Two federal price indexes cover streaming. The one named for it leaves Netflix out

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a price index called cable, satellite, and live streaming television service. It does not measure Netflix.

That is not an inference about scope. It is written into the item's own definition, in the factsheet the Bureau publishes for telecommunications services, which lists what the index prices and then lists what it does not: "Excluded are pre-recorded video on demand subscription streaming services and satellite radio service."

So the government does publish a price index that covers your Netflix subscription. It is a different one, it sits three levels down in the recreation branch of the consumer basket, and until February 2023 it was called rental of video discs and other media.

How much do streaming services cost right now?

Netflix runs from $8.99 a month for the advertising tier to $26.99 for Premium, with the ad-free Standard plan at $19.99. Disney+ is $11.99 with ads and $18.99 without. YouTube TV, which carries live channels rather than an on-demand library, is $82.99 a month.

Those figures come off each company's own page rather than a comparison table. Netflix publishes its United States plans in its help centre: $8.99 for Standard with ads, $19.99 for Standard, $26.99 for Premium, with an extra member outside the household costing $7.99 with advertising or $9.99 without. Disney's subscription page gives Disney+ with ads at $11.99 and Disney+ Premium at $18.99 a month or $189.99 for the year, and prices the bundles alongside: Disney+ and Hulu together at $12.99, and Disney+, Hulu and ESPN Unlimited at $35.99. ESPN Unlimited bought as an add-on is $29.99 by itself. YouTube TV lists its main plan at $82.99 a month and a narrower Sports Plan at $64.99.

The spread is the first thing worth noticing. One live television service costs more than four Netflix advertising tiers, and the gap between the cheapest and the dearest single subscription on that short list runs better than nine to one. A household holding three or four of these is at a very different number depending on which three or four.

That is also why the aggregate question is harder than it looks, and why it is worth asking what the federal statistical system says about it. The answer depends entirely on which index you open.

Which price index actually measures a streaming subscription?

Subscription and rental of video and video games, series SS62055, which sits inside purchase, subscription, and rental of video in the recreation branch of the Consumer Price Index. The item most people would reach for, cable, satellite, and live streaming television service, prices television service delivered by a provider and excludes on-demand subscriptions by its own definition.

The word doing the work in that longer title is live. The Bureau's definition covers "subscriptions to cable, satellite, and live streaming TV" and counts base plan prices, premium networks, rental equipment, service fees and taxes, together with "streaming video services provided by TV providers". A live channel bundle delivered over the internet belongs there. A library of pre-recorded programmes does not, and the exclusion says so in as many words.

The same exclusion appears one branch over. The internet services item, which measures what households pay for broadband access, states that "fees for online activities such as music or video downloads, streaming media (both music and video), fees for online gaming, and subscriptions to online newspapers or magazines are all excluded", and then repeats the point for pre-recorded video on demand. The Bureau has drawn the line twice, in two separate definitions, in the same document.

Where the spending lands instead is a matter of the Bureau's own item file. Recreation contains video and audio, which contains six items at the next level down: televisions, the cable and live streaming item, other video equipment, purchase and subscription and rental of video, audio equipment, and recorded music and music subscriptions. The fourth of those splits again, into video discs and other media, and subscription and rental of video and video games. That last one is the streaming index.

Its name is the tell. In February 2023, with the publication of January data, the Bureau renamed three of these series. Cable and satellite television service picked up the words live streaming. Video discs and other media, including rental of video became purchase, subscription, and rental of video. And rental of video discs and other media became subscription and rental of video and video games.

Read that sequence again. The index that tracks the streaming economy carried a name about renting discs until three years ago. The index that acquired the word streaming in the same round of edits is the one that excludes the services most people mean by it.

How fast have streaming subscription prices risen?

The subscription and rental of video and video games index stood at 196.688 in July 2026 against 173.492 in July 2025, a rise of 13.4 percent. Over the same twelve months the all items index rose 3.4 percent. On annual averages, which smooth out a noisy series, the streaming item rose 9.9 percent in 2025 against 2.6 percent for everything else.

Set against 2019 the gap is narrower than the last year suggests. The index was 136.848 in July 2019 and 196.688 in July 2026, a rise of 43.7 percent, while all items went from 256.571 to 333.918, or 30.1 percent. Faster, then, over seven years, but not by a multiple. The multiple is recent.

The shape of the series explains why. From July 2019 to July 2021 it barely moved at all: 136.848, then 136.921, then 137.077, which is two years and two tenths of one percent. Those were the subscriber acquisition years, and whatever else was happening in the streaming business, list prices in the Bureau's sample were close to frozen. The twelve-month changes since then read 7.4 percent to July 2022, 5.1 percent, 5.9 percent, 6.0 percent, and then 13.4 percent.

One caution belongs here rather than at the bottom of the page, because it qualifies every number in this section. This is a small, volatile, unadjusted index. It fell 2.7 percent between July and August 2025, rose 19.5 percent between November and December 2025, and fell 8.7 percent again in February 2026. A twelve-month change calculated from a different pair of months would look materially different: December to December is 29.0 percent, and the July to July figure is 13.4 percent. Neither is wrong. The July comparison is used here because July 2026 is the most recent published reading, and the annual averages are given alongside precisely so the headline does not rest on one month.

What happened to October 2025?

Nothing was published. Every series discussed here carries no value at all for October 2025, and the Bureau attaches the same footnote to each: data unavailable due to the 2025 lapse in appropriations. There is no estimate and no interpolation in the official series. The month is simply absent.

This is visible in the raw data rather than in the commentary about it. Request any of these series from the Bureau's public data interface and the October 2025 record returns a hyphen where a number should be, with the footnote attached. All items, cable and live streaming, streaming subscriptions, televisions: the gap runs across the whole index.

It matters for anything built on top of the series. A twelve-month change spanning that month is calculated from eleven monthly observations rather than twelve, and any statement of the form "prices rose every month last year" cannot be checked for one of them. The 2025 annual averages the Bureau publishes are computed without it too.

It is also the single most checkable claim in this piece, and the least reported. A reader who wants to test everything else here can start by pulling one series and looking at the October row.

Why is the cable index barely moving while streaming climbs?

Because the two indexes measure different products bought by different households. Cable, satellite, and live streaming television service rose 2.8 percent over the year to July 2026, from 595.055 to 611.641, which is below the 3.4 percent headline rate. The streaming subscription item rose 13.4 percent over the same period.

That is a spread of more than ten percentage points between two series that a casual reader would take to be the same subject. Nothing here says which one is a better guide to what a household pays, because they are answers to different questions. The cable index prices a television service from a provider, with equipment and fees and taxes rolled in. The streaming index prices a subscription to a library.

What can be said is that the cable index has been the slower of the two for some time. Over the seven years from July 2019 it rose 28.5 percent, from 475.860 to 611.641, which is a shade under the 30.1 percent recorded for all items. A category with a durable reputation for above-inflation price rises has, on the Bureau's own measure, run slightly below inflation across those seven years.

The hardware moved the other way entirely, and much harder. The televisions index was 153.785 in July 2019 and 95.457 in July 2026, a fall of 37.9 percent. The screen got cheaper by more than a third over the period in which what plays on it got dearer by 43.7 percent. Those two facts sit in adjacent rows of the same table.

What do the CPI weights say about cord cutting?

They show the substitution happening in the spending data rather than in the price data. Cable, satellite, and live streaming television service carried 1.192 percent of the consumer basket in December 2020 and 0.606 percent in December 2025, roughly halving in five years. The item holding streaming subscriptions went the other way, from 0.076 percent to 0.188 percent.

Relative importance is the Bureau's measure of how much of household spending an item represents, and it is recalculated annually from expenditure data. It is not a price. It is the answer to a different question: of every dollar a household spends, how much goes here.

Item, CPI-U relative importance	Dec 2020	Dec 2022	Dec 2024	Dec 2025
Video and audio	1.537	1.266	1.060	1.053
Cable, satellite, and live streaming television service	1.192	0.865	0.653	0.606
Purchase, subscription, and rental of video	0.076	0.117	0.156	0.188
Recorded music and music subscriptions	0.045	0.060	0.075	0.082
Televisions	0.091	0.142	0.091	0.107

Figures for December 2020 and 2022 use the earlier item titles, which the Bureau's rename notice maps to the current ones. The series are continuous.

Two movements run through that table. The first is the collapse in the cable weight, which lost half its share of the basket in five years and shed a further 0.047 points in the single year to December 2025. The second is the rise in the streaming and music items, which between them went from 0.121 percent to 0.270 percent over the same period. Together the video and audio branch still shrank, from 1.537 to 1.053, because what households gave up on television service was larger than what they took up in subscriptions.

That last point is the one the price indexes on their own would hide. Streaming subscriptions are getting more expensive quickly. The category they belong to is getting smaller as a share of spending anyway, because the thing they replaced cost more.

Does any of this move the inflation rate?

No, and the arithmetic is not close. Purchase, subscription, and rental of video, the item containing streaming subscriptions, carried 0.188 percent of the CPI-U basket in December 2025 and rose 7.8 percent over the year to July 2026. Multiplying one by the other gives a contribution of roughly 0.015 percentage points to a headline rate of 3.4 percent.

That approximation is ours, computed from the published weight and the published index change rather than taken from the Bureau, which calculates effects on the index by its own method. It is the right order of magnitude and it settles the question. Even the larger cable item, at 0.606 percent of the basket, contributed something in the region of 0.017 points at its 2.8 percent rate.

For context on what does move the number, the July 2026 news release puts all items up 3.4 percent over twelve months, energy up 14.7 percent, food up 3.0 percent, and shelter accounting for roughly two thirds of the monthly increase on its own. Shelter is a third of the basket. Streaming is a rounding error in it.

Both things are true at once, and holding them together is the whole point. A household that carries four subscriptions is paying noticeably more for them than it did a year ago, and that experience is real and correctly measured at 13.4 percent. The same rise is invisible in the inflation rate because almost nobody spends enough on it to matter against rent.

Frequently asked questions

Which CPI series should I look at for streaming prices? Subscription and rental of video and video games, series identifier CUUR0000SS62055 for the not seasonally adjusted CPI-U. Its parent item, purchase, subscription, and rental of video, is CUUR0000SERA04 and also contains physical media. Cable, satellite, and live streaming television service, CUUR0000SERA02, excludes on-demand subscriptions by definition.

Does the streaming index only cover video? No. The item is titled subscription and rental of video and video games, and video game subscriptions and rentals sit inside it alongside streaming video. The Bureau does not publish a split between the two, so no figure in this piece is presented as measuring streaming video alone.

Why is there no October 2025 figure? The Bureau footnotes the missing month in every affected series as data unavailable due to the 2025 lapse in appropriations. No value was published and none was estimated after the fact.

Is cable really cheaper than streaming now? That is not what these indexes say. They measure the rate of change in prices, not the level, so a slower moving index does not mean a cheaper product. On the published list prices above, one live television service costs $82.99 a month while an on-demand subscription runs from $8.99 to $26.99.

How current are the prices quoted here? They were read from each company's own pricing page on 20 August 2026. List prices change without notice and several of the pages also advertise introductory rates, which are excluded here in favour of the standing monthly price.