Pandora Raised Its Prices Again — But Not the Same Amount for Everyone

New Pandora subscribers have paid higher prices since September 22, 2026. Existing subscribers billed directly through Pandora see the new rate on their first bill dated October 22, 2026 or later, according to Pandora's own support page, with reporting on the specific amounts from Engadget and Yahoo Finance. Pandora Plus went from $4.99 to $5.99 a month, Pandora Premium from $10.99 to $11.99, and Premium Family from $17.99 to $19.99.

Source: Pandora Help Center, Yahoo Finance, Oct 2026. Prices for subscriptions billed directly through pandora.com.

The same subscription, four different prices

Here's the part that doesn't show up on Pandora's own pricing page: if you subscribed through an app store rather than pandora.com, you were never paying Pandora's listed price in the first place — you're paying whatever that store adds on top to cover its own cut of the transaction, and October's increase landed differently on each one. According to Engadget's reporting, Google Play customers now pay $6.99 for Plus and $12.99 for Premium — a full dollar above direct billing on both tiers. Amazon Appstore customers are the one group whose Plus price didn't move at all, still $4.99. And Roku customers pay $10.99 for Premium — now actually a dollar cheaper than billing directly through Pandora, the reverse of how the gap usually runs.

Source: Engadget, Oct 2026. Amazon Appstore's Premium rate wasn't reported separately from its unchanged Plus price.

Why now: a shrinking audience, not shrinking costs

Pandora is owned by SiriusXM, and the increase comes alongside a continued decline in paying listeners. SiriusXM's Q2 2026 results, as reported by Yahoo Finance, put Pandora and off-platform self-pay subscribers at roughly 5.6 million — down 2% from about 5.7 million a year earlier. Fewer paying subscribers with the same (or rising) content and licensing costs is the same math behind most of the streaming price increases of the last few years: when the subscriber count won't grow, the per-subscriber price has to.

What to actually do about it

None of this is something you can negotiate individually, but it's worth checking two things on your own account:

• Find out who's actually billing you. If your receipt comes from Apple or Google rather than Pandora, you're very likely paying the app-store markup, not Pandora's own listed price — and the gap on Premium is currently a full dollar a month on Google Play. Subscribing directly through pandora.com, where that's an option for your account, is the cheaper route going forward, even though switching would mean losing whatever rate you're currently locked into.
• Check your actual billing date, not the announcement date. New sign-ups are already on the new rate. Existing direct-billed subscribers see it on the first statement dated October 22 or later — which, depending on where your cycle falls, might not be the very next charge.

Pandora isn't unusual in charging more through an app store than direct — most subscription apps carry some version of this gap, a byproduct of the 15–30% commission Apple and Google charge on in-app purchases. What makes this increase unusually visible is that four separate billing channels moved by different amounts at the same time, on a service with a public, dated price list for each one. Most subscriptions never hand you that comparison — you just see whatever single number landed on your own statement, with nothing to check it against.