How long has each drug been in shortage in the US?

What the data shows

• The list is 73 drugs, not 1,181 — a 16.2-fold difference between rows and medicines. The FDA’s own public shortage database lists the same 73, name for name.
• The median drug has been listed for 4.5 years. 30 of 73 have been listed five years or more and six for a decade or more.
• 51 of the 73 are injectables, and among the 30 longest-running shortages the figure is 26. Analgesia, anaesthesia and cardiovascular drugs are the largest categories, at nine each.
• Only three of the 73 were first listed in 2026. This is a stable inventory rather than a fast-moving one.
• 755 of the 1,181 records (64%) describe that specific package as currently available. Nine drugs show every listed presentation available; nine show none.

The data

Download CSV 73 rows · 7 columns · free to reuse with credit

How this was built

Every record with status "Current" was pulled from the openFDA drug/shortages endpoint on 31 July 2026, paginating at limit=1000 until the reported total of 1,181 was reached.

Records were grouped by the generic_name field. The "filings" column is the number of records in that group; "suppliers" is the number of distinct company_name values; "available" is the number of records in the group whose availability field reads exactly "Available".

The "listed since" column is the earliest initial_posting_date among that drug’s currently-listed records, and "years" is the interval from that date to 31 July 2026.

The 73 drug names were compared one by one against the "Currently in Shortage" table published by the FDA’s own drug shortage database at accessdata.fda.gov. The two sets matched exactly, with no entry in either that was absent from the other.

What this does not show

• The duration figures are a floor, not a measured shortage length. No record anywhere in the FDA’s shortage data is dated earlier than 1 January 2012, and 25 current records carry that exact date while another 55 carry 22 February 2012 — the signature of the date the database was populated rather than of eighty shortages that began on those two days. The oldest entries have been listed for at least fourteen years and possibly longer.
• The start date is the earliest posting among a drug’s records that are currently listed. It does not establish that the drug has been continuously in shortage since then, and a product that was resolved and later relisted may carry an older date than its present shortage warrants.
• "In shortage" does not mean unavailable. The availability field is set per package, and most currently-listed packages are marked available; the column is included here so that can be seen rather than assumed.
• Two records carry misspelled availability values ("Avaliable" and "Unvailable") in the FDA’s own data. They are counted as written, not normalised, so the available column is one lower than a spelling-tolerant count would give.
• The therapeutic category is the first value listed for the drug; a small number of records carry more than one, and seven drugs carry none, shown here as "Not stated".

Use it

This table is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Republish it, chart it, or build on it — commercially or not — as long as you credit The Fold and link back to this page.

The Fold (2026). "FDA drug shortages by drug and duration, July 2026." https://fold-news.com/data/fda-drug-shortages-duration-2026 (updated July 31, 2026).