Netflix increases the price of all three of its UK plans from 3 September, and the change reaches customers in two very different ways. People who pay Netflix directly find out by email and can act straight away. Millions of others receive Netflix inside a broadband or pay TV package, and for them the timing, the amount and even the wording of the increase sit with their provider rather than with the streaming service.
The rises are steepest at the cheap end. Standard with Ads goes from £5.99 to £7.99 a month, an increase of 33.4 per cent. Standard rises from £12.99 to £13.99, and Premium from £18.99 to £20.99, which takes that plan above £20 for the first time. The Extra Member add-ons also go up by £1, to £5.99 with adverts and £6.99 without. Netflix says the new pricing reflects improvements to its range of entertainment and the quality of its service. It is the company's second UK increase of 2026, following one in February.
The bundle decides when you pay
Netflix has more than 18 million subscribers in the United Kingdom, and a large share of them do not hold an account billed by Netflix. Sky includes Standard with Ads in its TV packages, with the option to upgrade. EE, Virgin Media and other providers sell similar arrangements, and Netflix has become a standard ingredient in the packages that telecoms companies use to win and keep customers.
Netflix has not set out how the increase applies to those subscribers. Broadband TV News reports that the position for Sky customers is unclear. Max Beckett of Uswitch says providers tend to pass such rises on at their next price review rather than immediately, which means a household could see the effect months later, folded into a single package price with no reference to Netflix at all.
A direct subscriber gets roughly a month's notice, a clear before and after figure, and the option to downgrade or cancel at any point. A bundled subscriber may get a smaller, later increase that is harder to trace and harder to leave, because it is attached to a contract covering broadband and phone as well as television.
Two sets of rules, two experiences
The two groups also sit under different regulation. Since January 2025, Ofcom has required telecoms and pay TV providers to state any in-contract price rise in pounds and pence, prominently and at the point of sale, along with the date it takes effect. The rules replaced increases tied to unknown future inflation rates, and they are not retrospective, so households on older contracts remain on the previous formulas.
Netflix sold directly is not part of that regime. It is a rolling monthly subscription with no minimum term, and the protection it offers is the ability to leave. Netflix points customers who dislike the change towards cancelling or downgrading.
The broader rules on subscriptions are still some way off. The subscription contracts regime under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, which introduces clearer reminders and easier exits, is now expected to apply from spring 2027 after a year's delay. Until then, the strongest consumer protections apply to the bundle rather than to the streaming service inside it.
A busy week for the television package
The increase lands in the middle of a wider reshuffle. On 3 September, VodafoneThree announced Vodafone TV, its first pay TV product, built around internet delivery and streaming apps and due to launch in October. No price has been published. On the same day, EE and BT renamed and repriced their own television and broadband bundles.
The market they are competing in is shrinking by subscriber numbers and growing by value. Ofcom's Media Nations 2026 report puts pay TV penetration at 30 per cent of households in the first quarter of the year, down three percentage points on the year before and well below the 54 per cent peak of 2016. Pay TV revenues still rose in 2025, to £6.22 billion from £5.99 billion.
What to watch next
Netflix's ad-supported tier was introduced as the affordable entry point, and it has now taken the largest increase of the three plans. That narrows the gap between paying with adverts and paying without them, and it tests how much of the growth in advertising revenue depends on the tier staying cheap.
The next signals arrive in October, when Vodafone publishes its prices, and again in the spring, when providers apply their annual increases. That is the point at which most bundled customers will find out what a Netflix price rise costs them.
