Enter your vial size, the bacteriostatic water you added and the dose in milligrams. You get the exact mark to draw to on an insulin syringe.
Quick answer: the number of units depends on how much bac water is in the vial, not on the milligrams alone. A 10 mg retatrutide vial mixed with 1 ml of bacteriostatic water is 10 mg/ml, so 1 mg is 10 units and 2 mg is 20 units on a U-100 syringe. Mix the same vial with 2 ml and every number doubles: 2 mg becomes 40 units.
100 units per ml. Check the barrel — this is what almost every insulin syringe is.
U-100 insulin syringe · 50 unit barrel
Keep a log of every dose and vial on your phone — Dose Tool for Android
The most common question about retatrutide dosing is some version of “how many units is 4 mg?” — and it has no answer on its own. Units measure volume, not mass. A unit on a U-100 syringe is one hundredth of a millilitre, always. How many milligrams sit in that volume depends entirely on how much water went into the vial.
So when someone says they draw to 40 units, that number is meaningless without their vial size and their water volume. Two people can hold identical 10 mg vials, inject the same 4 mg, and correctly draw to 40 units and 80 units respectively. Neither is wrong. They reconstituted differently.
This is why the table below lists the setup alongside every figure, and why the calculator asks for your water volume rather than assuming one.
All figures are units on a U-100 insulin syringe, where 100 units is 1 ml. This is arithmetic for reference — the dose column is a range of arbitrary values to illustrate the maths, not a suggestion of what to use.
| Vial + water | Conc. | 1 mg | 2 mg | 4 mg | 6 mg | 8 mg | 12 mg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 mg + 1 ml | 10 mg/ml | 10u | 20u | 40u | 60u | 80u | — |
| 10 mg + 2 ml | 5 mg/ml | 20u | 40u | 80u | — | — | — |
| 15 mg + 1.5 ml | 10 mg/ml | 10u | 20u | 40u | 60u | 80u | — |
| 20 mg + 2 ml | 10 mg/ml | 10u | 20u | 40u | 60u | 80u | — |
| 30 mg + 1.5 ml | 20 mg/ml | 5u | 10u | 20u | 30u | 40u | 60u |
Dashes mark combinations that exceed a 100 unit barrel. At that concentration the dose does not fit in one draw. Mix with less water (a stronger mix) so it takes fewer units, or split it into two draws.
The 10 mg + 2 ml row is worth reading closely. It produces the largest, easiest-to-read numbers of any setup here, but it also runs out of barrel soonest. That trade — reading precision against how much fits in one draw — is the whole of what you are choosing when you pick a water volume.
There is no required volume. The water only sets the concentration, and any volume holds the same total milligrams. What most people actually want is a volume that makes the arithmetic easy, so the table shows the water that lands each vial on a round concentration, and what 1 mg and 2 mg then read as on a U-100 syringe.
| Vial | Bac water | Conc. | 1 mg | 2 mg |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 mg | 1 ml | 5 mg/ml | 20u | 40u |
| 10 mg | 1 ml | 10 mg/ml | 10u | 20u |
| 10 mg | 2 ml | 5 mg/ml | 20u | 40u |
| 20 mg | 2 ml | 10 mg/ml | 10u | 20u |
| 30 mg | 3 ml | 10 mg/ml | 10u | 20u |
| 30 mg | 1.5 ml | 20 mg/ml | 5u | 10u |
5 mg vial: 0.5 ml gives 10 mg/ml, but a half-millilitre is fiddly to measure; 1 ml gives 5 mg/ml, where 1 mg is 20 units. 10 mg vial: 1 ml gives 10 mg/ml, the most common choice, because the units are simply the milligrams times ten. 20 mg vial: 2 ml gives the same 10 mg/ml. 30 mg vial: 3 ml gives 10 mg/ml if the vial can hold it; 1.5 ml gives 20 mg/ml and halves every mark.
The 10 mg/ml rows all read identically, which is the point: once you settle on one concentration, a given dose sits on the same mark whatever size vial you started with. Write that concentration on the vial so the next draw does not depend on memory.
Searches for retatrutide dosing schedules and escalation charts return a lot of confident numbers. Almost all of them trace back to published clinical trial arms, where participants were titrated gradually under medical supervision across several dose levels, with monitoring and withdrawal criteria that no one reproduces at home.
A trial dose level is a description of what was studied. It is not a protocol, it was not chosen for you, and it carries none of the supervision that made it defensible in the study. This page deliberately does not reproduce those numbers as a chart, because presenting them as a schedule is the step that turns published research into apparent instructions.
What the calculator does is narrower and more honest: if you have already decided on a figure with someone qualified to advise you, it tells you which mark on the syringe corresponds to it.
Write the concentration and the date on the vial as soon as you reconstitute it. Retatrutide vials are frequently reconstituted at different volumes by the same person over time, and a vial with no label tells you nothing about what a unit is worth weeks later. This one habit prevents the largest category of dosing error in practice.
Reconstituted solution is kept refrigerated and is less stable than the dry powder, which is why bacteriostatic rather than sterile water is normally used. Stability varies by preparation, so follow the documentation that came with your vial instead of a general rule. The water itself keeps to a different schedule — how long bac water lasts — and the printable cheat sheet carries the concentration and units tables if you would rather not recalculate each time.
Working in micrograms, or using a different compound? Use the general peptide reconstitution calculator, or the tirzepatide calculator.