Missed a Wegovy dose? Here's exactly what to do

You've just remembered you missed Sunday's injection, it's now Thursday

This is the scenario a question our prescribers hear most weeks tends to revolve around: the injection day quietly slips by, and by the time Tuesday or Thursday arrives the question isn't whether to take it but whether it's still safe to do so.

The Wegovy Patient Information Leaflet, reflected in NHS guidance on semaglutide, draws a clean line at five days. Within that window (so, up to and including day four after the missed dose) inject as soon as you remember and then continue from a new weekly schedule based on that day. If Thursday is when you remember, Thursday becomes your new injection day going forward.

Beyond five days things are different. At that point the safest course is to leave the missed dose behind, return to your original schedule on your next planned injection day, and carry on as normal. It feels counterintuitive to let a dose go, but the alternative (stacking two doses close together) raises your exposure to semaglutide sharply and with it the likelihood of nausea, vomiting and other gastrointestinal effects without any meaningful clinical upside.

One thing worth noting: the day you restart after a gap is not a day to worry about which strength you're on. You return to the same dose you were taking before the miss. No stepping back down unless your prescriber specifically advises it.

What a missed dose does (and doesn't) do to your progress

Semaglutide works by steadily reducing appetite through its action on GLP-1 receptors, and it has a half-life of roughly a week, which is why once-weekly dosing works in the first place. A single missed injection means the circulating level of the medicine falls more than usual before your next dose, and some people notice their appetite returning more than they'd expect in that gap. That's normal physiology, not a sign anything has gone wrong.

What it doesn't do is reset your results. The weight-loss progress recorded in the STEP 1 trial (an average reduction of around 15% of body weight over 68 weeks) was built across consistent dosing, but the pharmacology of semaglutide is forgiving enough that one missed week is not a clinical event. The concern isn't the single gap; it's falling into a pattern of irregular dosing, because that does affect outcomes over time.

If you find yourself regularly missing doses, that's worth raising with your prescriber. It may point to a practical problem with injection days, a tolerability issue, or simply a need for a better routine. The broader picture of missing semaglutide doses matters more than any single lapse.

Longer gaps: what changes when you've missed more than one week

Missing one dose is straightforward. Missing two consecutive doses, or an entire fortnight, shifts the picture. If you miss two Wegovy doses in a row, the medicine's concentration has fallen substantially and restarting without guidance risks running into the tolerability issues that the dose-escalation schedule is specifically designed to avoid.

In practice, a prescriber may advise stepping back to a lower dose temporarily before returning to your maintenance dose, particularly if nausea was already a feature of your treatment. That decision belongs to the prescriber, not to a general rule in a leaflet. The same logic applies if you've missed a full week and are unsure whether your gap technically crosses any threshold: when in doubt, contact your clinical team rather than guessing.

For gaps stretching to two weeks or more, the guidance on missing two weeks of Wegovy covers restarter considerations in detail. The short version: longer gaps nearly always warrant a conversation before you resume, and some people effectively restart their escalation from scratch under prescriber supervision.

If you've been prescribed Wegovy through nume and have questions about restarting, our prescribers are available for aftercare seven days a week. You can also review the full range of weight-loss treatments available through our pharmacy if your circumstances have changed.

Partial doses and other practical questions

A few related questions come up regularly alongside the missed-dose question. One is what to do if you think you received a partial dose, if the pen misfired, leaked or you're not sure the full volume was delivered. The answer differs from a missed dose: a partial injection isn't the same as no injection, and the right response depends on how much you think was delivered. Again, the Patient Information Leaflet and your prescriber are the right sources here.

Another is whether the five-day rule applies differently at different strengths. It doesn't: the same timing logic applies whether you're at 0.25 mg, 1.7 mg or the 2.4 mg maintenance dose. The MHRA Yellow Card scheme is also available if you experience unexpected symptoms after restarting, reporting suspected side effects is open to patients as well as healthcare professionals, and it genuinely contributes to post-market safety monitoring.

If you're not yet on Wegovy but are weighing it up, a good starting point is understanding the weight-loss treatment options available through a regulated UK pharmacy, so you have the full picture before any clinical assessment.