Disney+ UK Prices Shoot Up Again, On Every Single Plan

Disney+ is hiking its UK prices for the fourth autumn running, and this time it’s Standard subscribers who get stung the hardest.

We can now reveal that from today, new subscribers will pay £11.99 a month for Disney+ Standard, up from £9.99. That’s £2 more, or a 20% jump, for Disney+ in Full HD without adverts.

At the time of writing, the new prices haven’t appeared on the Disney+ website yet, but they’re due to go live later today.

Last month, we spotted the first sign of the rise in the fine print on Disney’s own website, which showed the cheapest plan going up to £6.99. Now we know what’s happening to the rest, and Premium, the 4K plan, has got off surprisingly lightly.

That changes the maths if you’ve ever wondered whether 4K is worth paying extra for. If you already subscribe, you’ve got a few weeks before the new price hits your bill.

What You Get With Each Disney+ Plan

Disney+ brings together films and shows from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and National Geographic, along with Hulu, which replaced Star last year, and ESPN, which arrived on Disney+ in April.

All three plans give you the same library. What changes is how you watch it:

• Standard with Ads: Full HD, two screens at once, adverts, and no downloads.
• Standard: Full HD, two screens at once, no adverts, and downloads.
• Premium: 4K and HDR, Dolby Atmos, four screens at once, no adverts, and downloads.

There are three ways to pay, too. You can go month by month and cancel whenever you like, or pay for a year upfront on Standard and Premium.

And since June, Disney+ has also offered a six-month saver on all three plans: you commit to at least six months and pay less each month in return, then move onto the regular monthly price once the six months are up.

Then there’s Extra Member, Disney’s answer to password sharing. A Disney+ account is meant to be shared only with the people you live with, but for an extra monthly fee, you can add one person who lives somewhere else.

Your Extra Member gets their own login and profile, and can watch on one device at a time, in the same picture and sound quality as your plan. They have to be 18 or over, live in the same country as you, and can’t already have their own Disney+ subscription.

Extra Member is only available if you pay Disney+ directly, rather than through a deal like Sky’s, and it’s always billed monthly, even if you pay for your own plan annually.

The New Disney+ UK Prices

Here’s what each plan costs from today if you’re signing up as a new or returning subscriber:

Standard with Ads is going up by £1, exactly as Disney’s fine print suggested last month.

The annual plans still cost ten months’ worth of the monthly price. Paying for a year upfront saves you £23.98 on Standard and £31.98 on Premium compared with paying month by month for 12 months, although you lose the freedom to cancel whenever you like.

The price of Extra Member isn’t changing. It stays at £4.99 a month if you’re on Standard with Ads, and £5.99 a month on Standard or Premium.

Why Premium Suddenly Looks Better Value

Standard is going up by 20%, while Premium is going up by less than 7%. That’s an odd way round for Disney+, which did the opposite last year: Standard rose by £1 and Premium by £2.

So the gap between the two has shrunk. Upgrading from Standard to Premium cost an extra £5 a month after last year’s rise. Now it’s back to £4, and that gets you 4K, HDR, Dolby Atmos and two extra screens.

If you’ve got a 4K TV and stuck with Standard to save money, the upgrade just got a little easier to justify.

Getting rid of the adverts, on the other hand, now costs more. The step from Standard with Ads to Standard was £4 a month, and now it’s £5.

It’s also the reverse of what happened in the US last month. There, Disney put the ad-free Premium plan up by around 13% and its ad-supported plan by around 4%.

In the UK, the ad plan is going up by about 17%, Standard by 20% and Premium by 7%.

And it’s not quite what we expected, either. Back in September, we estimated that Standard would go up to £10.99, possibly as high as £11.99, and that Premium would most likely land at £16.99.

Standard hit the top of our range, while Premium came in £1 below our best guess. Half right, then – and annoyingly, it’s the wrong half if you’re on Standard.

When Will Existing Subscribers Pay More?

Today’s prices are for new and returning subscribers. If you’re already paying Disney+ directly, you’ve got a little longer.

Monthly subscribers will move onto the new price from their first billing date on or after November 18. Annual subscribers will pay the new price from their next billing date on or after December 2, which means when their plan next renews.

If your annual plan is due to renew before December 2, you should renew at the current price for one more year.

If you’re already on a six-month saver, you’ll keep paying the price you signed up at until your six months are up. After that, you move onto the then-current monthly price, which will be the new one.

Disney’s UK Subscriber Agreement says it will email you at least 28 days before a price change takes effect, so you should start getting those emails soon. If you don’t want to pay more, you can switch to a different plan or cancel.

If you get Disney+ through Sky, which includes Standard with Ads at no extra cost for millions of its customers, these prices don’t apply to you directly. The same goes if Disney+ comes as part of a deal from another provider, so check the terms of your own deal.

How Disney+ Compares Now

In September, we could only compare Disney’s ad-supported plan with its rivals, because the other prices hadn’t been announced. Now we can compare all three tiers, and Disney+ has moved up the order.

Until today, Disney+ Standard cost the same £9.99 as the ad-free plans from Paramount+, HBO Max and Apple TV. Now it’s £2 more than all three. Netflix is the only one of these that charges more, at £13.99 for Standard since Netflix put its UK prices up in September.

Premium is a closer contest. At £15.99, it’s £1 more than HBO Max Premium and £3 more than Paramount+ Premium, which went up in August.

Netflix Premium is in a different league at £20.99, and it’s still the most expensive mainstream streaming plan in the UK by some distance.

HBO Max hasn’t changed its UK prices since launching in March, and Apple TV has so far left UK prices alone after raising its US price this summer.

How To Pay Less For Disney+

If you’re signing up anyway, the six-month saver is the cheapest way in. It’s going up today too, but it still undercuts the regular monthly prices:

• Standard with Ads: £5.99 a month (was £4.99)
• Standard: £9.99 a month (was £7.99)
• Premium: £11.99 a month (was £10.99)

Over six months, that saves you £6 on Standard with Ads, £12 on Standard and £24 on Premium. The Premium saver also costs exactly the same as Standard on a regular monthly plan, so for six months you get 4K for the price of Full HD.

The catch is the six-month minimum term, after which the plan rolls onto the full monthly price. The saver is open to new and eligible returning subscribers.

If you’re happy to commit for a full year, the annual plans are the other way to pay less.

Disney+ is also available through deals from Sky, O2, Virgin Media, Vodafone, Lloyds Bank and Uber, so it’s worth checking whether a provider you already pay can get it for you more cheaply.

When Disney+ launched in the UK in March 2020, £5.99 a month got you everything, 4K included. The same experience costs £15.99 today. Standard, which has no 4K at all, now costs double that launch price.

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