YouTube Premium is most likely to be worth it if you watch YouTube for hours each week, listen to music on it, or want videos to keep playing with your phone locked. An Individual membership costs $15.99 a month in the US and includes YouTube Music Premium, so it can replace a separate music subscription. If you only want fewer ads on regular videos, Premium Lite at $8.99 a month may be enough, and if you watch now and then, the ads may not be worth paying to remove.
What YouTube Premium costs
YouTube sells four plans in the US, with tax added on top:
- Individual: $15.99 a month.
- Family: $26.99 a month for the manager and up to five other people, six in all, who live at the same address.
- Student: $8.99 a month, with the same benefits, for full-time students at approved colleges and universities, verified through SheerID every year for up to four years.
- Premium Lite: $8.99 a month, covered below.
Individual memberships can also be bought as a prepaid 12-month plan. Annual plans don't renew on their own, can't be paused and aren't refundable, and there is no annual Family plan. YouTube says it emails members at least 30 days before a price increase.
YouTube's US sign-up pages offer eligible accounts a one-month free trial on each plan, though YouTube says trial lengths can vary. A trial needs a payment method and becomes a paid membership unless you cancel before it ends.
What Premium includes
- No ads on videos: Premium removes ads before and during videos, plus banner and search ads. Sponsorships that creators build into their own videos can still appear.
- Background play: videos and music keep playing with the screen off in the YouTube, YouTube Music and YouTube Kids mobile apps.
- Downloads: you can save videos to watch offline on mobile and in supported desktop browsers, for up to 29 days before you need to reconnect.
- YouTube Music Premium: ad-free music, music downloads and background listening.
- Extras: 1080p Premium with a higher bitrate on eligible videos, Jump ahead to skip to the point most viewers fast-forward to, queuing on phones and tablets, and picking up where you left off on another device.
Premium Lite, the cheaper option
Premium Lite removes ads from most YouTube and YouTube Kids videos and, since a February 2026 update, adds background play and downloads for most videos. Music is where it falls short: music still plays with ads and can't play in the background or download on Lite. Ads can also appear on Shorts, search results and browsing pages, and Lite doesn't include YouTube Music Premium, Jump ahead, queuing or the higher-quality video and audio.
If you rarely play music on YouTube, Lite gives you ad-free videos, background play and downloads for most of what you watch. If music is a big part of how you use YouTube, Premium is the plan that removes those ads.
The catches
- Not every ad goes away: creator sponsorships stay, and ads can still appear on live events and Primetime Channels.
- Family plan checks: members must live with the manager, can't join another family group, and can't have switched family groups in the past 12 months. YouTube can pause a member's benefits if it can't confirm they live in the same household.
- Billing route matters: if you subscribed through Apple, you cancel in your Apple account, and Apple-billed memberships can't be paused.
Cancelling or pausing
On the web, go to youtube.com/paid_memberships, select Manage membership, then Deactivate, and follow the steps to cancel. You keep the benefits until the end of the period you paid for. The same menu lets you pause instead, for one to six months, starting after the current billing cycle. Downloads stay on your device while paused but can't be played until the membership resumes.
Who should skip it
If you watch YouTube for a few minutes a day and don't mind the ads, Premium is hard to justify. If you already pay for Spotify or Apple Music and want to keep it, look at Premium Lite instead, since Lite doesn't include YouTube Music Premium.
