How much does a press release cost in 2026?

Published prices for the same announcement span four orders of magnitude, and the spread is almost entirely in what the word "outlet" is doing at each end. At the bottom you are buying automated republication of your text. At the top you are buying a tier-one wire circuit priced per 400 words, with the logo, the images and the extra words billed separately on top. Fourteen distributors publish a rate card you can read; three tier-one wires publish nothing and will not quote without a sales call.

The same act — one announcement, pushed out to news outlets — is sold at about €0.80 and at $10,375. Both prices are published. Neither vendor is lying about what it does. The difference is almost entirely in what the word "outlet" is doing in each sentence.

Here are the rate cards that exist, side by side, and a plain statement of which ones do not exist.

The only tier-one rate card you can read without a sales call

Cision publishes no pricing on prnewswire.com. Its official 2024 Domestic Pricing Guide is nonetheless public, hosted as a PDF by the Independent Book Publishers Association.

Two things in that table are easy to miss. The membership fee is charged before a single release goes out — $305 a year on the 2024 card, whether you send one release or twelve. And the national rate buys 400 words: a 900-word release on US1 National is $1,020 plus five blocks of $325, which is $2,645 before anyone attaches a logo.

Most pricing articles still quote an older Cision card — $195 to $249 membership, $805 national, $245 per extra 100 words. Those figures were real once. They are not the ones on the 2024 PDF, and we would rather cite the document than the summaries of it.

Three tier-one wires publish no price at all

Business Wire publishes no rate card. The site sits behind an Akamai bot shield, so its pricing page could not be read at all. The figures that circulate — roughly $760 for 400 words national, $195 per extra 100 words, $425 for the first multimedia item, and no membership fee — trace back to Prezly, which labels its own table "industry estimates, not gospel". That is an estimate of an estimate, and we are flagging it as one rather than laundering it into a table.

GlobeNewswire publishes no rate card either. The widely repeated cluster — about $350 base, $140 to $175 per extra 100 words, $100 or so for a logo, about $200 for an image — appears close to verbatim across Prezly, Pressonify, NewswireJet and RedPress. All four sell competing distribution. That is one unsourced figure repeated four times, not four sources. The single independent cross-check available runs the other way: NewMediaWire publishes a flat $429 and claims savings of 40% to 60% against Cision, Business Wire and GlobeNewswire, which back-solves to roughly $715 to $1,072 for a GlobeNewswire release. Note also that globenewswire.com's footer now reads "© 2026 Digital Media Innovations, LLC" after two ownership changes in two years, so any GlobeNewswire figure older than that should be re-confirmed rather than trusted.

Newsfile, owned by TMX, publishes no pricing whatsoever. It is quote-only. It is also the most genuinely differentiated of the group — exchange-backed, reaching Refinitiv, FactSet, Factiva and Bloomberg terminals, and acting as a SEDAR and EDGAR filing agent — and it will not tell you what any of that costs until you ask.

The mid-market, where prices are published

Half of that list is reselling the other half

Read the fine print and the same rails keep appearing. PRWeb is Cision's own self-serve brand and describes its output as syndication via PR Newswire. eReleases sells "custom national PR Newswire distribution" from $399 and quotes the equivalent PR Newswire list value at $1,145 to $1,875. PRUnderground names the "PRNewswire/Cision network" on a $419.99 tier. The $479 line on 24-7PressRelease says PR Newswire national in as many words.

So $399 and $1,020 can put your text on the same circuit. What changes across that gap is word count, how many targets you actually get, whether a logo is included, and whether anyone tells you what actually published. Each of those is a separate meter on the Cision card, and we have priced them line by line.

The tier name does not tell you what is in the bundle

The most useful single sentence any vendor has published about this is EIN Presswire's, in its own FAQ: to reach Yahoo Finance you need PR Newswire, GlobeNewswire or Business Wire. EIN's $66.60-a-release Corporate tier is therefore not a cheap version of a $899 package — it is a different product with a different footprint, and its own vendor says so.

Priced by what they actually include, the cheapest credible routes to a Yahoo Finance placement we found published were XpressWire at $200, Press Ranger at $299, King Newswire at $400 and PRUnderground at $419.99. The premium self-serve cluster sits at $795 to $1,205: Brandpush Ultimate $795, RedPress Premium $949, Newswire.com Feature $965, ACCESS US Premium $1,095 to $1,205. The same spread runs down inside a single masthead: one AP News placement is published at $310 and at $52.20, by vendors that both deliver a page on apnews.com.

Where we sit, since you asked

Our packages run from $599 to $899, and the price for your industry is on the package page rather than in this article, attached to the outlet list it buys. We will not pretend that is the cheapest number on this page, because it is not. Against the published market, $899 sits around the 60th to 65th percentile of offers that include Yahoo Finance — above Brandpush Ultimate at $795, below Newswire.com Feature at $965. If price is your only criterion, PRUnderground at $419.99 is a real option and we have just named it twice.

What the difference buys is the part most of this industry does not sell: we open the published links, report what actually went live, and mark anything we could only take from the supplier's pickup report as exactly that — the difference between a send receipt and a coverage report. A sample report shows what those rows look like before you spend anything.

What we could not find

• Business Wire, GlobeNewswire and Newsfile publish no rate card. Every number quoted for them anywhere, including here, is reported rather than primary.
• Business Wire and ACCESS Newswire publish no content policy either. Candidate URLs and sitemaps were probed directly; neither exists.
• The real white-label rates at eReleases and MarketersMedia are gated behind a sales conversation. EIN Presswire's FAQ states pricing "ranges from $50 to $149 per release" — the $50 floor is below any published tier, which confirms unpublished bulk pricing exists without revealing it.
• Two sources disagree on ACCESS Newswire's tiers ($415 to $475 Budget, $775 to $853 National, $1,095 to $1,205 Premium). We have shown the higher card and flagged the spread rather than picking one.

What to compare before you pay

Word limit and the overage rate. Whether a logo or an image is extra. Whether there is an annual membership on top. Whether the named outlets are in the tier you are buying or the one above it. And what happens to your money if the release is rejected in review — at least one vendor, 24-7PressRelease, states in writing that refunds will not be issued when a compliance check fails.