Google confirms higher prices across all YouTube Premium tiers
A new report confirms that YouTube Premium‘s individual plan is going from $13.99 to $15.99 per month. The family plan gets it worse, jumping from $22.99 to $26.99, a $4 monthly bump that adds up to almost $50 more per year.
YouTube Premium Lite, which Google launched about a year ago at $7.99, is climbing to $8.99. YouTube Music Premium moves from $10.99 to $11.99.
Subscribers are starting to get email notifications about the change, though Google hasn’t put out any official announcement. According to these emails, the new rates apparently take effect with the June 2026 billing cycle.
This is becoming a pattern
This is the third time in four years that Google has hiked YouTube Premium prices in the US. The family plan went from $17.99 to $22.99 in 2022, and individual plans followed in 2023, moving from $11.99 to $13.99.
The reasoning Google gives is almost word-for-word what it said last time: the company needs to “continue to improve Premium and support creators.” Netflix just bumped its prices for the second time in under two years, so streaming services across the board are squeezing subscribers harder.
The timing could not be worse
What makes this sting even worse is the context. Just this week, reports popped up about YouTube testing 90-second unskippable ads on the TV app, so essentially, Google is making the free experience worse while asking paying subscribers to fork over more.
For those looking to save, the annual individual plan runs $159.99, which comes out to just over $13 per month. You can also pause your subscription for up to six months through YouTube’s membership page.
Subscription fatigue is catching up to all of us
I use YouTube Premium every day, and paying more for a service that feels the same as it did before my last price increase is hard to swallow. Most of us can’t keep absorbing cost bumps from every streaming platform we subscribe to, so at this point it’s turned into a constant calculation of which service gets the axe next so we can keep our budget intact.Google knows most people will complain and keep paying, though, and they’re probably right. But “pay up or deal with ads” isn’t a compelling pitch, and I suspect more subscribers are going to take a serious look at Premium Lite for $8.99 instead.
