Netflix price rises again. For now, only in the United States, although movements like this tend to be the canary in the mine of increases: very possibly, we will soon experience a similar one in Europe. It is the second increase in less than two years for a platform with more than 325 million subscribers in the world, in a sector where escalating prices has become the norm.
The new prices. The standard plan with ads, the cheapest, goes from $7.99 to $8.99 per month. The ad-free standard goes up two dollars, from 17.99 to 19.99. The premium (four simultaneous screens, 4K, no ads) scales from $24.99 to $26.99 per month. The cost of adding an extra member also increases: one dollar more in all cases, that is, it remains at $6.99 for the plan with ads and 9.99 for the variants without advertising. The average increase is around 11% and the new prices will be applied in the next billing cycle, after notifying subscribers by email.
To understand the proportion of the accumulation, it is worth looking back. The standard plan without ads was $15.49 before January 2025 and $11.99 until October 2023. In less than three years, that same plan has gone from just over twelve dollars to twenty.
22,000 million profit. Netflix does not raise prices because it needs to. In 2025 it generated $45.2 billion in revenue and a gross profit of almost 22,000 million, with an operating margin of 29.5%, the highest in its history. Net profit for the year was 11,000 million, and free cash flow reached 9,500 million, compared to 6,900 million in 2024. For 2026, it projects an operating margin of 31.5%.
Netflix is not a struggling company looking to plug holes. The increase does not respond to financial pressure but to just the opposite: the company has detected that it can charge more because it knows that the majority of its subscribers are not going to leave. The analyst firm TD Cowen calls him pricing power (pricing power), which is the technical way of saying that the customer is trapped enough to take the hit. According to their estimates, the average revenue per subscriber in the US and Canada will grow 6% in 2026 due to this adjustment alone.
Shared accounts no. Added to all this is the ban on account sharing, applied globally since May 2023. Far from causing the flight of subscribers that many anticipated, the measure worked: since then Netflix has added tens of millions of new subscribers. What seemed like a risk was actually a monetization lever. Each household that previously took advantage of a third-party account had to choose: pay or do without the service. And the majority paid.
Ads go up. The rise in the cheapest tier (from $7.99 to $8.99) is perhaps the most revealing move. This plan has existed since 2022, designed as a safety net for those who could not or did not want to pay more. It has worked: it accumulates more than 190 million monthly active users and represents 55% of new registrations in markets with advertising enabled, according to Netflix itself. That is, it is the plan that captures the most price-sensitive users, but the truth is that there is no longer a comfortable position within the Netflix ecosystem that is protected from increases.
Especially this plan: The platform’s advertising revenue exceeded $1.5 billion in 2025, multiplying by 2.5 compared to the previous year. The goal for 2026 is to double that figure to nearly 3 billion. In this context, charging an extra dollar to 190 million people means optimizing to the maximum a source of income that already works perfectly.
And in Spain? The increase currently affects only the US. In Spain, current prices They are the result of the last revision applied in October 2025: 6.99 euros for the plan with ads, 13.99 for the standard without advertising and 19.99 for the premium. In January 2025, when Netflix went up in the US, Canada and Portugal, Spain was left out. But it will end up arriving: Netflix has been in Spain for eleven years and in each cycle of between twelve and eighteen months it has revised upwards some of its plans, usually with increases of one or two euros. As I said: everything according to plan.
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