Source: Kelvin Goodson, MoneySavingExpert, “Netflix hiking prices by up to £24 a year AGAIN — here's what's changing plus tips to save on streaming”, published 8 September 2026. Household expenditure comparison below is taken from ONS: Family spending in the UK, financial year ending 2025, published 11 June 2026.
Our view, before the detail
A £12 or £24 annual increase on a single subscription is easy to shrug off — it's the price of two coffees, spread across a year. That's exactly why it's worth stopping on: Netflix has now raised prices twice in under two years, after axing its cheapest ad-free tier back in July 2024, and it is not the only streaming service doing this. The genuine story here isn't one price rise, it's what a household's whole subscription stack now costs when you add all of them up rather than looking at each bill in isolation the day it lands. That's the number worth checking this week, not just Netflix's.
What's actually changed, plan by plan
Prices rose for new sign-ups from Thursday 3 September 2026. Existing subscribers are being moved onto the new prices gradually rather than all at once — Netflix gives each account a month's notice before the increase hits their next payment, so the exact date varies household to household through September and into October. The new monthly prices:
- Standard with Ads: £5.99 → £7.99 (up 33%, £24 a year)
- Standard (no ads): £12.99 → £13.99 (up 8%, £12 a year)
- Premium: £18.99 → £20.99 (up 11%, £24 a year)
- Extra Member with ads: £4.99 → £5.99 (up 20%, £12 a year)
- Extra Member (no ads): £5.99 → £6.99 (up 17%, £12 a year)
The ad-supported tier took the biggest percentage hit by some distance. It was the plan Netflix marketed hardest as the budget option when it launched, and it's now risen by a third in one move — worth knowing if you signed up for Standard with Ads specifically because it was the cheap tier, because that gap to the ad-free Standard plan has narrowed from £7 a month to £6.
This isn't a one-off
Netflix last raised UK prices in February 2025, on what MoneySavingExpert describes as a similar scale to this round. Before that, in July 2024, it withdrew its old ‘Basic’ ad-free tier entirely, pushing existing subscribers who wanted to stay ad-free onto a plan costing £36 a year more. Three price increases in a little over two years is a pattern, not a blip, and it's a pattern every major streaming service has followed to some degree over the same period. Budgeting for streaming as a fixed cost that never moves is no longer realistic; it behaves more like an annual bill that creeps every year, similar to insurance renewals or subscription software.
Illustrative figures only, built from the published September 2026 prices above and MoneySavingExpert's own comparison figure, to show the shape of the cost — your household's actual mix will differ.
- Netflix Premium alone: £20.99/month = £251.88 a year, up from £227.88 — a rise of £24.
- Add Amazon Prime Video (£8.99/month with ads): another £107.88 a year.
- Add Disney+ Standard with Ads (£5.99/month): another £71.88 a year.
- Add Apple TV+ (£9.99/month): another £119.88 a year.
Running all four simultaneously, as MoneySavingExpert notes, costs at least £33 a month — £396 a year — before a TV licence (£174.50 a year), a cinema membership or any music streaming are added. Against the ONS's figure of £676.60 average weekly household expenditure for the year to March 2025, four streaming services alone would eat roughly an eighth of one week's entire average household spend, every single week, for content most households only watch a fraction of at any one time.
Three things worth doing this week
- Check whether you actually need your current tier. Downgrading Netflix from Premium (four screens, Ultra HD) to Standard (two screens, full HD) saves £84 a year, and most people can't tell Ultra HD from full HD on an ordinary TV without deliberately looking for the difference. If nobody in the house streams two different things on two different screens at once, Premium is paying for a feature you're not using.
- If you want to keep it but share the cost, use Netflix's own Extra Member option rather than passing round a password. Password sharing outside a household is actively detected and blocked by Netflix's systems; Extra Member, at £6.99 a month ad-free or £5.99 with ads, is the legitimate route to splitting the cost with someone who doesn't live with you, and it's genuinely cheaper for both of you than two separate subscriptions.
- List every subscription actually leaving your account each month, not just Netflix. A five-minute look through a bank statement usually turns up at least one subscription nobody in the house has opened in months. Free, fully legal alternatives — BBC iPlayer, Channel 4, ITVX — cost nothing and carry a genuine slice of what most households watch, which makes cancelling one paid service for a month a real, low-effort test rather than a sacrifice.
Where this fits in the bigger picture
None of this is really about Netflix specifically. It's about what happens when four or five small, individually-forgettable subscriptions each creep up by 8-33% a year and nobody adds them back together. A household that shrugged off Netflix's £24 rise, Disney+'s last increase, and whatever Spotify or a gym app did this year could easily be paying £150-200 a year more than they were twelve months ago without a single decision to spend more — just a series of renewal emails nobody read closely. That's the pattern worth breaking, not any single price rise on its own. Our guide on cutting your bills without cutting your life walks through doing this properly for every recurring cost in the house, not just streaming, and if pay rises keep quietly disappearing into subscriptions and upgrades before you notice, beating lifestyle creep after a pay rise covers exactly that pattern.
What is still uncertain
Netflix hasn't published a fixed date by which every existing subscriber will have moved to the new prices, only that each account gets a month's notice before their turn comes — so check your own billing page or the email Netflix sends ahead of your next payment rather than assuming a date. It's also reasonable to expect at least one more increase within the next twelve to eighteen months given the pattern of the last two years, though Netflix hasn't announced anything beyond this round. What's certain is the price you're paying right now for whichever plan you're on, and that's the number worth checking today rather than waiting for the renewal email to tell you.
If cutting the subscription stack is one part of a wider budget that needs a proper look, our guide on how to budget with a system that actually works is the place to start, and if money is tight enough that £20 or £30 a month genuinely matters right now, free, independent help is available today from MoneyHelper, StepChange and National Debtline.