How much does YouTube Premium cost around the world?

YouTube Premium is more than just banishing the ads. You get background and offline play, access to millions of songs and podcasts on YouTube Music, and more exclusive content. If you’re a heavy YouTube user, upgrading from the free version may make sense, although the streaming service now costs $13.99 per month for US subscribers. That adds up over time. Millions of other people don’t have to make such a large outlay, with the streaming service’s price varying between nations. We’ve laid out the YouTube Premium cost around the world, and we’ll look at whether this means Americans could get it any cheaper.

We’re keeping this comparison straightforward by only considering the cost of the Individual Plan. We could look at family and student plans or the savings from an annual subscription, but it’s not necessary for the purpose of the exercise. These alternative payment structures are almost always proportionate to the Individual Plan. To put it another way, the cheapest country for a YouTube Premium Individual Plan is going to be among the cheapest for the other plans.

How much does YouTube Premium cost around the world?

The table below shows the monthly subscription price to YouTube Premium in the local currency of each country, as well as the equivalent US dollar value of each. We’ve ordered the table from cheapest to most expensive.

At the time of writing, the cheapest place in the world to get YouTube Premium is Argentina, where residents pay the equivalent of just $1.05 for the monthly plan. There are possible reasons for this that we’ll go into a bit later, but it makes the US look very expensive by comparison.

Switzerland is the country with the most expensive Individual Plan at $18.35 per month. That’s $2 more than the UK, which is the second most expensive. The United States is certainly at the pricier end of the scale at $13.99 per month.

It’s interesting to see that the cost of YouTube Premium isn’t particularly correlated to region. For example, Canadians and Mexicans are charged significantly less than their American neighbors, both paying less than $10 monthly. And while the expensive end of the table is dominated by European countries, the relatively affluent nation of Sweden pays under $7 per month.

If you’re familiar with VPNs, the table above might have immediately put certain thoughts in your head.

For the uninitiated, a VPN encrypts your internet connection and routes it through a hub in another location. This makes them fantastic as an online security measure, as your connection is near-impossible to decrypt, and your real IP address is replaced with that of the location of the hub, making your location untrackable. The latter perk also means that your connection can appear as if it’s in a different country, and people often use this to get around regional restrictions on things like streaming services.

Does this mean that you can use a VPN to pretend you’re in another country for the purpose of getting a cheaper YouTube Premium subscription? We haven’t tried it for reasons that will become apparent, but we think it might be more complicated than that, and we wouldn’t advocate that you try it.

On a practical level, signing up for YouTube Premium probably requires more than just an IP address in that country. It’s likely that you’ll be expected to pay with a card that’s linked to a bank in that nation, which you’re unlikely to be able to provide. Even if you think you can make it work, you risk losing your YouTube account if you’re discovered. You wouldn’t be the first person to try this scheme, and YouTube will have systems in place to try and catch such payment evasion.

There are three apparent reasons why the price of YouTube premium varies significantly across the world. The most obvious is that the service you’re paying for is actually different from your peers abroad. Due to various laws and regulations regarding licensing and such, the content available in each country differs. For example, there may be a sporting event on YouTube in one country that’s not available in others due to rights issues. The same goes for TV shows and movies.

Then there’s the most cynical reason: YouTube charges what it thinks you’ll pay. There will be teams of marketing experts and financial analysts at YouTube HQ specifically tasked with looking at the spending power and the demand for the service in each country, then crunching the numbers to work out what plan pricing will maximize revenue. This isn’t a charity — the bottom line will be a major driving factor.

The nature of our comparison also brings exchange rates into play. This can sound like a minor thing, but converting every country’s subscription cost into US dollars can shed some light on the volatile nature of the world economy. Taking this into account, it becomes less surprising to see Argentina at the top of the list. The country’s inflation was over 200% in 2023, so while the locals might see prices rising, the cost of goods and services in US dollar terms has been getting cheaper by the month.