When you’re prescribed a sterile compounded medication, such as an eyedrop, injection, or IV solution, it’s essential to understand its expiry date. These medications are made under strict conditions and often have shorter shelf lives than standard prescriptions. This blog explains what affects the expiry of sterile medicines, why they’re different, and how to make the most of your medication.
In this fact sheet, we’ll explore:
Sterile medications are prepared in a way that eliminates all microbial contamination. They’re used in forms where even a small amount of bacteria can be harmful—such as:
Because of how they’re administered, sterile medications require careful handling and precise preparation to ensure safety.
Unlike mass-produced medicines, compounded medications are made just for you. This means:
It’s important not to use sterile medications past their expiry, as the risk of reduced potency or infection increases.
Several factors influence how long a sterile medication remains safe to use:
For example, some sterile eye drops that have undergone in-depth testing can have expiry dates ranging from 30 to 90 days, depending on the formulation and storage.
Each compounded sterile medication should come with a clearly marked expiry date on the pharmacy label. If you’re unsure:
Timing matters—collecting your medicine as soon as it’s ready helps you get the most use out of it before it expires.
Once a compounded sterile medication reaches its expiry date:
Planning ahead can help avoid interruptions to your treatment.
Understanding the expiry date of your sterile compounded medicine helps ensure you get the safest and most effective treatment. Always check your labels, ask questions if you’re unsure, and use your medication within the recommended time.
Sterile medications are those that are administered into different dosage forms than you’d be familiar with, potentially. So if you’ve seen an eyedrop before, that’s generally a sterile medication, especially a compounded eyedrop is a sterile medication, um, a thing like an injection. So that could be an injection into your muscle, or it could be just under the skin, like in the case of insulin. That’s also a sterile medicine. And then any medicine that goes into an IV like you might have had in hospital or at your doctor’s clinic, those are sterile medications too. So these medications are very specialised. And compounding pharmacies can really help get these types of medications formulated with the assistance of your doctor or specialist. But obviously everything that’s made has an expiry date or a best use date, which is a bud. Um, and this is subject to a few key things. So it might be the ingredients used and how stable they are. It could be whether there’s preservatives or not in that formulation. And that will determine how long the product lasts for um, and compounding medication has some rules and regulations that provide guidance to how long a medicine should last for. But what you’ll find is if you don’t have sufficient stability testing and don’t have sufficient efficient information on that product. The expiry date can be really short, so this could sometimes be 24 hours up to three days when there’s a compounded formula that’s had a series of stability indicating assays and tests done with it. What it enables a compounding pharmacy like us to do is to provide a slightly extended expiry date based on the information that we have. So things like some of our eyedrops, because we’ve spent a lot of research and time developing the information we have through the testing that we’ve done, gives it a 30 day to 90 day expiry date in some situations. So the best thing for you to do if you’re unsure about the expiry date of a sterile medicine, is to have a look on the label. Every dispensary label on every compounded product should feature the expiry date on there. Otherwise, have a chat to our team when you’re ordering your medicine, and we’ll be able to give you the heads up in advance of what our standard expiry date is. Remember, because a medicine that’s compounded is custom made just for you, the expiry date of that product will generally start from the day that it’s made. And this means that if you can collect it as soon as possible, you have the best length of expiry to use your product. After the product expires, we don’t recommend taking it anymore, and it’s probably now a good time to refill your repeat or chat to your doctor about a new prescription.