Objective: Acne is a common dermatological condition and impacts millions of adolescent and adult lives in the United States (US). The purpose of this study was to accurately quantify the cost per episode for the treatment of acne in the US and to examine disparities in treatment costs. Methods: Information was collected from the PharMetrics Integrated Patient-centric Database, a large collection of administrative claims in the year 2004. The database included more than 80 public and private healthcare plans included in the database, representing approximately 9.6 million unique patients. Analysis was performed using the Total Resource Utilization (TRU) Benchmarks process, a descriptive methodology which organizes and separates information from the third-party database, into accessible benchmarks for comparison. Results: There are many different drug treatment therapies that can be used to treat acne which can range in price dramatically. The average acne episode cost $777.19, with pharmacy costs representing 59.5% and outpatient costs representing 39.1%. Inpatient services were reported in only 0.1% of acne episodes and were associated with $9,297.56 in costs. For patients diagnosed with acne, pharmacy visits represented 85.5% of all episodes. Average outpatient costs were $303.99, attributable to 3.73 outpatient services with 2.18 of these services were physician visits. The lowest average total episode costs were found in the South-central region and were $624.05. The highest average total episode costs were found in the Northeast region and were $856.50. Average outpatient costs in the Northeast region were the highest in the country at $377.64 – the range for other regions was $240.70-$285.93. Conclusion: Much diversity exists in the cost of treating acne across different segments of the U.S. Future research should be done to determine what the underlying factors are when accounting for the discrepancies in cost per episode of acne.