YouTube Premium's US price jumped from $13.99 to $15.99 a month this year, and roughly half of the cancellation threads I read afterward turned out to have nothing to do with the price at all — they were people stuck on a cancel button that visibly does nothing on an iPhone.
Quick answer
Cancelling YouTube Premium does not delete your saved playlists — they stay on your account and remain visible on the free tier. What you lose is offline downloads, background play, ad-free viewing, and the YouTube Music Premium bundle, and only once the current billing period actually ends. There's no refund and no early cutoff for the days between cancelling and that end date. Where you cancel depends on how you're billed: web and Android go through youtube.com/paid_memberships or Google Play, while iPhone users billed through Apple use Settings, and iPhone users billed through Google have to switch to a computer or Android device to cancel at all.
Why the iOS cancel button doesn't always work
The most common YouTube Premium support complaint isn't about losing content — it's about a cancel button that seems to do nothing. Google's own help page spells out the reason: "iOS users who are billed through Google must cancel using a non-iOS device (for example, a computer)." If you originally signed up inside the YouTube iOS app itself, you're billed through Apple, and cancellation happens entirely inside Settings, not the YouTube app. If you signed up any other way — website, Android, TV — you're billed through Google, and the iOS cancel path in the app simply isn't there for you. One Apple Support Community thread captures the resulting frustration well: "I paid for YouTube Premium 6 months ago and never got it. They keep billing me! Just want to cancel now!" That's almost always a billing-source mismatch, not a broken app — whether it's an accident of Apple's in-app-purchase rules or a design that happens to keep undecided subscribers paying a little longer while they hunt for the right screen, the outcome looks identical from the wrong device.
Check which one applies to you before doing anything else. On the iPhone, open Settings > [your name] > Media & Purchases (or the equivalent purchase history screen). If YouTube Premium shows up there, you're Apple-billed. If it doesn't, you're Google-billed and need a different device.
How to cancel on the web
Go to youtube.com/paid_memberships, click Deactivate or Continue to cancel, pick a cancellation reason, click Next, then confirm with Yes, cancel. This is also the path for any iOS-Google-billed subscriber who can't cancel from their phone — a laptop or desktop browser works fine.
How to cancel on Android
Tap your profile picture in the YouTube app, then Paid memberships, select the membership, tap Continue to cancel, choose a reason, tap Next, then Yes, cancel. If you're billed through Google Play specifically, you can also cancel from inside your Google Play account settings directly.
How to cancel on iPhone or iPad
If you're Apple-billed: open Settings, tap Purchases and memberships, select the membership, tap Manage Apple Subscriptions, tap YouTube Premium, then tap Cancel. If you're Google-billed, this path doesn't exist for you — use youtube.com/paid_memberships on a computer or the Android steps above instead. One more wrinkle: pausing a membership (rather than cancelling outright) is only available to Google-billed accounts — Apple-billed subscribers don't get that option.
Cancelling a family plan
YouTube Premium can be shared with up to five other people in the same household, plus the manager. Only the family manager can remove individual members or cancel the whole plan: sign in to the manager's Google Account, go to youtube.com/paid_memberships, select Manage membership, click Edit next to Family sharing, pick a member's name, and click Remove member to drop just that person. Cancelling the entire plan follows the same individual-cancellation flow, but access runs to the end of the current billing cycle for everyone, and after that "all family members will lose access to the paid membership, but will still keep their Google Accounts." If you're the manager, tell the household before you cancel — nobody in the group gets an automatic in-app notice, and the family plan's own address and household rules are worth a read if a member move is what actually prompted this, rather than a full cancellation.
What you actually keep — and what disappears
The one thing people worry about most is safe: saved playlists are a base account feature, not a Premium perk, so they stay on your account and remain browsable on the free tier after cancellation. Google doesn't have a single page that states this in so many words, but it follows from how playlists are built into the free product, backed up by user reports in YouTube's own community forums saying their playlists survived cancellation.
What ends the moment your paid period lapses:
- Ad-free viewing — pre-roll, mid-roll, and banner ads come back.
- Background play — the "play with the screen off" behavior on the YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids apps stops working.
- The YouTube Music Premium bundle — ad-free listening, offline song downloads, and 256kbps audio quality in YouTube Music all end with the same membership, since it's bundled at no extra cost, not billed separately.
- Downloaded videos — the app can no longer play them back once the membership is inactive; the files aren't necessarily deleted from storage, but playback is locked without an active membership.
Even before you cancel, downloads have a built-in expiration: they only play offline for up to 29 days before the device needs to reconnect to the internet, or as little as 48 hours in some countries. Miss that window and "it will be removed from your device during the next sync" regardless of your membership status.
The no-refund part people miss
Cancelling stops future billing — "you won't be charged again unless you re-subscribe" — but it doesn't end your benefits early. Access runs to the end of the billing period you already paid for, no grace period beyond that. There's no partial refund either: "You won't be refunded for the period between when you cancel and when your membership ends," and "Refunds are not available for partially used prepaid plans," per YouTube's own refund policy. The one exception is a processed refund on a specific payment, which does cut off access immediately — that's different from a plain cancellation, which lets the current period run out.
This is worth knowing right now given the price moves: the US individual plan went from $13.99 to $15.99/month in 2026, family jumped from $22.99 to $26.99, and international prices are rising roughly 10–15% from each subscriber's next billing date on or after September 23, 2026. If a hike just showed up on your statement and you're weighing whether to keep paying, cancel before your next renewal date, not after — there's no partial credit for the unused days either way, so timing it to land right before the charge is the only lever you have — none of this is a YouTube-specific trick, it's the standard subscription-billing script, but it's worth saying out loud instead of assuming the fine print somehow works in your favor. For the full cancellation flow with screenshots, YouTube's own help page is the canonical source.
If YouTube Premium is one of several renewals you're trying to keep straight, the same billing-source confusion — web versus Apple versus Google Play — shows up on Spotify and Netflix too, and it's the exact problem a renewal-date list in Subnesio is built to catch before the charge lands, not after.
Cancel from the device that actually bills you, and the rest sorts itself out on its own schedule.
