Every Streaming Service Price in 2026: What You Really Pay

Last updated: April 30, 2026

The $7 a Month I'm Paying for Pixels

I bought a 4K TV last fall. Bigger than I needed. Color science I'll never fully appreciate. It was on sale.

A few weeks later I sat down to watch a Netflix documentary and noticed it was streaming in HD. Not 4K. I assumed my router was being cranky.

Then I checked the plan settings.

Netflix Standard at $19.99/month is 1080p. That's it. To get 4K out of Netflix — the resolution my new TV was sold to me for — I had to upgrade to Premium at $26.99/month. $7 more, every month, for resolution my hardware was already capable of rendering. That's $84 a year.

Most "streaming service prices in 2026" comparison posts list Netflix at $19.99 and stop there. They miss the point. The headline price is rarely the price you'll actually pay. Once you account for tier upgrades, ad-free fees, simultaneous-stream limits, and the slow drip of annual hikes, the real cost of a streaming stack has quietly run past the cable bills most of us cancelled.

This is the comprehensive 2026 reference. Every major US service. Every tier. The hikes that landed in the last 14 months. The fees nobody surfaces in headline comparisons. And the patterns I see running our live pricing tracker at RecurDash: the rotate-streamers economy, the ad-tier trap, the annual-plan arbitrage Apple TV+ buyers have figured out and the rest of us haven't.

The 2026 US Streaming Price Table

Prices in USD as of April 30, 2026. For real-time updates across 55+ services, our live pricing tracker refreshes quarterly.

A few things to flag before going further:

• Netflix has no annual plan. Hulu's no-ads on-demand plan has none either. Most other services give you 16-17% off for paying yearly. Apple TV+ gives you 36%.
• Crunchyroll caps at 1080p across every tier, including Ultimate Fan at $17.99. There is no 4K plan at any price.
• Standalone Showtime no longer exists. The Showtime app shut down in April 2024 and its content was folded into the top Paramount+ tier — which was then renamed from "Paramount+ With Showtime" to "Paramount+ Premium" in mid-2025. The "Showtime" name now only lives inside Paramount+ Premium.
• ESPN+ as a brand is being phased out. New sign-ups go through ESPN Select ($12.99) or ESPN Unlimited ($29.99), the direct-to-consumer service Disney launched on August 21, 2025.

Streaming Has Hiked 3× Faster Than Inflation Since 2024

Across 13 flagship US streamers, the unweighted average ad-free price has climbed from roughly $14.85 in January 2024 to about $18.10 by April 2026. A 22% nominal increase in 28 months. Over the same window, US consumer inflation ran roughly 7% cumulative. Streaming is now hiking at about 3× the pace of everything else you buy.

The most aggressive hikers, cumulative since January 2024:

• Peacock Premium Plus: +41.7%
• Crunchyroll Mega Fan: +40.0%
• Apple TV+: +30.0% in a single jump (August 2025: $9.99 → $12.99)
• Amazon Prime Video: introduced an ad-free upcharge that didn't exist in January 2024, now sitting at $4.99/month after April 2026's rebrand to "Prime Video Ultra"
• Netflix Premium: +17.4% across two hikes (January 2025 and March 2026)

The pattern that matters more than any single hike: 2025 was the year ad-supported tiers stopped being the cheap floor. Netflix's ad tier launched at $6.99 in November 2022. By March 2026 it was $8.99 — up 28.6% in 14 months. Every major streamer except Apple has now hiked their ad-supported tier at least once. The "save money by accepting ads" pitch hasn't aged well.

The Hidden Tier Tax — Why "Premium" Is Now Mandatory

This is the part of streaming nobody flags in side-by-side comparisons. The cheapest paid tier is increasingly a different product, not the same product cheaper.

Netflix Standard ($19.99) → Premium ($26.99): $7/month for 4K + HDR + 4 simultaneous streams. There is no other way to get 4K on Netflix.

HBO Max Standard ($18.49) → Premium ($22.99): $4.50/month for 4K and Dolby Atmos. Premium also advertises 4 simultaneous streams — but quietly throttles to 2 streams for live sports. That detail is buried in the help center.

Disney+ Basic ($11.99) → Premium ($18.99): $7/month for 4K, downloads, and "Disney Plus Extras" (deleted scenes, commentary, making-ofs). Basic is the cheaper headline; it's also a meaningfully thinner product.

Paramount+ Essential ($8.99) → Premium ($13.99): $5/month for Showtime content, local CBS livestream, 4K, and downloads. Essential is the headline number nobody is actually using if they want the catalog.

Prime Video: As of April 10, 2026, 4K UHD requires the new "Ultra" $4.99/month add-on on top of Prime ($14.99/mo). Effective ad-free 4K Prime Video cost: $19.98/month. A year ago it was $17.98. Two years ago it was $14.99.

The exceptions worth flagging: Apple TV+ ($12.99), Disney+ Premium ($18.99), and Peacock Premium Plus ($16.99) all include 4K with no upcharge from the next tier down. Crunchyroll caps at 1080p across all three plans. Starz has no 4K offering at any price.

If you bought a 4K TV in the last five years and you're paying for the cheapest tier of any major streamer, you're either watching downscaled video or paying for hardware capability you can't use. Both are bad outcomes.

The Ad Tier Trap

Ad-supported tiers were sold to consumers as a permanent value option. In 2026, they're not.

Per Antenna's Q2 2025 State of Subscriptions report, 57% of new sign-ups to major US streamers in Q1 2025 went to ad-supported tiers. Across services that offer them, 46% of all subscribers are now on ads. This is no longer a niche choice.

It's also no longer cheap.

• Netflix Standard with Ads: $6.99 → $8.99 in 14 months (+28.6%)
• Hulu (With Ads): $7.99 → $11.99 since October 2024 (+50%)
• Peacock Premium (with ads): $5.99 → $10.99 since July 2024 (+83%)
• Disney+ Basic with Ads: $9.99 → $11.99 over 14 months (+20%)
• Paramount+ Essential: $5.99 → $8.99 over 18 months (+50%)
• HBO Max Basic with Ads: $9.99 → $10.99 (October 2025, +10%)

What you give up on the ad tier varies by service. Disney+ Basic blocks downloads and "extras." Hulu (With Ads) has gaps in the catalog where licensed titles are unavailable. HBO Max Basic blocks downloads and 4K. Paramount+ Essential blocks Showtime entirely.

The strategic shift: streamers position the ad tier as the default at signup, then ratchet the price up as adoption grows. Apple TV+ remains the only major streamer with no ad tier — and notably, the only one that has held the line on simple flat pricing.

Bundle Math — When Bundles Save and When They're Just Lock-In

The math on bundles depends entirely on whether you'd subscribe to all the components anyway.

Disney+ / Hulu / HBO Max bundle (with ads): $19.99/month. Components separately: $11.99 + $11.99 + $10.99 = $34.97. Saves $14.98/month if you'd pay for all three.

Disney+ / Hulu / HBO Max bundle (no ads): $32.99/month. Saves about $23/month versus paying separately.

Apple One Premier: $37.95/month for Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, iCloud+ 2TB, Apple News+, and Fitness+. If you use four of those six services, you save roughly $30/month versus subscribing individually. If you use two, you're better off à la carte.

Verizon's Netflix + HBO Max with Ads perk: $10/month, raising to $13/month effective May 6, 2026, available to Unlimited Ultimate, Unlimited Plus, and Unlimited Welcome customers.

The trap: bundles only save money if you'd pay for the components anyway. The most common bundle mistake I see in our pricing data is people signing up for Disney/Hulu/HBO Max for one show on one of the three services, then leaving the bundle running for months. The savings calculation flips the moment you'd otherwise have cancelled.

The Annual-Plan Arbitrage Most People Miss

If you know you'll keep a service for a year, switching from monthly to annual is the most under-marketed savings lever in streaming.

Apple TV+ at $99.99/year works out to $8.33/month — the cheapest premium ad-free streamer in the US, by some distance, if you commit annually. The 16.6% norm everywhere else is the standard "pay 10 months, get 12" deal.

Switching four monthly subscriptions to annual saves the average household around $50–$80/year. Most people don't bother because the option isn't surfaced at signup.

Live TV Has Quietly Exceeded Cable

The cord-cutting promise was that streaming would be cheaper than cable. For most stacks in 2026, that's no longer true.

• YouTube TV: $82.99/month (up from $72.99 in January 2025)
• Hulu + Live TV (with ads): $89.99/month, includes Disney+ and ESPN Select
• Fubo Pro: $73.99/month, plus regional sports network fees up to $16.99/month extra
• DirecTV Stream Entertainment: $94.99/month, plus a $10/month Gemini lease fee
• Sling TV (Orange & Blue): $60.99/month — still the cheapest "real" live option
• Philo: $25/month, the genuinely cheap option, but no major sports networks

Per Deloitte's 2025 Digital Media Trends, the average traditional pay-TV bill landed around $125/month. So YouTube TV at $82.99 is saving you ~$42/month over cable, not the $80 the original cord-cutting pitch promised.

Add a sports stack on top — NFL Sunday Ticket ($240/season for new YouTube TV subs at standard pricing, $378 for returning, $480 standalone, with a $192 promo for new YouTube TV signups), ESPN Unlimited ($29.99/month), NBA League Pass ($21.99/month), MLB.TV ($29.99/month) — and the math reverses entirely. A serious sports household stacking live TV and league passes is now spending $150–$200/month on the live-and-sports half alone, before adding any on-demand services.

The FCC opened an inquiry into sports streaming pricing in late 2025. Whether it produces anything actionable is anyone's guess.

The Rotate-Streamers Economy

This is the data point that surprised me most when I started running our pricing tracker.

Antenna's December 2024 net-churn analysis found that of 169 million gross sign-ups to Premium SVOD services in the year ending August 2024, 57 million were "Resubscribers" — users rejoining a service they'd cancelled within the prior 12 months. That's 34% of all sign-ups.

Antenna's June 2025 update put it more directly: "more than one in three people who cancel an SVOD service will resubscribe within the year."

What that tells us: cancelling and resubscribing isn't a hack anymore. It's mainstream behavior. The dominant pattern is to keep a service active during a show's run, cancel when the season ends, and resubscribe when the next thing drops.

The math is brutal in your favor. Rotate four services and keep each active six months a year instead of twelve, and you cut your annual streaming spend roughly in half without watching less content. You watch the same shows. You just don't subscribe through the dry months.

How to Audit Your Stack in 30 Minutes

The point of all of the above is not to make you cancel everything. It's to help you cancel the things that aren't worth it — and keep the ones that are without overpaying for tiers and add-ons you don't use.

I wrote a 30-minute subscription audit method that walks through the surfaces most people miss: PayPal billing agreements, App Store subscriptions, the "free trial that auto-converted in 2024" graveyard. If you'd rather work from a checklist, the free Subscription Audit Toolkit has the same method as a printable PDF.

For pricing freshness, our live streaming pricing tracker refreshes quarterly. RecurDash itself never asks for your bank login — we built it that way on purpose, because the trade nobody talks about with "automatic" subscription trackers is that you're handing your read-only banking credentials to a third party so they can scrape your transactions.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the cheapest streaming service in 2026?

Among free services: Tubi, Pluto TV, Plex (free tier), and Kanopy (with a public library card) all cost $0. Among paid ad-free options: Apple TV+ at $99.99/year (~$8.33/month) is the cheapest premium ad-free streamer if you commit annually. Among monthly plans: Discovery+ with ads at $5.99 is the cheapest paid SVOD. If you can cancel a service after each season finishes and resubscribe later, the rotation strategy is cheaper than any single tier.

Which streaming service has the most content?

Per Reelgood's January 2026 library count: Prime Video at 8,057 titles, followed by Netflix (6,233), HBO Max (3,373), Peacock (3,023), Paramount+ (2,995), and Hulu (2,594). More titles isn't the same as better content. MoffettNathanson's 2025 estimates (reported by Variety in January 2026) show Netflix delivering the lowest revenue-per-hour-watched at about $0.48/hour, versus $0.64–$0.93/hour for the others.

Is YouTube TV still cheaper than cable?

YouTube TV at $82.99/month versus the average 2025 cable bill of about $125/month: yes, you're saving roughly $42/month. The savings shrink fast once you add 4K Plus ($9.99), Sports Plus ($10.99), or NFL Sunday Ticket ($240–$480/season at standard rates, with a $192 promo for new YouTube TV signups). For a household that watches sports heavily, the live-TV-plus-streaming stack is now within $20/month of the cable bill it replaced.

Do streaming services still offer free trials in 2026?

Most don't. Hulu still offers a 30-day free trial for its on-demand plans — the longest in the industry. Apple TV+ offers 7 days (or 3 months bundled with a new Apple device purchase). Paramount+ no longer offers a free trial directly, only through Amazon Prime Video Channels. Netflix killed free trials in October 2020 and hasn't brought them back. Disney+, HBO Max, and Peacock have no standard free trials.

Which streaming services raised prices in 2026?

In the first four months of 2026 alone: Paramount+ (January 15), Crunchyroll (March 4), AMC+ (March 13), Netflix (March 26), YouTube Premium (April 10), and Amazon Prime Video Ultra (April 10) all raised prices. AMC+ and BritBox both hiked in late 2025 with effects carrying into 2026. The cadence has been roughly one flagship streamer hiking every 4–6 weeks since late 2024.

Will the FTC's "click-to-cancel" rule make this easier?

The FTC's Negative Option Rule was vacated by the 8th Circuit on July 8, 2025 on procedural grounds. A new rulemaking opened in March 2026 with a public comment period that closed April 13, 2026. At the federal level, there is no enforceable click-to-cancel rule right now. California's strengthened Auto-Renewal Law (effective July 1, 2025) requires online cancellation if signup was online — and because services don't build state-specific cancellation flows, California's standard has effectively become the national norm. Note: if you signed up through an iOS app, you have to cancel through Apple's Settings → Subscriptions, not the provider's website. Provider-specific cancel guides walk through each flow.