YouTube TV is cable without the cable company. Same live channels, same sports, same monthly bill. And the bill has a habit of climbing a few months in, because the price you sign up at is not the price you keep paying.
This page is the money. Every price below comes from YouTube TV’s own pricing pages. I checked them on October 8, 2026. What each plan lists for, the promotions stacked on top of it, whether a free trial is open right now, and how to shut the charge off when you have had enough.
One note before the numbers. Promotions rotate on their own schedule. The list price is the stable fact. The promotional price is a snapshot. Do not build a budget on it.
What YouTube TV costs right now
There is one main plan and four narrower ones. When people say “YouTube TV,” they almost always mean the main plan. It is also the expensive one.
| Plan | List price | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Base Plan | $82.99/mo | 100+ channels, local broadcast stations, unlimited DVR |
| Sports + News | $71.99/mo | 50+ sports and news channels, locals included |
| Sports | $64.99/mo | About 30 sports channels plus your local stations |
| Entertainment | $54.99/mo | Cable entertainment, news, kids and lifestyle networks |
| Spanish Plan | $34.99/mo | A Spanish-language package that needs no English plan |
The cheaper plans look like the base plan with extras. They are the base plan with channels removed. Each genre plan keeps one slice of the lineup, hands you the local stations, and drops the rest. So if your household watches both games and regular cable shows, the slice you lose is exactly why the price looks low.
Add-ons sit on top and bill separately. 4K Plus is $9.99 a month and opens up 4K on the handful of channels that broadcast that way. NFL Sunday Ticket is the big one. It runs $378 for the season, or twelve payments of $31.50. And it only pays off if you want out-of-market games.
What the base plan actually includes
Before you price the alternatives, know what the $82.99 already covers. A cable bill hides a lot of small line items. YouTube TV folds most of them into one number.
You get more than 100 channels. That includes your local ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox stations. You get unlimited cloud DVR, with recordings kept for nine months.
You get up to six household accounts, each with its own login. Three of them can stream at once. And there is no box rental fee, no DVR fee, and no broadcast fee.
That last part matters more than it sounds. On cable, those extras add twenty or thirty dollars. The advertised rate is not the bill.
Taken together, the base plan is a fair price for what it is. That does not make it cheap. It makes the comparison honest, which is a different thing.
It is also why the genre plans exist. They let YouTube TV advertise a lower starting price without cutting the price of the main plan. The main plan did not get cheaper. It got a cheaper neighbor.
The price on the sign is not the price you pay
New subscribers rarely pay $82.99 in month one. YouTube TV runs a rolling set of first-month and first-year discounts. The size depends on the plan and the week you happen to sign up.
That is not a scam. But it produces a very specific disappointment. You hand over a number you saw in an ad. Three months later, the bill jumps to the list price with no fresh warning.
And that jump is not a price increase. It is the promotion expiring, on the date it was always going to expire.
Is there a free trial?
Sometimes, and the length moves around. Ten-day trials show up on some of YouTube TV’s own pages. Twenty-one-day trials show up on others. And the offer can vanish for weeks at a time.
Eligibility is tied to your Google account, not your card. So if you have held a YouTube TV membership before, the trial usually will not return. Waiting does not reset it.
But a live-TV trial is more useful than it sounds. It is long enough to test one thing. Do the channels you want come through at your address?
Run that test on a real game night, not a quiet afternoon. Live sports are where a streaming stack shows its seams.
Who this is for
Live sports are the reason most people stay. If your weekends revolve around out-of-market games, YouTube TV carries them without a cable contract.
Local news is the second reason. An antenna picks up your broadcast stations for free. It cannot pick up ESPN or the cable news networks.
If you watch neither, this is the wrong product. An antenna and one cheap streaming plan cover most households. So check what you actually watch before you check the price.
Pause, switch, or cancel
There are three exits here, and people reach for the wrong one. Each does something different to your money and your recordings.
| Move | What it does |
|---|---|
| Switch plan | Keeps the account and your DVR. The new price starts at your next billing cycle |
| Pause | Stops billing for a set window. Then it restarts on its own, at the current plan price |
| Cancel | Ends the membership. Access runs out at the end of the period you paid for |
The pause row is the trap. A pause feels like a cancel. It is not one. It is a nap, and the charge wakes up on schedule.
So if you have decided to leave for good, cancel. Do not pause and hope.
Switching, on the other hand, is the move people forget. If the bill climbed and the service still earns its place, stepping down a tier beats closing the account.
How to cancel YouTube TV
Cancelling is the easy half, and it is the mirror image of signing up. There is no retention call to sit through and no contract to break.
On the web, sign in to YouTube TV. Open Settings, then Membership, then cancel. The same screen is where you switch plans. It is also where you pause.
YouTube TV bills through Google. So the membership also shows up in your Google account’s subscription list. If you cancel in one place and a charge still lands, check the other.
Cancelling stops the next payment. It does not refund the current month. You keep access until the period you already paid for runs out.
For the full version of this problem, the step-by-step guide to cancelling any subscription walks the Apple, Google, Amazon and direct-billing paths together.
What people get wrong
| Assumption | What is actually true |
|---|---|
| The promo price is the price | It is a first-few-months price. The list price takes over on a date that is easy to miss |
| All the plans are the base plan plus extras | The narrower plans are the base lineup with channels taken out |
| Pausing is the same as cancelling | Pause restarts the charge by itself. Only cancel ends it |
| Cancelling loses everything you recorded | Your DVR library goes when the membership ends, so save anything you care about first |
| Sunday Ticket comes with the plan | It is a separate charge. Cancelling YouTube TV drops it too |
The DVR row is the one that stings. Unlimited cloud DVR is a real advantage over a cable box, and it is also the thing you cannot pack up and take with you. Recordings live inside the membership, so they leave when it does.
None of these are secrets. They are just spread across a help center nobody reads until something goes wrong. The pattern is the same everywhere. The sign-up page is short, and the fine print lives in the fine print.
What I would do
If you are signing up, run the math on the list price, not the promo. If the full $82.99 looks fine, go ahead. If it only looked fine at the promo number, the discount was doing the persuading, not the service.
If the bill just climbed, check the tier before you cancel. Stepping down beats leaving. Moving from the base plan to Sports or Entertainment keeps your locals and your DVR, and it can cut twenty to thirty dollars a month without closing the account.
And if you are leaving for good, cancel before the next billing date, not after. The service runs to the end of the period you paid for either way. So paying for one more month buys you nothing.
One last thing. The cheapest YouTube TV plan is the one you cancel on time. Nobody pays $82.99 because the service tricked them. They pay it because cancelling slid down the to-do list, and the list never got shorter.