Antidepressant Taper Schedule
Build a personalized week-by-week reduction plan — with dates, proportional step sizes, and a printable chart to bring to your prescriber.
Antidepressant Taper Schedule
Build a gradual, proportional reduction plan — the “hyperbolic-style” pattern where cuts get smaller as your dose gets lower.
SSRI · Half-life: ~26 hours (active metabolite 62–104h)
Total per day, across all doses you take.
Proportional tapering guidance commonly uses 5–10% of the current dose per step.
Longer holds are gentler. Most antidepressant tapers hold 2–4 weeks per cut.
Enter your current daily dose above
Your personalized week-by-week schedule will appear here.
Safety Warning: This tool performs mathematics only. It does not account for your medical history, how long you've taken the medication, or your stability at each step. Tapering schedules should always be slowed down if withdrawal symptoms become severe, and depression or anxiety returning during a taper is a reason to pause and talk to your prescriber. Never change your dose or stop an antidepressant abruptly without medical guidance.
Tapering a specific medication?
Each page below is pre-configured with drug-specific guidance — half-life, available strengths, and what to do when the doses get too small for tablets.
How this taper schedule builder works
The builder follows the proportional (“hyperbolic-style”) approach described by Horowitz & Taylor (Lancet Psychiatry, 2019) and the Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines: reduce by a percentage of your current dose, hold long enough to stabilize (usually 2–4 weeks), then repeat. Because each cut is proportional, the reductions shrink in milligrams as you descend — which is what keeps each step's impact on your nervous system roughly constant.
The schedule also shows each dose as a percentage of your starting dose, so you and your prescriber can see the true shape of the taper, and it flags the step where reductions become too small to achieve with your medication's standard forms.
Why fixed-dose drops go wrong at the bottom
A schedule like 20mg → 15mg → 10mg → 5mg → 0 looks even. It isn't. Because serotonin transporter occupancy climbs steeply at low doses and flattens at higher ones, that final 5mg → 0 step removes far more of the drug's actual effect than the first 20mg → 15mg step did.
This is the single most common reason a taper that started smoothly falls apart at the end — and it's why the last few milligrams need the smallest steps and the longest holds, not a sprint to the finish.
The last stretch: getting to zero
Every proportional taper eventually reaches doses that standard tablets can't measure. That's not a dead end — it's a planned phase. Where a manufactured oral liquid exists (sertraline, escitalopram, citalopram, fluoxetine, paroxetine), it's usually the simplest route. Where it doesn't — Effexor XR and Cymbalta being the notable cases — the options are switching to a splittable form, counting capsule beads with prescriber supervision, or compounded doses.
The builder marks where this phase begins for your medication so you can arrange it in advance rather than discovering it at the pharmacy counter.
Frequently asked questions
How do I calculate an antidepressant taper?
The approach described in modern deprescribing guidance is to reduce by a percentage of your current dose — commonly 5-10% — and hold for two to four weeks before the next step. Because each cut is a percentage of the current (not the original) dose, the reductions get smaller in milligrams as you descend. Enter your medication, daily dose, cut percentage, and hold time above and the builder produces the full schedule with dates.
What is hyperbolic tapering?
Hyperbolic tapering means reducing the dose in steps that produce an even change in the drug's effect rather than an even change in milligrams. Serotonin transporter occupancy rises steeply at low doses and flattens at higher ones, so a fixed 10mg cut removes far more effect at the bottom of the range than at the top. Proportional reductions — taking a percentage of the current dose each time — approximate that curve, which is why the final steps end up very small.
How long does it take to taper off an antidepressant?
Longer than most people expect. Reaching a very low final dose with 10% steps takes roughly 38 reductions, so a two-week hold works out to around 18 months and a four-week hold to about three years. Those numbers surprise people, and they are why many prescribers use larger steps early and small steps only at the low end. What matters more than the total is that each individual step is small enough to be uneventful — speed should always yield to symptoms, and holding longer at a dose is a normal part of a successful taper rather than a failure.
Which antidepressants does this cover?
SSRIs (sertraline/Zoloft, escitalopram/Lexapro, citalopram/Celexa, fluoxetine/Prozac, paroxetine/Paxil), SNRIs (venlafaxine/Effexor XR, duloxetine/Cymbalta), and atypicals (bupropion/Wellbutrin XL, mirtazapine/Remeron). Each carries its own half-life, available strengths, and formulation notes, and there are dedicated pages with drug-specific guidance for Zoloft, Lexapro, Effexor, and Cymbalta.
What if the cuts get too small for my tablets?
Every proportional taper eventually reaches doses below what tablet-splitting can deliver, and the schedule marks exactly where that happens for your medication. From there the options are a manufactured oral liquid where one exists (sertraline, escitalopram, citalopram, fluoxetine, paroxetine all have one in the US), compounded doses, or — for capsules like Effexor XR and Cymbalta — switching forms or counting beads under prescriber supervision. This last stretch is normal and plannable.
Can I taper off an antidepressant without a doctor?
You shouldn't do it alone. A prescriber keeps your supply stable, can write for liquid formulations or smaller strengths, and — importantly — can help you tell withdrawal apart from a returning depressive or anxiety episode, which is genuinely hard to judge from the inside. If your prescriber is reluctant to go slowly, a printed schedule is a useful starting point for that conversation.
Is it withdrawal or relapse?
The distinction matters and it deserves your prescriber's input rather than a self-diagnosis. As a rough guide: discontinuation symptoms tend to appear within days of a dose change and often include physical features — dizziness, 'brain zaps', nausea, flu-like feelings — that a returning episode usually doesn't, and they typically settle if you hold at a stable dose. Relapse tends to build more gradually over weeks and resembles how your original episode felt. Holding rather than continuing down is a reasonable way to get more information.
Sources
- Horowitz, M.A. & Taylor, D. (2019). Tapering of SSRI treatment to mitigate withdrawal symptoms, Lancet Psychiatry — the basis of hyperbolic tapering.
- Horowitz, M.A. & Taylor, D. (2024). The Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines — practical proportional-taper schedules for antidepressants.
- US FDA prescribing information for each medication — half-life values, available strengths, and formulation details.