t “more is always better.” It’s that even the middle doses are powerfully effective, so there’s rarely a reason to rush. If you want the bigger-picture view of how these drugs work, the GLP-1 for weight loss overview is a good companion read, and our tirzepatide side effects breakdown covers what to watch for at each step.

Maintenance doses: 5, 10, or 15 mg

Once you’ve climbed to a dose that’s working, that becomes your maintenance dose — the one you settle into long-term. Zepbound and Mounjaro both offer three official maintenance options: 5 mg, 10 mg, and 15 mg.

Choosing between them comes down to a simple trade-off:

• 5 mg — lighter side-effect load, strong results for many people. A reasonable home if you’re losing steadily and feel good.
• 10 mg — the middle ground. Often where people land when 5 mg stalls but 15 mg feels like too much.
• 15 mg — the maximum, for those who tolerate it and need the extra push toward their goal.

Your clinician decides maintenance based on three things: how much weight you’ve lost (or how your blood sugar has responded), how the side effects feel, and your goal. There’s no medal for being on the highest number.

Suggested read: Peptide Dose Calculator: Reconstitution Math

Why you might stay on a lower dose

Plenty of people never reach 15 mg, and that’s completely normal. Common reasons to hold steady:

• It’s already working. If you’re losing weight at a healthy clip on 5 or 10 mg, there’s no reason to push higher and invite more side effects.
• Side effects say “slow down.” Persistent nausea, vomiting, or gut upset is a signal to pause at the current dose — or even step back down — rather than climb. A good review of GLP-1-class tolerability notes that GI side effects are the most common reason people struggle, and they tend to ease when you hold a dose steady.²
• Supply gaps. During shortages, some people couldn’t get higher-dose pens and stayed put. That’s not ideal, but it’s rarely harmful.
• Cost and dose strategy. Some clinicians intentionally hold the lowest effective dose. There’s also growing interest in microdosing GLP-1 approaches, though evidence there is still thin and you should only do it under medical guidance.

If your weight loss flattens out after months at a steady dose, that’s a true plateau, not necessarily a reason to immediately bump the dose. The first levers worth pulling are food, sleep, and training, not a higher milligram number.

Reading tirzepatide dosing in units

Brand-name Zepbound and Mounjaro come in pre-set single-dose pens, so you never count units — you just inject the whole thing. Units only matter with compounded tirzepatide, which is reconstituted into a multi-dose vial and drawn up with an insulin syringe.

The math hinges on concentration. The most common compounded concentration is 10 mg/mL, and insulin syringes are marked in units where 100 units = 1 mL. So:

• 10 mg per mL means 1 mg = 10 units.
• Multiply your mg dose by 10 to get units at 10 mg/mL.

Two warnings here. First, the conversion is only right if you know your exact concentration — a 20 mg/mL vial halves every unit count above. If you’re not certain, ask the pharmacy that made it; never guess. Second, this is the same unit-math used for semaglutide, but the doses are completely different, so don’t reuse a semaglutide dosage figure here. For the practical side of mixing and measuring, see how to reconstitute peptides and where to inject GLP-1.

Suggested read: Natural GLP-1: Foods and Habits That Raise It

What to do if you miss a dose

Life happens. The rule of thumb for a missed weekly tirzepatide dose:

• If it’s been four days (96 hours) or less since your scheduled day, take it as soon as you remember.
• If more than four days have passed, skip the missed dose entirely and take your next one on your regular day.
• Never double up. Two doses close together stacks the side effects and gives you no extra benefit.

If you miss several weeks in a row, don’t just resume at your old dose. Your gut loses some of its tolerance, and jumping back to 15 mg can bring back the nausea you’d left behind. Many clinicians have you restart a step or two lower and re-titrate. Always check with your prescriber before restarting after a long gap.

How tirzepatide dosing compares to semaglutide

People often cross-shop the two, so it helps to see the numbers next to each other. The doses are not interchangeable — these are different molecules with different milligram scales.

In a head-to-head diabetes trial (SURPASS-2), tirzepatide outperformed semaglutide on both blood sugar and weight.³ For obesity specifically, semaglutide’s STEP 1 trial showed about 14.9% weight loss at 68 weeks,⁴ versus tirzepatide’s roughly 21% at the top dose. If you’re weighing the two, our semaglutide vs tirzepatide comparison goes deeper on the trade-offs.

Suggested read: Compounded Semaglutide and Tirzepatide: Safe?

Protecting muscle while you lose weight

One thing the dosage chart can’t tell you: a meaningful share of the weight you lose on any GLP-1-class drug is lean mass, not just fat. Reviews put lean-tissue loss at a notable fraction of total weight lost, which matters for strength and long-term metabolism.⁵ The mitigation is unglamorous but real — eat enough protein and lift weights. Aim for adequate daily protein intake and add resistance training while you’re on any maintenance dose. That habit pays off far more than chasing a higher milligram number.

Bottom line

Use this tirzepatide dosage chart as a map, not a rulebook: 2.5 mg to start, four-week steps up through 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, and 15 mg, with maintenance usually landing at 5, 10, or 15. Climb only as high as you need to, hold a dose if side effects flare, and double-check your concentration before converting mg to units on a compounded vial. The “right” tirzepatide dose for weight loss is whatever keeps you losing steadily without making you miserable — and that’s a conversation to have with your prescriber, not a spreadsheet.