What streaming costs a year in 2026

Four major streaming catalogues — Netflix, Disney+, Hulu and HBO Max — cost $347.76 a year with ads or $635.76 a year without, buying them the cheapest way the vendors actually publish, every price checked on 22 August 2026. Published annual prices for a single service run from $79.99 at the bottom to $229.99 at the top. Only three companies will show you an annual price on their own website. Only one, Disney, will tell you what anything renews at. And the number most households actually pay is higher than either basket above, because almost nobody buys streaming the cheapest way it is sold.

That is the whole finding. The rest of this is how we got there, and which fine print did the damage.

The prices moved three times in six months

Three US price changes landed in the first half of 2026, and only one of them was large on its own.

Paramount+ went first, on 15 January. Both tiers rose a dollar a month: Essential to $8.99 and Premium to $13.99. Netflix followed on 27 March, lifting all three plans at once — the ad tier by a dollar to $8.99, Standard and Premium by two dollars each to $19.99 and $26.99. Amazon was third, on 10 April, retiring the $2.99-a-month ad-free upgrade to Prime Video and replacing it with Prime Video Ultra at $4.99. That one is a 67% increase presented as a product launch, which is a technique the rest of the category has certainly noticed.

The 2025 increases are still doing most of the work in your bank statement, though. Apple TV went from $9.99 to $12.99 in August 2025, a 30% step in one move. Peacock added $3 a month to both tiers in July 2025. Hulu’s standalone plan went from $9.99 to $11.99 on 21 October 2025. Disney and HBO Max both raised prices in October 2025.

At least ten of the nineteen plans in the ledger above are priced differently than they were eighteen months ago. None of them are priced lower.

Almost nobody publishes a renewal price. Disney is the exception

This site prints a renewal column because in most subscription categories it is where the money is hidden. VPNs are the extreme case: a first-year price and a renewal price that can be triple it, both on the same page.

Streaming does not work like that, and the ledger shows it. Of nineteen plans, seventeen carry no published renewal figure at all — not because anything is being concealed, but because there is no introductory discount to renew away from. The price is the price, monthly, until the company announces it is a different price.

The two exceptions are both Disney’s, and they are worth looking at closely. On the Disney+ plan picker, the Disney+ and Hulu bundle is advertised at $11.99 a month with a small double-dagger next to it. The footnote says: for the first six months. After that it is $12.99. The ad-free version does the same thing from $17.99 to $19.99.

A dollar or two is not a scandal. What makes it notable is that Disney is the only company in this category that shows an introductory price at all, which makes it the only one whose renewal column can hold a number rather than a shrug. If the rest of the industry decides that six-month teasers are how you sell a subscription in 2027, this is the page it started on.

The annual option is published at three companies and hidden at three

An annual prepay is the only lever a subscriber has in this category, and the vendors are inconsistent about admitting it exists.

Published on the vendor’s own page: HBO Max (all three tiers), Peacock (all three tiers), Amazon Prime. The discount runs 15 to 17 percent. HBO Max Premium is the biggest single saving on the ledger at $45.89 a year for prepaying; Amazon Prime saves $40.88; HBO Max Standard, $36.89.

Not published on the page we read: Hulu, Paramount+ and Apple TV. All three are widely reported to sell a discounted year, and not one of them showed the figure where a shopper compares plans on 22 August 2026. Apple’s product page for Apple TV states one price and one billing period, full stop, so the only annual number we can honestly print for it is $12.99 twelve times: $155.88.

Does not exist: Netflix. There is no annual option, no prepay discount and no loyalty pricing. Netflix Standard is $239.88 over twelve months and there is no legitimate way to pay less, which is why it looks so expensive next to HBO Max Standard’s published $184.99 — a $54.89 gap between two near-identical products, created entirely by one company’s willingness to sell a year.

And then there is Disney, which on the day we checked would not sell you Disney+ on its own at all. Every tile on Disney’s plan picker was a bundle. The cheapest route to Disney+ that Disney itself displays comes with Hulu attached whether you wanted Hulu or not.

The arithmetic: four services against one cable bill

Here is the sum the brochures never show, built only from prices in the ledger above.

Start with the bundle, because bundling genuinely works here, which is not always true. Buying the same four catalogues separately, using each vendor’s cheapest published option, costs $373.75 a year — $25.99 more than the bundle route, for exactly the same viewing. It is rare for the packaged option to be the honest one. In streaming right now it is.

Then there is the ad premium. Going ad-free across those four costs $288.00 a year more than tolerating the ads. That is the single largest discretionary number on this page, and it is one most people agree to at sign-up without ever seeing it expressed annually.

$288.00a year · what removing the ads from four catalogues costs · checked 22 August 2026

Against cable, streaming still wins on list price and it is not close. CableTV.com’s State of TV 2026 report — a Pollfish survey of 1,000 US adults aged 18 to 65, fielded January 2026 — put the average US cable bill at $147 a month, or $1,764 a year. Four ad-free streaming catalogues come to 36% of that. Four with ads come to under 20%.

The catch is the gap between the cheapest way to buy and the way people actually buy. Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends survey, of 3,575 US consumers fielded in October and November 2025, found US households spending an average of $69 a month on streaming video across about four paid services — $828 a year. That is $192.24 more than the cheapest four-catalogue ad-free basket in the table above, and roughly two and a half times the cheapest ad-supported one. The same survey found 68% of US streaming subscribers now on an ad tier, up from 54% in 2024.

So the honest summary is not “streaming got expensive”. It is that streaming is still much cheaper than cable, most households are paying a couple of hundred dollars a year more than they need to, and the industry has quietly discovered that the ad tier is the product and the ad-free tier is the upsell.

What we could not read, and why it is not in the table

Every price in the ledger except one was read on the vendor’s own website on 22 August 2026. That is the standard, and where a vendor would not show us a figure, we have left it out rather than borrowed it from somewhere downstream.

None of those gaps are accusations. Pricing pages are built to sell, not to inform, and the annual figure usually lives one click inside a sign-up flow because that is where it converts best. But a price we did not read is a price we do not print, and a table with four honest holes in it is worth more than a tidy one with four guesses.