---
title: Genome Sequencing Costs
description: The cost of sequencing a human genome has fallen from USD 95 million in 2001 to around USD 500 today — a decline faster than Moore's Law, driven by a revolution in next-generation sequencing technology.
---

The cost of reading the human genome is one of the most dramatic technology cost curves ever recorded. In September 2001 — shortly after the completion of the Human Genome Project — sequencing a single human genome cost roughly **USD 95 million**. By 2022 it cost around **USD 500**.

That is a 190,000-fold reduction in two decades.

For comparison, Moore's Law (the doubling of transistors per chip every two years) predicts roughly a 100-fold reduction over the same period. Genome sequencing costs fell roughly **2,000 times faster** than the Moore's Law baseline between 2008 and 2012.

## The 2008 inflection

The steepest drop in the dataset occurs in 2008: cost per genome fell from around USD 3 million in January to around USD 750,000 by October — a 75% decline in a single year. This coincides with the commercial release of **next-generation sequencing (NGS)** instruments, which replaced Sanger sequencing and enabled massively parallel reading of DNA.

## Data

Sourced from the [National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI)](https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/DNA-Sequencing-Costs-Data), which has tracked sequencing costs at its funded centers since 2001. The dataset covers September 2001 through May 2022 at roughly quarterly intervals.

Two metrics are tracked:

| Field | Description |
|-------|-------------|
| `Cost per Mb` | USD cost to sequence one megabase (1 million bases) at specified quality |
| `Cost per Genome` | USD cost to sequence a complete human genome (approximately 3.2 billion base pairs) |

## Citation

Wetterstrand KA. *DNA Sequencing Costs: Data from the NHGRI Genome Sequencing Program (GSP).* Available at: [www.genome.gov/sequencingcostsdata](https://www.genome.gov/sequencingcostsdata).

## License

Public Domain (ODC-PDDL-1.0). No restrictions on use.