What's a maintenance dose of a GLP-1 after reaching goal weight?

“Maintenance dose” means two different things depending on who’s answering: The label’s answer — keep the working dose. Wegovy recognizes 2.4 mg (or 1.7 for the intolerant) as maintenance; Zepbound blesses 5, 10, or 15 mg. The trials support it: STEP 4 and SURMOUNT-4 continuers held or extended their losses for as long as studied. If cost and side effects are non-issues, not fixing the unbroken is defensible and simple. The practice answer — find your floor. Holding weight takes less appetite suppression than losing it (you’re no longer fighting a deficit, just defending a position), so the common real-world pattern after 2–3 stable months at goal is a stepwise descent — exactly the taper method, with “find the floor” rather than “reach zero” as the goal. The landing zones people actually report: - One-to-two rungs down the ladder (Zepbound 15 → 7.5; Wegovy 2.4 → 1.0–1.7) — most common. - Stretched intervals: the same pen every 10–14 days — pharmacologically reasonable given ≈5-day half-lives, and it cuts cost by a third to a half on per-dose pricing. - Fractional/compounded microdoses below the pen ladder — the maintenance microdosing lane, where compounding’s flexible increments earn their keep (a few programs, NexLife notably, run formal maintenance protocols built on exactly this). The monitoring that makes any choice safe: a weekly weigh-in, an honest appetite check (food noise returning = under-dosed), and a pre-agreed step-back-up trigger. Maintenance failure rarely announces itself; it accumulates at +0.5 lb/week while nobody’s watching. The economics are not a footnote: maintenance at half-dose or stretched intervals can halve a multi-year bill — for many people that difference is the difference between sustainable indefinite therapy and quitting outright, which makes finding the floor a clinical-financial win twice over.