Just when you thought your streaming bills couldn’t get any higher, Disney+ has delivered the news nobody wanted to hear.
The streaming service has announced price increases across every single subscription tier, effective from September 30.
Whether you’re on monthly or annual plans, ad-supported or premium, your bill is going up. It’s a comprehensive price rise, and there’s absolutely nowhere to hide (except that if you’re an existing annual subscriber, your price will only increase when your next billing cycle arrives).
We speculated last week that Disney+ might follow its usual pattern of increasing all pricing simultaneously, despite only confirming the annual Standard plan jump to £99.99 at first. Turns out, we were right to be pessimistic.
The Full Price Increase: Every Tier Affected
So how much more will you actually be paying? Here’s the complete breakdown of Disney+’s new UK pricing structure, effective from September 30, 2025:
| Plan | Old Price | New Price | Increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard with Ads | £4.99/month | £5.99/month | £1.00 (20%) |
| Standard (Monthly) | £8.99/month | £9.99/month | £1.00 (11%) |
| Standard (Annual) | £89.90/year | £99.99/year | £10.10 (11%) |
| Premium (Monthly) | £12.99/month | £14.99/month | £2.00 (15%) |
| Premium (Annual) | £129.90/year | £149.90/year | £20.00 (15%) |
The Premium monthly tier hitting £14.99 is a big jump – we’re now just a penny shy of £15 for a single streaming service.
The annual Premium plan sits at £149.90, which is a world away from the £59.99 Disney+ cost when it launched back in March 2020.
What’s particularly galling is that even the ad-supported tier hasn’t escaped. It’s jumped from £4.99 to £5.99 – the first time this supposedly “budget” option has increased since Disney introduced it in November 2023.
Disney+ has also increased the cost of its Extra Members feature, which allows subscribers to add someone outside their household to their account.
The Extra Member option now costs £4.99 monthly for Standard with Ads subscribers (up from £3.99), and £5.99 monthly for both Standard and Premium tiers (up from £4.99).
These price increases come at a somewhat awkward moment for Disney. The company just spent mid-September dealing with a massive subscriber revolt after suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live!, following government pressure.
Whilst Kimmel’s show has since returned to air, the whole controversy highlighted just how frustrated some subscribers are becoming with Disney’s various policies.
The Journey From £5.99 to £14.99
This latest increase marks Disney+’s continued shift away from its budget-friendly roots. The streaming giant has transformed from a simple, affordable service into a multi-tiered platform with premium pricing to match.
When Disney+ first launched in the UK in March 2020 – right as the first lockdown began – it cost £5.99 monthly and offered everything in a single package: 4K streaming, four concurrent devices, and ad-free viewing across Disney’s entire catalogue.
It was genuinely competitive pricing that undercut most rivals.
Less than a year later, in February 2021, the first price adjustment arrived. Disney+ jumped to £7.99 monthly with the introduction of Star, which dramatically expanded the content library with more mature shows and films.
The real shake-up came in November 2023 when Disney+ introduced its three-tier system. Suddenly, if you wanted to maintain that original 4K quality and four concurrent streams, you needed to pay £10.99 monthly for the new Premium tier.
The Standard tier offered Full HD but limited you to just two streams, whilst the ad-supported option arrived at £4.99 – cheaper on paper, but with the catch of watching adverts on a paid service.
October 2024 brought another round of increases, pushing Premium to £12.99 monthly. And now, barely a year later, we’re at £14.99 for Premium.
If you’re a subscriber who wants the same experience Disney+ offered at launch – 4K streaming and four concurrent devices – you’re now paying 150% more than you did in March 2020. That’s a massive jump in just over five years.
What You’re Getting for the Extra Money
To give Disney some credit, the service has evolved significantly since those early days.
Over the past year, Disney+ has pushed aggressively into live sports. The service secured exclusive rights to the UEFA Women’s Champions League for five seasons and recently added Saturday evening LaLiga matches featuring Real Madrid, Barcelona, and other Spanish giants.
The upcoming rebrand of Star to Hulu this autumn isn’t just cosmetic either. It’s part of Disney’s broader plan to merge its streaming platforms globally, creating a single destination that combines family-friendly Disney content with adult entertainment and live sports.
Disney has also “enhanced” the service with its Extra Members feature for password sharing. This lets Standard and Premium subscribers add someone outside their household for £4.99 monthly – which is really just another revenue stream on top of the already-increasing base subscription.
It’s the Netflix playbook: crack down on sharing, then charge people for the privilege of doing what they used to do for free.
The content library has expanded considerably too. Beyond the sports additions, Disney+ has been investing heavily in original productions across Marvel, Star Wars, and general entertainment.
Shows like Andor, The Bear, and Only Murders in the Building have received critical acclaim, whilst the back catalogue continues to grow with acquisitions and library content from Disney’s various studios.
But here’s the question: does all of that justify a 150% price increase for the same quality tier you got at launch? That’s something each subscriber will need to answer for themselves.
How Disney+ Stacks Up Against the Competition
With these new prices, let’s see how Disney+ compares to the other major players.
Netflix currently charges £5.99 monthly for its Standard with Ads tier (now matching Disney+’s ad-supported price), £12.99 for Standard, and £18.99 for Premium with 4K.
That makes Disney+’s new £14.99 Premium tier actually cheaper than Netflix’s top offering – though Netflix does give you more simultaneous streams.
Amazon’s Prime Video works differently, bundling streaming with shopping perks at £8.99 monthly or £95 annually.
If you just want Prime Video on its own, that’s £5.99 monthly – but here’s the catch: Amazon introduced adverts in 2023 and charges an additional £2.99 monthly for ad-free viewing. So the real ad-free cost is £8.98 monthly.
Apple TV+ remains the cheapest mainstream option at £9.99 monthly following its September increase, though its library is considerably smaller.
The uncomfortable truth? Disney+ Premium at £14.99 is now firmly in the premium pricing bracket.
If you’re maintaining subscriptions to Disney+, Netflix, Prime Video, and Apple TV+, you’re easily looking at £50+ monthly – which is exactly the kind of money that Sky and Virgin Media packages used to cost (and we haven’t even mentioned Sky’s own NOW, Paramount+, TNT Sports and others).
And – every year, like clockwork – streaming prices keep going up (at least with some of the services).
What Should You Actually Do?
If you’ve got children, Disney+ remains pretty hard to beat. The combination of Disney classics, Pixar films, Marvel content, and Star Wars shows creates something you can’t really replicate elsewhere – even at £14.99 monthly for the full Premium experience.
For adults without kids, it’s a tougher call. Yes, the live sports additions and mature content via Star/Hulu add value, but £149.90 annually for Premium (or £99.99 for Standard) is proper money for a single streaming service
The approach I always recommend is the rotation strategy: subscribe for a few months when there’s content you actually want to watch, then cancel until the next must-see show arrives.
That’s the whole point of streaming services – you’re not locked into long-term contracts like the old Sky and Virgin Media days (but you do miss the annual discount this way).
What’s becoming clear is that streaming services are no longer the scrappy disruptors they once were.
Disney+, Netflix, Amazon, and the rest are now fully-fledged entertainment giants focused on squeezing maximum revenue from existing subscribers, whether through price increases, advertising, or password-sharing fees.
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The problem with DisneyPlus is be it tier 1 at £4:99/£5:99 & tier 2 £8:99/£9:99 is that you can only have the service on 2 devices without ads but the tier with ads it’s £4 cheaper as you can only have the service on 2 devices only too.