Claude API Pricing in 2026: Every Model per Million Tokens, and What Pro and Max Cost

Published 26 September 2026 · Every price below was read from Anthropic's pricing documentation, the Claude plans page and the Claude Help Center on 26 September 2026, four days after Claude Opus 5.5 launched.

The Claude API costs between $1 and $10 per million input tokens and between $5 and $50 per million output tokens on Anthropic's current models: Claude Haiku 4.5 at $1 and $5, Claude Sonnet 5 at $2 and $10, Claude Opus 5.5 at $4 and $20, and Claude Fable 5.1 at $10 and $50. Cached input is billed at a small fraction of those rates, the Batch API halves them, and none of the current models charges a premium for long context. Claude's apps are priced separately from the API: Free is $0, Pro is $20 a month ($17 a month billed annually), and Max is $100 or $200 a month for five or twenty times Pro's usage.

Those rates are the easy part. What decides a Claude bill is how many tokens each request carries, and in a multi-turn product that number grows with every turn, because the whole conversation is sent again each time. The worked example further down shows a 40-turn chat on Sonnet 5 costing $1.09 without prompt caching and $0.29 with it, from the same rate card.

Claude API price per million tokens, current models

All figures are US dollars per million tokens, from Anthropic's pricing documentation. Claude Mythos 5.1 carries the same rates as Fable 5.1.

Opus 5.5, released on 22 September 2026, is the change most pricing pages have not caught up with yet. Anthropic's launch post puts its input and output rates 20% below Opus 5 ($5 and $25) and its cache reads 60% below ($0.20 against $0.50). Sonnet 5 launched on 30 June 2026 at an introductory $2 and $10, and Anthropic made that price permanent in August.

Choosing between them on price alone is simple arithmetic: Sonnet 5 costs half of Opus 5.5 per token, Haiku 4.5 costs half of Sonnet 5, and Fable 5.1 costs two and a half times Opus 5.5. Sonnet 5 is the default model in the Free and Pro apps. Which model is good enough for a given job is a quality question the rate card cannot answer, so run your own prompts through two adjacent tiers before committing a workload to either.

Older models still on the price sheet

Anthropic still lists earlier models, and several of them cost more than their replacements.

A workload still pinned to Opus 4.1 pays $15 and $75; the same tokens on Opus 5.5 cost 73% less. A workload on Sonnet 4.6 pays $3 and $15, so moving it to Sonnet 5 cuts the token bill by a third, although a model change is a quality decision as well as a price one and deserves the same evaluation as any other.

What one request actually bills

Every request is billed as input tokens plus output tokens, and input is more than the user's latest message. Anthropic's context window documentation lists what counts: the system prompt, every message in the messages array (including tool results, images and documents), the tool definitions, and Claude's own earlier output. In a conversation, "previous turns are preserved completely", which means turn 40 pays again for turns 1 to 39.

Thinking tokens are billed as output. The extended thinking documentation reports them in usage.output_tokens_details.thinking_tokens as part of the billed output, so a reasoning-heavy request can cost several times what its visible answer suggests. On Opus 4.5 and later, Sonnet 4.6 and later, and the Fable and Mythos models, earlier thinking blocks also stay in the conversation and count toward the context window like any other input, while Haiku models and older Opus and Sonnet models have them stripped automatically.

The tokenizer matters too. Anthropic's Opus 4.7 announcement says its updated tokenizer can map the same input to roughly 1.0 to 1.35 times as many tokens depending on content, with the per-token price unchanged. When you compare a bill across model generations, count tokens rather than characters, using the token counting endpoint before you send and the usage fields on every response after.

When prompt caching pays for itself

Prompt caching stores a prompt prefix so that later requests read it instead of paying full input price for it. The prompt caching documentation sets the multipliers against the base input rate: a 5-minute cache write costs 1.25 times, a 1-hour cache write costs 2 times, and a cache read costs 0.1 times. Opus 5.5 reads at 0.05 times and Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 at 0.025 times, which is why their cache-read prices sit so close to Sonnet 5's.

The break-even follows directly. Two requests sharing a 5-minute cached prefix pay 1.35 times the prefix instead of 2 times, so caching saves money from the first reuse. A 1-hour write pays 2.1 times across two requests against 2 times uncached, so it loses on one reuse and wins from the second. The 1-hour cache is for traffic that returns after more than five minutes but less than an hour, such as a user who pauses between messages; the 5-minute cache suits rapid turns and agent loops.

Four details decide whether caching works in practice:

• Minimum length. A prefix shorter than the model's minimum is not cached, and the API returns no error. The minimum is 512 tokens on Opus 5.5, Opus 5 and Fable 5.1, 1,024 tokens on Sonnet 5 and Sonnet 4.6, and 4,096 tokens on Haiku 4.5.
• Order of invalidation. The cache follows the order tools, then system, then messages. Changing a tool definition invalidates everything after it, and adding an image or changing tool_choice invalidates the message cache.
• Breakpoints. A request can carry up to four cache breakpoints, and automatic caching (a top-level cache_control setting) uses one of them and moves forward as the conversation grows.
• Rate limits. Cache hits do not count against your rate limit; only uncached tokens do.

Check cache_read_input_tokens and cache_creation_input_tokens in the response. A cache that silently misses costs at least ten times the read price on every request (twenty times on Opus 5.5, forty on Fable 5.1), and the only place it shows up is the usage object.

Batch API, long context and the smaller line items

Batch API. Asynchronous batch requests cost 50% of the standard input and output rates on every model, as the table above shows. Anything that does not need an answer within the conversation, such as nightly summarisation, evaluation runs or back-filling a data set, belongs there.

Long context. Claude 4.6 and later models include the full 1 million token context window at standard pricing. Claude Sonnet 5, Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1 and every Opus model from 4.6 onward take 1 million tokens, and every model can generate up to 128,000 output tokens per request.

Fast mode. A research-preview speed setting runs Opus 5.5 at $8 and $40 per million tokens, twice its standard rate.

US-only inference. Setting inference_geo to "us" applies a 1.1 times multiplier to every token category on Claude 4.6 and later models.

Tools and runtime. Web search costs $10 per 1,000 searches plus the tokens it adds, web fetch costs only its tokens, code execution costs $0.05 an hour after 50 free hours a day, and Claude Managed Agents sessions cost $0.08 per session-hour.

What a real conversation costs

Take a chat assistant with a 2,000-token system prompt, where each user message is 150 tokens and each reply is 350 tokens. The first turn sends 2,150 tokens. By turn 40 a single request carries 21,650 tokens, because it includes the 39 exchanges before it, and the whole 40-turn conversation has consumed 476,000 input tokens to produce 14,000 output tokens.

"Cache warm" assumes automatic caching with a 5-minute cache and replies arriving inside that window, so each turn writes only the new exchange and reads everything before it. Two things stand out. Input tokens, not output, make up most of the bill once a conversation passes a few turns. And the cost per conversation grows faster than the number of turns: going from 40 to 100 turns multiplies turns by 2.5 and the uncached bill on Sonnet 5 by more than five, because each turn carries every turn before it.

At 10,000 such 40-turn conversations a month on Sonnet 5, that is roughly $10,900 without caching and $2,900 with it. Caching is the first lever. It stops working when users leave and come back after the cache has expired, and the history has to be written again at the higher write price. We build Maximem Synap, a memory layer that sends a bounded context block (2,000 tokens by default) instead of the full transcript, so this cost is the problem we work on every day. The arithmetic for when that beats caching, and when it does not, is in how to reduce LLM token costs in long conversations.

How much Claude costs per month: the plans

Claude's apps (web, desktop, mobile, Claude Code and the Office and browser extensions) are sold as subscriptions, priced per person, from the Claude plans page:

Annual billing saves $36 a year on Pro and $60 a seat on Team Standard. Enterprise adds SCIM, audit logs, a compliance API, custom data retention and a HIPAA-ready offering on top of Team.

Free vs Pro vs Max: what actually changes

The three individual plans differ mainly in how much you can use, not in what you can use it for.

Free covers chat on web, desktop and mobile with web search, file creation, code execution, memory and app connections.

Pro adds Claude Code, Claude Design, Slides and Docs, Claude Science, Projects, more models and the Chrome and Microsoft 365 extensions, with more usage per session than Free.

Max keeps every Pro feature and raises the allowance to five or twenty times Pro's per-session usage, with higher output limits, early access to new features and priority access when traffic is high. The Max plan article is explicit that the two Max tiers differ in usage, not in models.

Anthropic does not publish message counts for any plan. Usage depends on conversation length and complexity, the model, the effort level and the tools you use, and connectors are called out as token-intensive. On Pro and Max, the session allowance resets every five hours, and a separate weekly limit applies across all models and resets at a fixed time assigned to your account. Chat and Claude Code draw from the same allowance, so a long coding session reduces what is left for chat.

The practical rule: stay on Free until you hit its limits regularly, move to Pro when you want Claude Code or Projects, and move to Max only when you run out of Pro's weekly allowance often enough that the extra $80 or $180 a month is cheaper than waiting.

Subscription or API?

A Pro or Max plan does not include API usage. The Pro plan article says API access "requires separate Console access and billing", so a developer who wants both pays for both.

Two billing surprises follow from that separation:

• Claude Code and the API key. If ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is set in your environment, Claude Code authenticates with it instead of your subscription and bills your API account at token rates, even while you are paying for Max. Unset the variable if you meant to use the plan.
• The Agent SDK credit that is not there. Anthropic announced a separate monthly credit for Agent SDK and claude -p usage on paid plans ($20 on Pro, $100 on Max 5x, $200 on Max 20x), then paused that change on 15 June 2026. Until further notice, Agent SDK and third-party app usage draw from your plan's normal usage limits. Several pricing pages still describe the credit as live.

For a team building a product, the question mostly answers itself. Plans are priced per person for people using Claude's own apps; a product that serves your users runs on the API, billed per token, and the useful comparison is between API configurations (model, caching, batch) rather than between an API bill and a subscription. For an individual developer, Pro or Max is usually the cheaper way to use Claude Code heavily, and the API is the right way to run anything automated in production.

Frequently asked questions

How much does the Claude API cost per million tokens?

On current models, $1 input and $5 output for Claude Haiku 4.5, $2 and $10 for Claude Sonnet 5, $4 and $20 for Claude Opus 5.5, and $10 and $50 for Claude Fable 5.1. Cache reads cost $0.10 to $0.25 per million tokens, and the Batch API halves the input and output rates.

How much does Claude cost per month?

Free is $0, Pro is $20 a month or $17 a month billed annually, Max is $100 (five times Pro usage) or $200 (twenty times), Team is $25 a seat a month or $20 billed annually, with Premium seats at $125 or $100, and Enterprise is $20 a seat a month billed annually plus usage.

What is the difference between Claude Free, Pro and Max?

Pro adds Claude Code, Projects, more models and the Office and browser extensions to Free, with more usage per session. Max keeps every Pro feature and multiplies Pro's per-session usage by five or twenty, with priority access at busy times. Pro and Max limits reset every five hours and also carry a weekly limit.

Is API usage included in Claude Pro or Max?

No. API usage is billed separately through a Claude Console account. Claude Code on a Pro or Max plan uses the plan's allowance unless an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY environment variable is set, in which case it bills the API.

Is there a free Claude API tier?

Anthropic's pricing page does not list one. The Free plan covers the Claude apps, not the API.

What is the cheapest way to use Claude?

For personal use, the Free plan. For API workloads, Claude Haiku 4.5 through the Batch API at $0.50 input and $2.50 output per million tokens, with prompt caching on any repeated prefix.

Does long context cost more on Claude?

Not on Claude 4.6 and later models, which bill their full 1 million token context window at standard rates. The cost of long context comes from volume: every token in the window is billed on every request that carries it.

How do I estimate my monthly Claude API bill?

Multiply tokens by rate for each part of a request: uncached input, cache writes, cache reads and output, including thinking tokens. For conversations, remember that input per turn grows with the history, as the worked example above shows. Count tokens with the token counting endpoint before launch, then read the usage fields on live traffic, which is where a cache that is not hitting will show up.

What this means for your bill

The rate card sets the price of a token, and your architecture sets how many tokens you buy. Prompt caching and the Batch API are the two largest discounts Anthropic offers, and both are configuration rather than engineering. Past that, the bill is decided by how much of each conversation you choose to send again on every turn, which is a design decision about what your product remembers and how.

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Sources, all retrieved 26 September 2026: Anthropic pricing documentation; Claude plans; Claude Help Center articles on the Pro plan, the Max plan, usage limits, Claude Code on Pro and Max and the Agent SDK on paid plans; Claude Platform documentation on prompt caching, extended thinking and context windows; Anthropic's announcements of Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5 and Claude Opus 4.7. Worked examples are our own arithmetic on those rates.