The short answer
No. Expired test strips cannot be sold by anyone, and no legitimate buyer will take them. The rule is simple: if the printed date has not passed and the factory seal is intact, we will buy it. Send a photo of the front of the box and the expiration date and we will read it for you before you commit to anything.
Why the cutoff is not the expiration date
Whoever buys your box has to store it, list it, sell it and ship it to an end user who then uses it over weeks or months. That whole chain has to finish before the date on the box. A strip with sixty days left has no room for any of it.
Why expired strips are genuinely dangerous
Test strips carry an enzyme coating that degrades over time and with heat and humidity. A degraded strip does not fail obviously — it returns a number that looks normal and is wrong. Someone then doses insulin off that number. This is the part of the category that has to be taken seriously, and it is why every reputable buyer refuses expired stock outright rather than discounting it.
What to do with expired supplies
- Test strips and lancets: household waste is generally acceptable for unused, unopened strips. Lancets are sharps and go in a sharps container.
- Sensors and pods: household waste, batteries removed where applicable.
- Insulin: a pharmacy take-back program, never the bin or the drain.
Check with your county’s solid waste authority if you have a large volume — several metro Atlanta counties run household hazardous waste days.
Act before the window closes
The most common thing we hear is “I meant to do this last year.” If your boxes are still in date, that is the moment they are worth the most. Run the 60-second check →
What the record shows
Everything below is quoted or drawn from a primary source, linked so you can check it yourself rather than take our word for it. Full list on our sources and regulations page.
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“You could be greatly overusing or underusing insulin because of an incorrect result. That’s where it would be a really critical health issue.”
— American Diabetes Association — Matt Petersen, Vice President of Medical Information, Reselling diabetes test strips an unregulated ‘gray market’ in US, reported.
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40.1 million Americans — 12.0% of the population — have diagnosed or undiagnosed diabetes, including 29.1 million diagnosed adults. An estimated 11.0 million more have it and do not know.
— Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Diabetes Statistics Report, 2023 data.
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