Two things need saying before the numbers, and the first one is short.
NAD⁺ is not a peptide. A peptide is a short chain of amino acids joined by peptide bonds — that is the whole definition. NAD⁺ is nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide: two nucleotides joined through phosphate groups, containing no amino acids and no peptide bonds. It gets called one because telehealth providers sell it from the same menu as sermorelin and BPC-157 under a heading like “peptide therapy”, and the category label sticks to everything under it. We go through why that matters for judging a seller in a separate piece.
The second thing matters more for what you came here for. The peptide label does not just misname the molecule — it imports a dosing model that does not apply.
Why “peptide dosage” thinking misleads here
Peptide protocols have a recognizable shape: a dose in micrograms, sometimes per kilogram of body weight, run in cycles with a loading phase and a washout. Whether or not that shape is well founded for peptides, it is what people arrive expecting, and they go looking for the NAD⁺ version of it.
There is no NAD⁺ version of it. Not one of the human trials listed below — which is every published NAD⁺ dosing study we were able to read in full — uses a body-weight dose, and not one uses a cycling schedule. They all give a flat milligram amount, once or twice daily, for a fixed number of weeks. If you find a site publishing a NAD⁺ mcg/kg table, it is not translating research; it is inventing a format.
And there is a deeper reason no chart exists. A real dosing chart comes from trials that established which dose produces which effect at which risk. For NAD⁺ that work has not been done. The dose-ranging trials measured a blood level, not a benefit, which means nobody can tell you what dose produces a result because nobody has established a result to work back from.
What researchers actually administered
Here is the real thing underneath the invented charts. These are doses given in published human studies, each attributed. None is a recommendation, and the decision belongs to a clinician who knows your history.
NMN, 250 mg daily. The two trials that measured sleep and walking both used this. One randomized 108 older Japanese adults to NMN or placebo, taken either in the morning or the afternoon, for 12 weeks (n = 108) [1]. The other gave 250 mg a day to 60 older adults for 12 weeks [2].
NMN, 300 to 900 mg daily. A randomized, multicenter, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial randomized 80 healthy middle-aged adults to placebo or 300, 600 or 900 mg once daily for 60 days. Blood NAD⁺ rose significantly in every NMN arm at day 30 and day 60, against placebo and baseline (all p ≤ 0.001)[3].
NMN, 300 to 1,200 mg daily. A six-week trial in 48 amateur runners used those three doses against placebo alongside training[4].
NMN, 1,250 mg daily. A safety study gave 1,250 mg of β-NMN orally once daily for up to four weeks to 31 healthy adults aged 20 to 65, and reported no severe adverse events over the study period [5].
NR, 2,000 mg daily. A 12-week randomized, placebo-controlled trial gave 40 obese, insulin-resistant men nicotinamide riboside at 1,000 mg twice daily. The paper concluded that dose “appears safe” while finding no improvement in insulin sensitivity or whole-body glucose metabolism [6].
NR, 3,000 mg daily. The NR-SAFE trial randomized 20 people with Parkinson’s disease to NR 1,500 mg twice daily or placebo for four weeks. Its own background notes that doses above 2,000 mg daily had not previously been tested in humans. NR was well tolerated with no moderate or severe adverse events, and blood NAD⁺ rose up to fivefold; the authors support extending the range to 3,000 mg a day in phase II trials [7].
Intravenous NAD⁺, one published rate. The only human infusion study we can find ran NAD⁺ at 3 µmol per minute for six hours. Notably, plasma NAD⁺ did not change until after two hours[8].
What that spread tells you
The oral figures above run from 250 mg to 3,000 mg a day — a twelvefold range, across two different molecules that are not interchangeable. In a field with an established dose-response, that spread would have collapsed by now. It has not, because the trials were designed to establish safety and to move a biomarker, and both of those goals are satisfied across the whole range.
There is one pattern worth noticing. The two trials that reported a subjective improvement — better sleep quality in one, less daytime drowsiness in the other — both used the lowest dose on the list, 250 mg a day. More is not established as better here. It is not established as anything.
The injectable side, where doses go unpublished
Everything above is oral, because that is where the dose data is. Compounded NAD⁺ sold as a shot or an IV has no dose-finding study at all, and most sellers do not publish the milligrams their monthly price buys — which is the finding, and the reason a monthly rate is not a value judgment until you know what is in it. We take that apart in the dosage page, and our price table marks which sellers disclose.
So what is the dose?
We are not going to tell you, and neither should anyone else. What we can tell you is the shape of the honest answer: published human trials have used 250 mg to 3,000 mg a day of an oral precursor, flat dosing rather than by body weight, for four to twelve weeks, and the ones that measured a blood level found it rose at every dose tested. Nobody has established which of those doses produces a result you would notice, because the outcome trials that would settle it have mostly come back null or endpoint-specific.
A site that answers this question with a confident number is not reading a literature you have not seen. It is filling a gap, and you are the one who pays for what it puts there.