Lifestyle

Watching Every NFL Game This Season Requires 10 Subscriptions and Costs Nearly $1,000

By Curtis Jones · September 9, 2026

In the 1990s, you needed a television and basic cable. In 2026, you need ten different streaming subscriptions and roughly $1,000 for the season. The era of turning on the TV and watching football is over — and the replacement is more expensive and more complicated than what it replaced.

The NFL’s broadcast rights are now split across Fox, CBS, NBC, ESPN, ABC, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Peacock, Paramount+, and YouTube’s NFL Sunday Ticket. No single service carries every game. No combination of two or three covers the full schedule. If you want to watch everything, here’s what it costs.

A live TV streaming service for the broadcast networks: $73 to $80/month. YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, or Fubo gets you Fox, CBS, NBC, ESPN, ABC, and NFL Network — which covers most Sunday afternoon games, Sunday Night Football, and Monday Night Football. That’s $365 to $400 for a five-month season. This is the base layer. Everything else stacks on top.

NFL Sunday Ticket for out-of-market games: $240 to $480. If your team doesn’t play in your city, you need Sunday Ticket through YouTube to watch their Sunday afternoon games. New subscribers pay $240 for the season. Returning subscribers pay $480 — double the price for loyalty. The league knows you’re not switching teams. They priced accordingly.

Amazon Prime for Thursday Night Football: $15/month. Every Thursday night game this season streams exclusively on Amazon Prime Video. No cable channel carries it. No antenna picks it up. If you already have Prime for shipping, this is included. If you don’t, it’s $75 for the season.

Peacock for exclusive games: $8 to $14/month. NBC moved select regular-season and playoff games to Peacock exclusively — meaning they don’t air on the NBC broadcast network. If one of those games involves your team, you either pay for Peacock or miss it. That’s $40 to $70 for the season.

Netflix for international and holiday games: $7 to $23/month. Netflix has the exclusive rights to the first international game this season and the Christmas Day games. A subscription you originally got for movies is now required for football.

The total: $810 to $1,050 per season. For new Sunday Ticket subscribers, the all-in streaming cost to watch every NFL game lands around $810. For returning subscribers, it’s closer to $1,050. That’s per household, per season, for the privilege of watching a sport that used to come free with a TV antenna and a $50/month cable package.

The NFL negotiated each of these deals separately because fragmentation maximizes the league’s revenue. Every platform pays a premium for exclusivity. Every fan who wants complete access pays every platform. The league earned $12.5 billion in media rights revenue in 2025. The cost was passed directly to you — one subscription at a time.