Netflix Hikes Prices Again: Your 4K Binge Just Hit a New Record

Right on schedule from its last price hike in January 2025, Netflix is once raising its prices across the board, bringing its cheapest, ad-supported tier up to $8.99 per month and its premium plan to a staggering $26.99, maintaining its lead as the most expensive single streaming service out there.

This puts Netflix on a roughly 14-month cycle of price hikes — its last increase before 2025 arrived in October 2023 — though that one at least spared the $15.49 Standard plan. Before that, we’d last seen an increase in January 2022.

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Netflix’s New Prices in March 2026

As with the last round of price increases, this latest one affects all plan tiers. Here’s the rundown of the current prices, and how they’ve changed.

Netflix introduced its ad-supported plan in mid-2022. It was initially equivalent to the Basic Plan, but upgraded to match the Standard tier in early 2023. Meanwhile, the Basic Plan was discontinued for new sign-ups in July 2023. Existing subscribers were allowed to keep it for a while, but when the $2 price hike in late 2023 failed to sour the milk enough to get folks to jump to another plan (it’s telling that was the one time the Standard plan didn’t get a price hike) Netflix forced the issue, telling Basic subscribers to pick a new plan or go away.

In the early years, Netflix used to grandfather in existing subscribers to insulate them against its price hikes. However, that changed with its 2017 round, with customers forced to pay the higher rates as soon as they come into effect. The same undoubtedly applies with these latest increases; new subscribers will pay between $8.99 for the ad-supported plan and $26.99 for the premium plan effective today, while existing customers will likely get a grace period to carry them until at least their next renewal date.

Netflix also introduced Extra Member accounts following its password sharing crackdown in 2023 to let folks legitimately add people outside of their household, such as kids away at college, extended family members, or close friends. Extra Members are standalone Netflix accounts with their own username and password, but their subscription is paid for by the account holder. They get one screen and one profile, but otherwise share the same features as the account owner, including streaming quality and download limits.

These plans were introduced at $7.99 per month — $1 more than Netflix’s ad-supported tier at the time — but they also haven’t been insulated from later price hikes. By January 2025, the Extra Member Accounts increased to $8.99 per month as Netflix decided to slip in an “Extra Member with Ads” tier below that, charging $6.99 for an ad-supported experience that limited quality to 1080p with no Spatial Audio, and downloads to 15 per month.

Now, both of those are also increasing, with the full Extra Member accounts going to $9.99 per month, while the Extra Member with ads jumps into the same $7.99 slot the full plan was initially introduced at.

Of course, Netflix is far from the only streaming service in the price hiking game. In the past few months we’ve seen price hikes from Disney+, HBO Max, and most recently, Amazon Prime Video.

Meanwhile, at Apple…

Even Apple hasn’t been immune to these price hikes, with Apple TV going from its surprisingly low $4.99 launch price to $6.99 in 2022, then $9.99 a year later — ironically the same price Bloomberg predicted it would launch at in 2019. It’s not hard to see how Apple’s decision to go with $4.99 was intended to draw in subscribers, even if it meant taking a hit on profits or even losing revenue.

Apple justified its 2022 increase by pointing that out, saying it was a “very low” introductory price to get people on board when it had relatively little content available. Even so, analysts believe Apple TV has been the craziest loss-leader ever, potentially losing a cool billion every year to produce high-end content while treating it as effectively a value-added service for its hardware customers.

In August, Apple TV jumped to $12.99 monthly with a more unusual twist; unlike previous increases, Apple left the annual price unchanged at $99 a year, which strongly suggested the monthly increase was more about reducing subscriber churn than directly increasing subscriber revenue.

Unlike the 2023 increase, Apple also left its Apple One bundle prices unchanged, so really the only folks who ended up feeling the sting were those who wanted to keep their options open. However, it may have also been a move to prepare for its new F1 and MLS streaming, the latter of which went from being a $99 a year service of its own to being included free for every Apple TV subscriber. That gives serious sports fans more incentive to stick around, but also increases the possibility of folks signing up for a month or two to catch the highlights during World Cup games or specific Grands Prix.