This paper presents a gradient-based reconstruction approach for simulations of compressible single and multi-species Navier–Stokes equations. The novel feature of the proposed algorithm is the efficient reconstruction via derivative sharing between the inviscid and viscous schemes: highly accurate explicit and implicit gradients are used for the solution reconstruction expressed in terms of derivatives. The higher-order accurate gradients of the velocity components are reused to compute the viscous fluxes for efficiency and significantly improve the solution and gradient quality, as demonstrated by several viscous-flow test cases. The viscous schemes are fourth-order accurate and carefully designed with a high-frequency damping property, which has been identified as a critically important property for stable compressible-flow simulations with shock waves (Chamarthi et al., 2022). Shocks and material discontinuities are captured using a monotonicity-preserving (MP) scheme, which is also improved by reusing the gradients. For inviscid test cases, The proposed scheme is fourth-order for linear and second-order accurate for non-linear problems. Several numerical results obtained for simulations of complex viscous flows are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed methodology.