Is the $27 Premium Plan Worth the Investment?

Right on schedule from its last price hike in January 2025, Netflix is once again 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.

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.