Electrolyte Powder Price Guide: Cost Per Serving

Electrolyte powders are the only shelf in the store where the thing you are buying has no number on the front of the bottle. A creatine tub prints its grams, a melatonin bottle its milligrams — but an electrolyte powder sells you a flavor and a serving count, and the actual mineral content hides on the back panel, where one product delivers 55 mg of sodium per serving and another delivers 1,000 mg. Both are sold as electrolyte powders, often at the same price per container. Priced per serving, the whole shelf looks evenly matched; priced per 1,000 mg of sodium — the mineral that makes up most of what these products actually deliver — the same shelf spreads to 15.9 times between floor and ceiling.

We pulled 612 electrolyte-worded listings with a live price on October 25, 2026. We clicked through to 28 retailer pages, read the Supplement Facts panels behind every candidate, and ten products made the tables below with complete, verified panel data — every sodium figure, serving size and servings-per-container count read from the panel itself, never from the package front. Every exclusion, and the reason for it, is named near the end; the named exclusions are the story of this aisle as much as the table is.

Corrected rate = price divided by (servings per container times panel sodium per serving), stated as the cost of 1,000 mg of sodium. The panel prints the sodium; the front of the package prints neither the sodium nor, usually, anything else you can price.

How we priced the shelf

Every row is priced the same way: the panel states sodium per serving and the label states servings per container, and the price divides the product of the two. Nothing is priced off the name, because the name carries no mineral figure at all — the same front-of-package design sells a 55 mg-per-serving stick pack and a 1,000 mg-per-serving packet. Our sodium, potassium, magnesium and chloride ingredient pages catalog the four minerals these panels print; this guide prices what each container actually delivers of the dominant one. The same panel-first method priced magnesium, calcium, vitamin E and omega-3 fish oil in earlier guides.

Sodium is the ruler here for a plain arithmetic reason: across the ten verified panels, sodium is the largest mineral on every label by weight except the chloride that usually accompanies it in salt, and it is the only mineral printed on all ten panels in a directly comparable form. Potassium runs from 99 mg to 500 mg per serving, magnesium from 20 mg to 190 mg — also wide ranges, and carried in the composition notes below — but sodium is the number that swings the price math hardest, and it is the one the shelf itself advertises least.

The verified shelf, cheapest per 1,000 mg of sodium first

Read down the sodium column before the price column: the shelf sells anywhere from 55 mg to a full 1,000 mg of sodium per serving, an 18-fold range hiding inside identically-shaped containers. ZEROLyte is the verified sodium floor at $1.200 per 1,000 mg — a $35.99 ticket that buys 30 grams of sodium. Ultima sits at the other pole: $19.082 per 1,000 mg, 15.9 times the floor, because its stick pack carries 55 mg of sodium and a 100 mg vitamin C line alongside it — a co-active named here so the sodium rate is read for what it is. These are both legitimate products; they are simply not the same product, and no per-serving price tag says so.

Composition notes from the verified panels, for readers comparing mineral families: Re-Lyte pairs its 810 mg of sodium with 400 mg of potassium and 1,280 mg of chloride; Legion prints 575 mg of sodium against 115 mg of potassium; Thorne carries 480 mg of sodium, 750 mg of chloride, 70 mg of calcium and 40 mg of magnesium; the 40,000 Volts concentrate is the magnesium outlier at 190 mg per teaspoon serving against just 105 mg of sodium; Power Pak adds a b-vitamin sprinkle (folate 255 mcg among them) to its 75 mg of sodium; the Trace Hydration I.V. packet carries 5.5 mg of pantothenic acid with its 500 mg of sodium. Where a panel adds a token vitamin line, the row stays in the table and the line is named; where the vitamin stack is the product, the row is excluded below.

The same shelf priced per serving

Cost per serving spans $0.4998 to $1.9500 — a 3.9-times spread that makes the shelf look like a tight, well-behaved category. It is the rankings that give the game away. Ranked per serving, Ultima sits third and ZEROLyte fifth; ranked per 1,000 mg of sodium they are tenth and first. The 40,000 Volts concentrate is the cheapest serving on the shelf and only seventh per 1,000 mg of sodium, because a teaspoon delivers 105 mg. Legion is ninth per serving and third per 1,000 mg. Eight of the ten products move at least four ranking places between the two rulers, and the product a shopper shortlists on ticket-per-serving math is close to the opposite of the one the mineral math selects.

Why the two rulers disagree

The disagreement has one cause: serving size is a flavor decision, sodium content is a formulation decision, and nothing ties them together. The verified sodium range runs 55 to 1,000 mg per serving while per-serving prices cluster inside a factor of 3.9 — so nearly all of the real price variation on this shelf is variation in how much mineral a serving carries, not in what the mineral costs. Divide the price by the mineral and the spread explodes to 15.9 times; divide it only by the serving count and the shelf flattens into a fiction of comparable products.

A year of one-serving-a-day use at these prices runs from $182.43 (the 48-serving concentrate) to $711.75 (Liquid I.V. at $1.95 a stick) — a $529 gap. The same year framed as a gram of sodium a day runs from $438.00 at the ZEROLyte floor to $6,964.93 at Ultima — a $6,527 gap, 15.9 times wider. Whichever frame matches what a buyer actually wants the container to deliver, the per-serving ticket is the number least likely to survive the comparison.

What the shelf does not print

Ten rows made the tables; the rest of the candidate set failed one of six checks, and each failure is a fact about how electrolyte powders are sold.

Dead listings. The Dr. Berg 50-serving tub was the arithmetically cheapest serving in the entire pull at 20 cents — and it flipped to unavailable with a robots-exclusion flag between the pull and the live check, which is exactly why naive per-serving floors from a catalog listing are never published here. A Pedialyte Sport four-pack case died the same way. Unverifiable is not a price.

Label conflicts. The Redmond Re-Lyte bulk pouch page carries the title "175 Servings" while every Supplement Facts panel printed on the same page says 60 servings per container (one says 30, for a stick-pack format) — with retailer copy confirming the serving size changed. A 175-serving tub and a 60-serving panel cannot both be true of one product, so the row is excluded rather than reconciled by guesswork; the 15-packet Re-Lyte box, whose panel matches its count, is priced instead.

No printed servings. The BodyBio E-Lyte concentrate prints a 1-capful serving and its mineral lines (89 mg sodium, 187 mg potassium, 65 mg magnesium) but no servings-per-container figure anywhere on the page — and a bottle price without a serving count is not a price per anything.

Vitamin stacks that are the product. The Jigsaw Electrolyte Supreme panel is a 13-active multivitamin (260 mg of vitamin C, six trace minerals, B12, biotin) wrapped around 380 mg of sodium — its $59.97 ticket buys vitamins first, so a per-sodium rate would charge the vitamins to the sodium and was left out, named. The Trace Power Pak variant whose name carries a zinc-and-selenium stack on the front adds those actives to the plain Power Pak priced above; the Cwench drink mix carries BCAAs; the Force Factor night-time powder carries a sleep blend and is also dead at the retailer. Hybrids are excluded on the name and the panel together.

Retailer 404s. Five candidate listings still displayed prices while their retailer pages returned page-not-found: the Swanson Simply Hydrate box, the Legendairy coconut-water mix, the True Grace ElectroMag sticks, the Ultima 12-ounce tub, and a single-serve Primaforce sachet that would have been the per-serving ceiling of the table. Dead links are excluded automatically.

Unreadable panels. Micro Ingredients Advanced, the Ultima 30-serving lemonade canister, and the Plink fizzy tablets print their labels only as images that could not be read as text this run; the small watermelon stick-pack boxes and the RAW Hydration pages render their panels only through scripts; the Skratch Labs booster page carries marketing copy about sodium but no per-serving label in its page text; and the Nutricost listing resolves to a collection page with no product panel at all. This guide does not price what it cannot verify — including two rows that would have slotted into the top or bottom of a table, which is precisely the bias the exclusion rule exists to remove.

How to compare any two tubs

Three steps survive every trap on this shelf. Read the panel, not the front: sodium per serving is the only number that identifies what the product is, and it ranges 18-fold across lookalike containers. Multiply before you divide: servings per container times sodium per serving is the mineral actually in the tub — the Liquid I.V. variety pack holds five sticks per flavor across three flavors, and only the panel says so. Then divide the price by that total and compare per 1,000 mg; per-serving tickets measure the flavor experience, not the mineral purchase. A 1,000 mg-sodium day costs $1.20 at the verified floor and $19.08 at the sodium-light pole; over a year that is the difference between $438.00 and $6,964.93 for the same gram of the same mineral. The electrolytes page catalogs the whole ingredient family, and the zinc and biotin guides apply the same panel-first arithmetic to other shelves.