Disney+'s Ad-Free Plan Has Now Tripled Since Launch

On September 23, 2026, Disney raised prices across Disney+, Hulu, and their bundles. New subscribers saw the higher prices immediately; existing subscribers get them on their next billing date, per Bloomberg and MacRumors. The ad-free Disney+ and Hulu plans each rose from $18.99 to $21.49 a month — a $2.50, roughly 13% jump. The ad-free bundle of the two went up $2, to $21.99. The ad-supported versions of both services rose 50 cents each, to $12.49, while the ad-supported bundle held steady at $12.99.

No public reason was given for the specific size or timing of the increase beyond the usual line about investing in content, and Disney didn't announce it with the kind of press push it gives a new show or feature — the new prices simply appeared on the company's plan pages and started showing up in billing emails. That's become the normal way a streaming price change gets communicated: quietly, on a date chosen by each company's own notice-period rules, not on a shared industry calendar.

Source: Bloomberg, MacRumors, Sep 2026. US prices.

The sixth increase since launch, the fourth in four years

Disney+ has now raised its US ad-free price every year since 2021, according to a price timeline compiled by Morning Brew: $7.99 that year, $10.99 in 2022, $13.99 in 2023, $15.99 in 2024, $18.99 in 2025, and now $21.49. Variety is calling it the fourth hike in as many years, and the ad-free plan launched at just $6.99 a month when Disney+ debuted in November 2019 — the increase this week pushes it to just over three times that starting price, a comparison TechSpot made explicitly in its coverage of the change.

The gap between the ad-supported and ad-free tiers is also worth noticing on its own: at $12.49 versus $21.49, watching Disney+ without ads now costs $9 more a month than watching it with them — a spread that's widened every year the two tiers have coexisted, and one every other major service (Netflix, Max, Peacock) now runs a version of. The ad-supported tier isn't really a discount plan anymore so much as the anchor the ad-free price gets measured against.

It's not just Disney — it's "streamflation"

Since 2022, US streaming prices have risen more than three times as much as general inflation, according to a Hollywood Reporter analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics pricing data. Over the past 12 months alone, streaming rates collectively rose 11.8%, with 2023 the sharpest single year at 17.7% — compared with cable and satellite television, which historically rose an average of 3.9% a year (excluding a one-off deregulation spike in the late 1980s). Streaming, in other words, is now doing to household bills what cable was long accused of doing, only faster.

None of this means streaming has stopped being worth it for most households — a $151 combined bill for eight services is still far below what a comparable cable package cost even a few years ago. The point isn't that the total is unreasonable; it's that almost nobody actually knows what their own total is, because it's spread across eight separate charges on eight separate dates, each one raised independently and each one small enough on its own to not prompt a second look.

What to actually do about it

None of this is something an individual subscriber can negotiate away — the new prices are already in effect and apply automatically unless you cancel first. A few things are still worth doing:

• Check which of your plans just moved. If you're on either ad-free plan or the ad-free bundle, your bill just went up by $2–$2.50; the ad-supported bundle didn't change at all, so switching tiers is a real option if the ad-free difference isn't worth $9 more a month to you.
• Compare what you're paying now against what you signed up at, not against last month's bill. A plan that's quietly climbed from $6.99 to $21.49 over seven years never presents that comparison to you on its own — each individual increase just looks like this month's bill being a little higher than last month's.
• Add up everything you stream, not just Disney's services. The BLS-backed data above is a category-wide trend, not a Disney-specific one — if you also subscribe to two or three other video services, each has very likely raised its price at least once in the last year, and the combined total moves faster than any single line item suggests.
• Expect this to keep happening annually. Six increases in seven years is a pattern, not a one-off, and there's no sign in the data above that the category is slowing down.