Apple Music's Family Plan Just Got 18% More Expensive — Here's What to Check Before You Accept It
Apple Music quietly raised its family plan to $19.99 in July 2026. If you haven't looked at your bill yet, there are four things worth checking before the next renewal.
If Apple Music is on your family's bank statement, your most recent charge was higher than you expected. On 17 July 2026, Apple raised the family plan from $16.99 to $19.99 per month — a jump of nearly 18%, or $36 extra over the course of a year. The individual plan went up too, from $10.99 to $11.99.
Apple cited rising music licensing costs, and the increase was their first since 2022. None of that makes it more welcome when it lands on your credit card.
Before you shrug and move on, it's worth spending 10 minutes on four quick checks. For some families, you might not need to pay the new price at all.
Check 1: Are you already paying for Apple One?
Apple One Family bundles Apple Music together with Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, iCloud+ with 200 GB of shared storage, and a few other services for $27.95 per month.
If your family is already subscribed to Apple One, you don't need a separate Apple Music subscription — it's included. And yet, plenty of families end up paying for both. It happens when one person originally set up Apple Music and nobody cancelled it when the household switched to Apple One.
Open your subscriptions list (iPhone → Settings → your name → Subscriptions, or your bank statement) and look for both charges. If you see Apple One and Apple Music, cancel the standalone Apple Music immediately. You've probably been double-paying for months.
SubManager's spending breakdown catches exactly this kind of overlap — if you track your subscriptions in the app, a quick look at your active services will show whether both charges are sitting there side by side.
Check 2: Does your phone carrier include Apple Music?
Several mobile operators bundle Apple Music with their higher-tier unlimited phone plans. Verizon's 5G Get More plan, for example, includes Apple Music at no extra cost.
If you're not sure whether your plan includes it, log into your carrier's app or website and look at your plan perks. Many people never activate the free services their phone plan already pays for.
This won't apply to everyone, and the specific carrier partnerships vary by country. But if you're in a market where your operator offers Apple Music as a perk, you've been paying $19.99 for something you already own.
Check 3: Is this finally the moment to reconsider Spotify?
For years, Spotify was the slightly-cheaper family option and Apple Music was the premium alternative. That's now reversed.
Spotify's family plan currently costs $21.99 per month — $2 more than Apple Music at the new price. YouTube Music's family plan sits at $18.99, making it the cheapest of the major services.
| Service | Family plan (up to 6) |
|---|---|
| YouTube Music | $18.99/month |
| Apple Music | $19.99/month |
| Spotify | $21.99/month |
| Apple One Family | $27.95/month (includes Apple Music + more) |
If your family has been on Spotify out of habit and never seriously compared, now is a reasonable moment to do it. Apple Music and Spotify are genuinely close in catalogue size and feature set these days. The main reasons to stay on Spotify tend to be its social features, cross-platform podcast integration, or the fact that everyone in the family already has years of playlists built up.
Those are real reasons. But they're worth consciously choosing, not just defaulting to.
Check 4: Set an alert for the next hike
Apple's price increase landed without much warning. One month you paid $16.99; the next, $19.99. If you weren't watching your bank statement closely, you might not have noticed until the second or third charge at the new price.
The pattern of annual or bi-annual price increases across music streaming isn't slowing down. Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and TIDAL have all raised prices in the past 18 months.
In SubManager, you can set a price alert on any subscription so you get notified the moment the charge amount changes. It doesn't undo a price increase, but it means you're making a conscious decision — keep it, switch, or cancel — rather than having the new price silently become your new normal.
The one thing to do today
If you do nothing else, spend two minutes checking whether your family is paying for Apple Music and Apple One at the same time. That's the most common and most painless fix — cancelling the duplicate saves you $19.99 a month without losing access to anything.
For everything else: the back-to-school season is a natural moment to look at what your family is actually using, what the price has become, and whether the answer is still yes.