The prices that Americans paid for subscription- and rental-based access to video streaming services and video games increased 29 percent from December 2024 to December 2025, according to data that the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released on Tuesday.
According to the BLS, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), which BLS says represents over 90 percent of the US population across the country, for all items “increased 2.7 percent before seasonal adjustment.”
The CPI-U for “subscription and rental of video and video games” includes subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) streaming services, like Netflix and Disney+, and “one-time rental of video and video game media. These may be rented or subscribed to through physical copy, streaming, or temporary download,” BLS says. For comparison, “cable, satellite, and live streaming television service [such as YouTube TV and Sling]” saw 4.9 percent inflation last year.
The index isn’t adjusted for the “effect of changes that normally occur at the same time and in about the same magnitude every year—such as price movements resulting from changing climatic conditions, production cycles, model changeovers, holidays, and sales,” per BLS. According to the federal agency, unadjusted data is “of primary interest to consumers concerned about the prices they actually pay.”
From November 2025 to December 2025 alone, subscription and rental of video and video games saw adjusted inflation of 19.5 percent, per BLS data.
Streaming and gaming subscriptions and rentals saw higher inflation in 2025 than any of the other CPI-U subcategories, which includes food. In that larger context, instant coffee (28 percent) saw the next highest inflation, followed by roasted coffee (18.7 percent), and uncooked beef steaks (17.8 percent).
We’ve begun to anticipate that streaming prices will climb faster than US inflation rates. But the 2025 data shows sharp increases from 2024. Per BLS, in 2024, streaming and gaming subscriptions and rentals saw unadjusted inflation of 1.6 percent from December 2023 to December 2024. The overall CPI-U for 2024 was 2.9 percent.
Subscribing to price hikes
Subscription-based streaming companies have been leaning on price hikes to fight slow or stagnant subscription growth. With streaming now the primary method for Americans to watch TV, streaming service providers have been able to squeeze more cash out of customers.
Last year, virtually every mainstream streaming service, including Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, and Apple TV, raised prices. Some smaller services, like Dropout and Discovery+, also started charging more as the broader industry grappled with the economic difficulties of providing constant, on-demand access to large libraries of costly, desirable, and original content and more typical business challenges, like increasing labor costs and appeasing investors.
Ads and password crackdowns have helped, but price hikes have also become common, especially since the initial prices of streaming services, built to lure people from traditional TV providers, wasn’t sustainable long-term.
While there are economic reasons that streaming services have been steadily raising prices, price hikes seem more egregious when combined with user dissatisfaction around several areas: content quality and availability; ad frequency; ease in navigating apps and finding content across services; and apprehension around SVOD consolidation, such as Disney+ and Hulu and Fubo and HBO Max with Netflix or Paramount.
Experts expect streaming prices to continue increasing in 2026. However, the price hikes may come in subtler forms, such as through upcharges for premium features like 4K. We also expect more streaming companies to bundle their subscription with other streaming or third-party services as they try to appear more cost-effective and limit cancellations.
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