📰 Paramount+ Raises Prices Again in 2026

Paramount+ costs $8.99 a month with ads and $13.99 without, effective January 15, 2026. A dollar more on each plan. That's not the number to remember.

The real increase is buried on the annual side. Essential's yearly plan went from $59.99 to $89.99. Thirty dollars on $59.99 is a 50% hike, filed under a headline that says "$1 more a month."

Fifty percent.

What does Paramount+ cost now?

Start with the monthly rows. Most subscribers live there.

A dollar on $12.99 is 7.7%. The same dollar on $7.99 is 12.5%, nearly double the bite, and it lands on the subscriber already watching commercials. Ad-tier customers pay twice, once in attention and once in cash. The cash half is the one still climbing.

I've read a lot of these announcements. The percentage never makes the press release. The dollar always does.

The $5.00 monthly gap between tiers hasn't moved. Multiply it out and it's sixty dollars a year, still, to drop the ads and pick up Showtime on the monthly plan.

Average the four increases in that table (12.5%, 7.7%, 50.0%, 16.7%) and you get 21.7%. That's the real number the headline skipped.

Every price for every major streamer, tracked and rechecked, lives in our streaming price comparison.

The annual plan is where the discount quietly shrank

Run the yearly math. Paramount+ already did.

Twelve months of Essential at the new rate: $107.88. The annual plan costs $89.99, a $17.89 savings, 16.6% off. Under the old prices, twelve months at $7.99 came to $95.88 against a $59.99 annual plan, a $35.89 savings, 37.4% off.

Subtract the two. Eighteen dollars, gone from the incentive to prepay, on top of the $30 already added to the sticker price. The discount rate didn't dip. It fell by more than half, from 37.4% down to 16.6% (a 56% drop in what prepaying is actually worth).

Premium's annual plan moved $20, from $119.99 to $139.99. That's 16.7%, a smaller number, same design.

Here's the mechanism. Annual subscribers don't see a monthly bill, so they don't comparison-shop every thirty days the way ad-tier customers do. Cut the discount instead of the sticker price and the only person who notices is the one renewing, once a year, on a date they didn't have circled.

Why now?

Because January is when streaming reprices. It didn't used to be. Now it is.

Most major services raised prices at least once during 2025. Paramount+ carrying that habit into the third week of January 2026 looks less like a decision and more like a calendar entry. Nobody in this industry breaks ranks first. Where the big three stand after their own moves is in our Netflix vs. Max vs. Disney+ comparison.

Variety reported the increase ahead of the effective date and flagged the detail that matters: the 7-day free trial ends the same day. Raise the price, close the trial, same afternoon.

Call it a lease renewal nobody asked to renegotiate. The sign out front stays the same size. Everything behind it gets rewritten.

Run the household math instead of the plan math. A dollar a month is $12 a year, per service. A house paying for two or three of these loses $24 to $36 a year the moment each one takes its own dollar. Not enough for a news cycle on its own, but enough to show up on a bank statement — enough, I'd bet, that someone in Paramount+'s pricing group ran that exact multiplication before signing off.

How does Paramount+ compare after the increase?

$8.99 looked like a dollar above the floor back in January. Six months later, it is the floor. Netflix's ad-supported plan sat at $7.99 when Paramount+ moved. Netflix raised its own price in late March 2026, to the same $8.99. Two of the majors now charge an identical rate to watch with ads. Peacock still lists a $7.99 Select tier, thinner than its own $10.99 Premium plan, but still the last sub-$8 door among the majors.

The catalog case still holds. Paramount+ carries Paramount, MTV and Nickelodeon programming, with Showtime folded into Premium. Its theatrical titles land day-and-date, the workaround covered in our guide to watching movies still in theaters at home. A day-and-date release usually shows up the same weekend in our box office results tracker. Worth checking before deciding the extra dollar earns its keep.

Nobody is fighting Paramount+ for the top spot in a household budget. Netflix, Max and Disney+ split that fight three ways. Paramount+ is fighting for the seat behind them. Its nearest competitor for that seat isn't any of the big three — it's Apple TV+, which is why the Apple TV+ vs. Paramount+ comparison tells you more than a Netflix comparison does.

Does this hit current subscribers right away?

Usually not mid-cycle. New pricing typically starts at the next renewal, so the $8.99 or $13.99 charge lands whenever the billing month turns over next. The exact date sits on the account's billing page — a thirty-second check settles it.

Annual subscribers should look twice. A renewal at $89.99, against a memory of $59.99, is exactly the kind of line item that gets a card frozen out of confusion, not malice.

New customers feel it immediately. No more trial. The first hour on Paramount+ is now a paid hour.

What to watch next

The sub-$8 subscription is close to extinct. Peacock's $7.99 Select tier is the last one standing among the majors. This year's sequence, Paramount+ in January, Netflix in March, suggests these floors don't hold long once one service breaks them. When the next major moves, the streaming desk will have the math the same week it happens.

Mark next January too. I'll believe this repricing calendar is permanent the day one of these services skips a year.

Sources and methodology

Current prices come from Deadline's ongoing streaming subscription price tracker, cross-checked against Paramount+'s own pricing page as of this writing. The January 15 effective date, the prior $7.99 and $12.99 monthly prices, and the free-trial phase-out were reported by Variety ahead of the change. Annual-plan figures are cross-checked against contemporaneous coverage of the increase. Netflix and Peacock comparison prices were re-checked July 19, 2026 against current plan listings. Every percentage here is computed directly from those figures: $1.00 ÷ $7.99 = 12.5%; $1.00 ÷ $12.99 = 7.7%; $30.00 ÷ $59.99 = 50.0%; $20.00 ÷ $119.99 = 16.7%. Annual-discount math uses 12 × the monthly rate against the annual sticker price.

Photo: "Paramount Skydance One Astor Plaza" by Nielsoncaetanosalmeron, licensed CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.