As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, including a fee if you add Paramount+ through Prime Video Channels using a link here. Paramount, Peacock, HBO Max and Walmart pay us nothing, and the first recommendation below is that a lot of readers should pay Paramount nothing either.
Paramount+ costs $8.99 a month for Essential or $13.99 a month for Premium, read from Paramount’s own plan picker on 11 August 2026. Annually it’s $89.99 and $139.99.
Those are the numbers. The question that actually decides it is narrower than “is there anything good on it”, because for most people Paramount+ is bought for one of three specific things: NFL on CBS, Showtime, or a CBS drama someone in the house won’t stop talking about. Everything else on the service you can get elsewhere.
First: check whether you already have it
Walmart+ includes Paramount+ Essential at no additional cost, for the duration of the membership. That’s confirmed on Paramount’s own help centre, not a deal blog.
If you pay for Walmart+, stop here and go and activate it. Paramount’s support pages note one catch: if you already subscribe to Paramount+ directly, you have to cancel and wait out your billing cycle before the Walmart+ benefit will attach. That is a genuinely easy way to pay twice for the same thing for a month — the same failure mode we cover in how to cancel subscriptions you forgot about.
The Walmart+ route has a second trick in it. Walmart+ members can upgrade the included Essential plan to Premium for $5.49 a month extra. Run that out:
$5.49 × 12 = $65.88 a year for Premium via Walmart+, against $139.99 paying Paramount directly. That’s $74.11 a year for the identical Premium tier.
The upgrade fee is slightly higher than the $5.00 monthly gap between the two plans bought direct, which looks like a worse deal until you remember the Essential half is free. It isn’t a discount Paramount advertises loudly, and it’s the single largest saving on this page.
What the two plans actually differ on
Both plans carry the Paramount+ originals library, Showtime series, UFC, Zuffa Boxing and UEFA Champions League, and both stream on three devices at once. Premium adds four things: no ads outside live TV, 4K/Dolby Vision/HDR10 on select titles, downloads, and your live local CBS station.
The live-CBS line is the one people misread, and Paramount’s help centre is unusually specific about it:
- NFL on CBS games are included on Essential. If a game is broadcast on your local CBS station, you can stream it live on the cheap plan.
- Live CBS switches off when the game ends. Essential doesn’t carry the local station generally, so you can’t roll on into whatever CBS airs afterwards.
- Everything else CBS Sports does needs Premium — Big Ten football on CBS, NCAA basketball, golf, the Golazo Network.
So the $50-a-year gap between plans ($139.99 − $89.99) buys you ad-free viewing, 4K, downloads, and the CBS station itself. If your entire interest is Sunday afternoon football, you do not need it.
The calculation most Paramount+ subscribers get wrong
The annual plan saves you a hair under 17% — the standard “two months free” shape:
| Plan | Monthly | 12 months at monthly | Annual | You save |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Essential | $8.99 | $107.88 | $89.99 | $17.89 |
| Premium | $13.99 | $167.88 | $139.99 | $27.89 |
That looks like an easy yes, and for a year-round viewer it is. For the largest group of Paramount+ buyers — football watchers — it’s backwards.
The NFL regular season runs from early September to early January, and the Super Bowl lands in early February. Call it five months of actually using the service.
5 months × $8.99 = $44.95. The annual plan is $89.99. Paying monthly and cancelling in February costs you $45.04 less — almost exactly half.
Across roughly 18 Sundays of in-market CBS games, $44.95 works out at about $2.50 a week. There is no version of the annual plan that gets close to that, because the annual plan is charging you for seven months you won’t open the app.
This is the general rule we set out in annual vs monthly billing: an annual discount is only a discount if your usage is annual. A 17% saving on twelve months you don’t want is not a saving. Set a calendar reminder for the week after the Super Bowl and take the monthly plan.
How the price compares
All figures below read from each company’s own site on 11 August 2026.
| Service | Cheapest ad tier | Per year | Ad-free option |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paramount+ Essential | $8.99/mo | $89.99 | Premium, $13.99/mo or $139.99/yr |
| Peacock Select | $7.99/mo | $79.99 | — |
| Peacock Premium | $10.99/mo | $109.99 | Premium Plus, $16.99/mo or $169.99/yr |
| HBO Max Basic With Ads | $10.99/mo | $109.99 | Standard, $18.49/mo or $184.99/yr |
Paramount+ Essential is the cheapest way to get a major broadcast network’s live sport, and it isn’t close. Peacock undercuts it on headline price with the Select tier, but Select is the pared-back one — Peacock’s own site describes it simply as “Watch TV with ads”, with sport sitting on Premium at $10.99. HBO Max is a different purchase entirely, and we’ve argued elsewhere that its ad tier is the only sensible way in. HBO Max was also running a prepaid-annual promotion at $6.58 a month on its own site the day we checked; promotional rates move, so treat that as a snapshot rather than the standing price.
What Paramount+ does not have is a deep general catalogue. Judged as a Netflix substitute it’s thin. Judged as “live NFL plus Showtime for $8.99”, it’s the best-priced thing in American streaming.
Subscribing through Amazon instead
Paramount+ is available as a Prime Video Channel, which bills it through your Amazon account and puts the cancel button in the same list as everything else you pay Amazon for. For anyone who has lost track of which app charges what, that consolidation is worth more than it sounds — it’s why we rate Prime Video Channels as a management tool as much as a shop.
We could not confirm the Prime Video Channels price for Paramount+ at source. Amazon returns a 503 to automated requests, so its channel pricing is not readable to us. Channel prices have historically tracked the direct rate, but we’re not going to print a number we haven’t seen on Amazon’s page — check it against the $8.99 and $13.99 above before you commit. One real difference to know regardless: a channel subscription lives inside Prime Video, so it needs an active Prime membership, and annual plans are generally not offered through channels.
The verdict
Don’t pay for it at all if you have Walmart+. Essential is already included. If you want ad-free, upgrade inside Walmart for $5.49 a month rather than paying Paramount $139.99 a year.
Don’t buy the annual plan if you’re here for football. Five months of monthly billing is $44.95 against $89.99, and the annual plan quietly bills you for a spring and summer you won’t use. Take the monthly plan, cancel in February.
Skip Paramount+ entirely if you don’t watch NFL on CBS, don’t care about Showtime, and aren’t following a current CBS series. That’s a real group of people and it’s a large one. The general-purpose catalogue is the weakest part of the service, and $89.99 a year for a library you browse and close is exactly the subscription this site exists to talk you out of.
Essential at $8.99 monthly is right for you if you want in-market NFL on CBS, UFC or Champions League and are willing to cancel when the season ends. Best sport-per-dollar on this page.
Premium at $139.99 a year is right for you if you’d otherwise have paid for Showtime separately, you want your local CBS station live year-round, or ads genuinely spoil it for you. At that point you’re buying two services, and the arithmetic changes.
Verified 11 August 2026. Paramount+, Peacock and HBO Max prices are exact and were read from those companies’ own websites on that date — Paramount’s figures from its signup plan picker and its help centre, which is also the source for the Walmart+ inclusion and the $5.49 upgrade fee. The Prime Video Channels price for Paramount+ is explicitly unconfirmed: Amazon blocks automated access to its pages and we will not restate a figure we haven’t verified. We did not attempt to price Walmart+ itself, as Walmart’s site blocks automated access. Promotional rates change; confirm at signup.