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Peacock sells three tiers, and only two of them contain the things people subscribe to Peacock for. Select is $8.99 a month or $89.99 a year, Premium is $12.99 or $129.99, and Premium Plus — the ad-free one — is $19.99 or $199.99. All three figures were read from Peacock’s own site today.
The question that decides it isn’t which tier. It’s whether you watch live sport, and for how many months of the year.
What each tier actually contains
Peacock’s own plan comparison is unusually blunt about what the cheap tier leaves out.
| Tier | Monthly | Annual | Annual cost if billed monthly | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Select | $8.99 | $89.99 | $107.88 | NBC and Bravo shows. No sport, no movies, no Peacock Originals |
| Premium | $12.99 | $129.99 | $155.88 | The above plus live sports and events, hit movies and Originals |
| Premium Plus | $19.99 | $199.99 | $239.88 | The above plus downloads, live local NBC, and no ads (limited exceptions) |
Read the Select row again. Peacock’s site lists sports, movies and Originals as things Select excludes. At $8.99 you are buying next-day NBC and Bravo reruns and nothing else — the same $8.99 Netflix charges for its ad tier, which carries a catalogue several times the size.
That’s the first verdict, and it’s a negative one: Select is the wrong tier for almost everybody. If Peacock is worth anything to you, it’s worth $4 more a month.
The annual discount is real, and it’s the same everywhere
Peacock prices its annual plans as twelve months for the price of ten. That works out at a 16.7% discount on every tier, and it’s the largest reliable saving on this page:
- Select: $89.99 against $107.88 — saves $17.89
- Premium: $129.99 against $155.88 — saves $25.89
- Premium Plus: $199.99 against $239.88 — saves $39.89
The arithmetic you can run on yourself is the break-even one. Annual billing on Premium costs $129.99 up front. Divide that by the monthly rate — $129.99 ÷ $12.99 — and you get 10.0 months. So the annual plan wins the moment you keep Peacock for more than ten months of a twelve-month year.
That number is the whole decision. If you subscribe for the NFL season and cancel in February, you’re on Peacock for five months and the annual plan loses badly — you’d pay $129.99 for $64.95 of use. If Peacock is a year-round fixture in your house, monthly billing is costing you $25.89 for nothing. This is the same trap we work through in detail on annual versus monthly billing, and Peacock is a textbook case because its catalogue is so seasonal.
What removing the ads costs per hour
Premium Plus is $7.00 a month more than Premium, or $70.00 a year more on annual billing. That’s the price of an ad-free experience, plus downloads and a live local NBC feed.
Divide it by how much you actually watch. Ten hours a month is 120 hours a year, so $70.00 ÷ 120 = about 58 cents an hour to skip the ads. Twenty hours a month brings it to 29 cents. Three hours a month — a plausible figure for someone who subscribes for one show — pushes it to $1.94 an hour, which is a lot to pay for not seeing an advert.
Run your own number: take $70.00 and divide by the hours you genuinely expect to watch in a year. If the answer is above roughly a dollar, stay on Premium and put up with the ads.
One caveat straight from Peacock’s page: Premium Plus is “no ads (limited exceptions)”, and Peacock says some programming still carries ads and certain pages are sponsored. You are buying fewer ads, not none.
The bundle that makes Peacock look cheap
This is the most useful thing on the page, and it has nothing to do with Peacock’s own checkout.
Apple sells Apple TV bundled with Peacock. Both prices were confirmed on Apple’s own pages today:
| What you buy | Monthly | Annual cost | Bought separately |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple TV + Peacock Premium | $14.99 | $179.88 | $25.98/mo |
| Apple TV + Peacock Premium Plus | $19.99 | $239.88 | $32.98/mo |
Apple TV alone is $12.99 a month. Peacock Premium Plus alone is $19.99 a month. The bundle containing both is $19.99 a month — the identical price. Adding Apple TV to ad-free Peacock costs $0.00.
The cheaper bundle is nearly as striking. Apple TV plus Peacock Premium is $14.99 against $25.98 bought separately, a saving of $10.99 a month or $131.88 a year. In that bundle, Peacock Premium effectively costs you $2.00 a month.
The catch is billing frequency. Neither bundle offers annual payment, so twelve months of the ad-free bundle is $239.88, against $199.99 for Peacock’s own annual Premium Plus plan. You’re paying $39.89 extra per year to add a service that costs $155.88 on its own. Still comfortably worth it — but the gap is narrower than the monthly comparison suggests, and if you’d never watch Apple TV, Peacock’s annual plan remains cheaper. We ran the same numbers from Apple’s side in our Apple TV piece.
Buying it through Amazon: read this before you do
Peacock Premium Plus 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 Amazon charges you for. For anyone who’s lost track of which app takes which payment, that consolidation genuinely helps.
We could not verify the current Channels price, and we think the published one is stale. Amazon’s newsroom post announcing Peacock on Prime Video quotes about $17 a month, or about $170 a year — we round Amazon’s figures by policy. That is below what Peacock now charges on its own site, the post carries no visible date, and Amazon’s shopping pages return errors to us so we can’t check the storefront. Our working assumption is that the newsroom figure predates a Peacock price rise and no longer applies. Treat it as approximate and unconfirmed, and check the actual number at checkout.
Amazon also sells Apple TV as a channel of its own, and its newsroom announced the same Apple TV + Peacock bundle described above. The same caveat applies with more force: we cannot read Amazon’s prices, so we don’t know whether that bundle is cheaper than buying it from Apple at $19.99. Apple’s page is the one we could verify, which is why the recommendation above points there.
The general pattern holds regardless: Channels charges the monthly rate and usually offers no annual option, which is why subscribing direct beats Channels for anything you keep all year. Buy Peacock through Amazon for convenience and seasonal cancelling, not to save money.
Students
Peacock’s student page offers Premium at $5.99 a month for 12 months, then $12.99, verified on Peacock’s own site today. That’s $71.88 for a year of the tier that includes live sport — cheaper than the $89.99 annual price of Select, which includes no sport at all. If you’re eligible, there is no argument for any other route.
The verdict
Buy Premium annually at $129.99 if Peacock is a year-round fixture — Premier League, NBA, WNBA, MLB, Big Ten football and Sunday-night NFL are all on the sports tier, and the annual plan pays off past ten months.
Buy the $14.99 Apple bundle if you want Peacock and have ever considered Apple TV. It costs $2.00 a month more than Peacock Premium alone and includes a $155.88-a-year service.
Buy the $19.99 Apple bundle if you want ad-free Peacock at all. It is the same price as ad-free Peacock on its own, with Apple TV thrown in for nothing. There is no scenario where paying Peacock $19.99 directly beats paying Apple $19.99 for strictly more.
Buy monthly and cancel if you’re here for one season. Five months of Premium is $64.95 against $129.99 for the year — and put the cancellation date in your calendar the day you sign up, because forgotten subscriptions are how this service makes its easiest money.
Don’t buy Select. At $8.99 you get NBC and Bravo reruns with no sport, no movies and no Originals — Peacock without the reasons anyone subscribes to Peacock, at the same price as Netflix’s ad tier.
Don’t buy Peacock at all if you want NFL and nothing else. Peacock carries NBC’s games; the rest are on other networks, and Paramount+ at $8.99 covers the CBS half of the schedule for less. A single league is rarely worth a subscription that shows you one network’s share of it — and $155.88 a year is a steep price for one network’s slice of a season.
Verified 27 August 2026. Peacock’s Select, Premium and Premium Plus prices, monthly and annual, what each tier includes and the $5.99 student rate are exact, read from peacocktv.com and peacocktv.com/student that day. Apple TV’s $12.99 price and both Apple TV + Peacock bundle prices are exact, from apple.com/apple-tv-plus and tv.apple.com the same day. Paramount+ and Netflix figures came from paramountplus.com and Netflix’s own help centre that day. The Prime Video Channels price is explicitly unconfirmed — it comes from an undated Amazon newsroom post quoting a figure below Peacock’s current list price, and is rounded per our Amazon policy, and Amazon’s shopping pages don’t render for us — so we’ve flagged it as probably stale rather than restating it as fact. Promotional rates change; confirm at signup.