Preferential Currency for Medicine Cut by $500 Million to $3 Billion

Mehdi Pirsalehi, head of Iran's Food and Drug Administration, said on Thursday, September 24, 2026, at a panel on the resilience of the medicine supply chain, that $500 million of preferential foreign currency for medicine has been removed from the budget, bringing the preferential allocation down to $3 billion. He said a further $900 million of medicine's preferential currency has been switched to the non-preferential rate. The remarks were reported by Mehr News Agency and republished by Donya-e-Eqtesad.

Pirsalehi added that pharmaceutical companies sourced non-preferential currency at about 70,000 tomans last year, and that the rate has now risen to 170,000 tomans. He put the size of the medicine market in the current Iranian year (1405) at about 750 to 800 trillion tomans, and said the Health Insurance Organization is more than 10 months in arrears to the supply chain and the Social Security Organization about 7 months. The biggest risk facing the sector today, he said, is the rial and financing risk.