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Xbox Game Pass now has four active tiers in June 2026, and the headline number is back where Microsoft left it after April: Ultimate costs $22.99 a month. The lineup is Essential, Premium, PC Game Pass and Ultimate, with prices ranging from $9.99 to $22.99.
That matters today because the subscription is no longer one broad bundle. It is a split system, and the difference between tiers now shapes who gets day-one Microsoft first-party releases, who gets Xbox Cloud Gaming, and who gets EA Play. For a lot of buyers, the decision is no longer whether to subscribe, but which hardware they actually use and which features they will never touch.
Microsoft’s April rollback cut Ultimate from $29.99 back to $22.99, trimming the yearly cost by $84 for anyone who stayed on the top plan. Essential stays at $9.99 and was renamed from Game Pass Core in the late 2024 restructure. Premium is the mid-range console and PC option, while PC Game Pass remains the PC-exclusive tier. The structure is meant to fit console, PC and cloud habits without forcing every subscriber into the same package.
The friction is easy to see. A PC-only Ultimate subscriber is paying $7 a month more for console benefits that may never be used, while Essential users keep the cheapest entry point and a library capped at 50+ games but miss every first-day Microsoft Studios release. Essential has included Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Forza Horizon 4, Sea of Thieves and Minecraft at various points, but it does not include Starfield or Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and it is excluded from the top-tier release window that drives much of the value pitch.
Xbox Cloud Gaming is included in Essential, Premium and Ultimate, but not in PC Game Pass. EA Play is available only in PC Game Pass and Ultimate, where it brings hundreds of EA titles, including the full EA Sports catalog. That leaves a clean split across the four tiers: cloud access for three of them, EA access for two of them, and day-one Microsoft first-party releases locked behind the two highest plans.
The naming has also settled only recently. Microsoft used separate labels such as Game Pass Core, Game Pass Standard, Game Pass Console and Game Pass for PC in earlier announcements, then moved to the current four-tier framework across 2024 and 2025. Community discussions still mix the old names with the new ones, which is part of why the June 2026 lineup is being checked so closely now. Understanding which tier matches a player’s hardware and habits can save $60 to $156 a year, depending on the plan.
What remains unresolved is not the structure but the next move. Microsoft has not confirmed another price change or another rewrite, so the June 2026 question is less about what the tiers are called than whether the current split stays in place long enough for subscribers to treat it as settled.
