Subscription Statistics: What Americans Actually Pay

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Quick answer

As of August 2026, the most recent broad number is $111 a month, from coverage of CNET's 2026 survey, where people estimated their own spend. The only major study that made people itemize their subscriptions instead of just asking, C+R Research in 2022, found they actually paid $219 a month after guessing $86. So: about $111 by self-report, and roughly double that when the statements get counted.

Subscription statistics get repeated until nobody remembers where they came from. Here, every number names its source and year in the sentence, each primary is linked in the References, and the figures that failed verification are named at the bottom instead of quietly reused. Everything was checked in August 2026.

Key numbers at a glance

  • People who itemized their actual subscriptions were paying $219 a month, after first guessing $86 (C+R Research, 2022).
  • Self-reported spend averages $111 a month, up 23% in a year, as reported by coverage of CNET's 2026 survey.
  • The average person has 3.4 active paid subscriptions (Self Financial, 2026).
  • 59.9% of people have at least one paid subscription going unused each month (Self Financial, 2026).
  • 52% of people surveyed have canceled or downgraded a streaming service because of a price increase (Reviews.org, 2026).
  • Premium streaming churn held at a 4.6% weighted monthly average across 2025 (Antenna, 2026).

How much does the average person spend on subscriptions per month?

It depends on how you ask, and the gap between asking methods is the single most useful fact on this page. Surveys that ask people to estimate their own spend land between $90 and $111 a month. The one major study that audited subscriptions line by line found $219.

C+R Research ran that audit in May 2022 with 1,000 consumers, split evenly across Gen Z, millennials, Gen X, and boomers. Asked to estimate first, participants guessed $86 a month. Then they itemized what they actually paid for. The real figure came out at $219 a month, $133 higher than the guess, roughly two and a half times what people believed they were paying.

CNET runs the big self-report survey annually. The 2025 wave (YouGov, 2,440 US adults, late April 2025) put average spend at $90 a month, $1,080 a year, with millennials highest at $101. The 2026 wave reportedly found $111, up 23%. "Reportedly" is deliberate: CNET's own page was unreachable when we verified, so the $111 comes from news coverage of the survey and its methodology is unconfirmed.

The 2026 number is at least internally consistent: $90 plus 23% is almost exactly $111. For streaming alone, Deloitte's Digital Media Trends (19th edition, published March 2025, fielded October 2024) measured $69 a month across an average of four video services, up 13% year over year. The 2026 edition, fielded in late 2025, found streaming fans paying $71 a month across four services and everyone else paying $56 across three.

Study Year Method Average monthly spend
C+R Research 2022 Itemized audit: 1,000 consumers listed their actual subscriptions $219 (vs $86 first guess)
CNET / YouGov 2025 Self-report survey, 2,440 US adults $90
CNET, as reported by coverage 2026 Self-report survey; methodology not yet verifiable $111
Deloitte, Digital Media Trends 19th ed. 2025 Self-report survey, 3,595 consumers; streaming video only $69 across 4 services

The safest sentence to repeat: people who guess say around $100 a month, and the study that counted found about double. Your own statement settles it, which is what the subscription cost calculator is for.

How many subscriptions does the average person have?

The freshest count is 3.4 active paid subscriptions per person, from Self Financial's March 2026 survey of 1,272 US adults. CNET's 2025 wave found 80% of US adults paid for at least one subscription in the past year. For streaming specifically, Deloitte's 2026 study puts 90% of US households at one paid video service or more, with subscribers averaging four.

Reviews.org's June 2026 streaming survey agrees on the shape: the most common single answer, from 24% of respondents, was exactly three services. One caution: every count here is self-reported, and C+R's audit showed people underestimate their spend by more than half. Read a remembered 3.4 as a floor, not a ceiling.

What are the most common subscriptions?

Streaming television leads. In CNET's 2025 survey, 61% of US adults paid for streaming TV, followed by e-commerce subscriptions such as Amazon Prime memberships, then music; the published article names the order but doesn't print percentages for second and third place. Deloitte's 90%-of-households figure says the same thing from the household side.

The long tail is growing too. Antenna's Q3 2025 report found about one-third of US subscribers have used a specialty streaming service (the anime, horror, and British-TV tier), up nearly 70% compared with two years earlier.

How many subscriptions go unused or forgotten?

This is where the numbers stop being trivia. In Self Financial's March 2026 survey, 59.9% of people had at least one paid subscription going unused each month. (You will see 54.9% circulating; that is a prior edition's figure.) The same survey found an average of 2.6 unused subscriptions per person, worth $26.79 a month.

Free trials do steady damage: 70% of Self's participants had forgotten to cancel a trial that converted to paid, which the survey says "has cost participants $34.31 in total." C+R Research found 42% of people kept paying for a subscription after they stopped using it, and 74% agreed it's easy to forget recurring monthly charges (both 2022).

CNET's surveys put a yearly price on the forgetting: $17 a month on unused subscriptions in the 2025 wave, $204 a year by CNET's math, and roughly $252 a year in the 2026 wave as reported by coverage. Bankrate's February 2022 survey (YouGov, 2,497 US adults) adds the sharpest stat: 51% of US adults with a subscription or membership account have incurred unwanted charges, from converted trials, accidental signups, or subscriptions they forgot they had.

In the same Bankrate survey, 34% said canceling a subscription or stopping its automatic payments was difficult, including 10% who called it very difficult. Deciding what to do with a half-used subscription is its own problem, and the subscription audit is the calm version of that decision.

How are people handling their streaming subscriptions?

Watchfully. In Reviews.org's June 2026 survey of 1,000 Americans, 48% had subscribed to a service for one specific show and canceled afterward, and 55% had resubscribed to a service they previously canceled. 43% said they were likely to cancel at least one streaming service within the next three months.

Price increases have visible consequences: 52% have canceled or downgraded because of one. (A 49% version of this stat circulates; in the actual report, 49% is a different finding, the share who feel streaming content has gotten worse over two years.) And 38% moved from an ad-free plan to an ad-supported tier in the past year.

Deloitte's numbers rhyme with that. In the 19th edition (2025), 54% of streaming subscribers had at least one ad-supported tier, up from 46%; 47% said they pay too much, and 41% said the content isn't worth the price. CNET's 2025 wave found 61% of US adults reconsidering subscription spending over the economy, 26% already canceling some, and 11% using the rotation method: subscribe, watch, cancel, repeat.

How often do people cancel? The churn numbers

Antenna measures churn from actual transaction data rather than surveys, the cleanest read on behavior. Across 2025, premium streaming services lost a weighted average of 4.6% of subscribers per month, a steadier year than the ones before. Growth slowed to 7%, the category's first single-digit year, from 12% in 2024.

Specialty streaming churns faster: 6.6% as of Antenna's Q3 2025 report, and between 6.6% and 9.2% in any given month since 2023. (The "7 to 9%" figure you may have seen is a rounding of that range.)

Antenna also tracks what it calls serial churners: people who have canceled three or more premium streaming services within the past two years. By the end of 2023, nearly one in four streaming consumers qualified, up 42% in a year, and this group drove 56.5 million cancellations that year. Canceling isn't fringe behavior; it's how a quarter of the market shops.

Survey numbers look wildly higher, and the difference is definitional. Deloitte's 2026 survey found 41% of consumers had canceled a paid streaming service in the past six months, and 22% had canceled and returned to the same service. That's any-cancellation-in-six-months, self-reported; Antenna's 4.6% is a monthly rate from transaction records. Different instruments, different readings, which brings us to the last section.

How to read these numbers

Subscription statistics come from three kinds of studies, and most misquotes come from mixing them.

Self-report surveys (CNET, Deloitte, Reviews.org, Bankrate, Self Financial) ask people to remember. They're cheap enough to run every year, so they produce the freshest numbers, and they run low: memory misses small charges, annual renewals, and anything that bills quietly. C+R measured the miss directly, and it was $133 a month.

Statement audits (C+R Research) count instead of asking: participants itemize what they actually pay. Closest to ground truth for spend, but rare and aging; the canonical audit is from 2022, and as of August 2026 nobody has repeated it at that scale.

Transaction panels (Antenna) watch real sign-ups and cancellations in purchase data. They record actions rather than memories, which makes them the best read on behavior over time, but they only see the services in the panel and say nothing about how anyone feels.

Four practical rules follow. Never compare a monthly churn rate with a canceled-in-six-months survey answer; both are real, and they can't share a chart. When two figures disagree, check the method before the year. When a number triples between editions of one survey (Self's unused count went from 0.8 to 2.6 in a year), suspect a changed question before changed behavior. And read any self-reported total as a floor.

A few widely shared numbers are missing from this page on purpose. A "$237.33 average monthly spend" circulates through stat aggregators with no reachable methodology and traces back to a 2018 study. A "68% on ad tiers" figure gets attributed to Deloitte but appears in neither Deloitte edition we verified. A millennials-$125-a-month claim attributed to CNET's 2026 survey shows up in no coverage we could reach. When a number can't be traced, it doesn't go here.

Every figure above is someone else's average. The number that actually matters is yours, and it lives in your statement. ReNood reads a statement you upload, finds the repeating charges, and totals them, no bank login required.

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FAQ

What is the average cost of a subscription?

For a single subscription there is no reliable all-category average as of August 2026; studies measure totals instead. The closest per-service figure is streaming: Deloitte's 19th edition measured $69 a month across an average of four video services, which works out to roughly $17 per service. Totals are the better-studied number: $90 to $111 a month self-reported (CNET, 2025 and 2026) and $219 audited (C+R Research, 2022).

What are common monthly subscriptions?

Streaming TV is the most common paid subscription: 61% of US adults paid for it in CNET's 2025 survey, and Deloitte's 2026 study found 90% of US households have at least one paid video service. CNET places e-commerce subscriptions, such as Amazon Prime memberships, second and music third, without printing exact percentages for those two.

How much does a subscription cost per month?

If you mean everything combined: self-reports average $111 a month, as reported by coverage of CNET's 2026 survey, and the one audited study found $219 (C+R Research, 2022). If you mean one service, prices vary too much for a useful average, though streaming works out to roughly $17 per service in Deloitte's 19th-edition data. The price on the service's own pricing page beats any average.

How much do you spend on subscriptions?

That's the thread question people actually post, and the true answer is personal. The averages say to expect a surprise: people guessed $86 and turned out to pay $219 in C+R Research's 2022 audit, and self-reports run around $111 (coverage of CNET's 2026 survey). The useful move is to stop estimating: add yours up once with the subscription calculator, or straight from your statement.

Update log

  • 2026-08-28: research completed; every figure verified against a primary source or flagged in the fact ledger.
  • 2026-09-04: first published draft.

This guide is educational, not financial or legal advice. Details change; check the linked sources for anything that matters to your situation.

References