Raspberry Pi 5 current price in 2026, the four-tier table

The 4GB SKU launched at $60 MSRP in October 2023 and held that price through January 2026. In early February 2026 Raspberry Pi Ltd announced the first memory-driven price increase: $15 on the 4GB tier, taking the official figure to $75. A second hike followed in early April 2026 (covered by The Register and Tom's Hardware) as LPDDR4X spot prices kept climbing on AI-datacentre demand, and a further adjustment landed in early May. As of May 12, 2026 approved resellers such as CanaKit list the bare 4GB board at $110, and the official 16GB SKU sits at $305. The 1GB tier ($45) and 2GB tier ($50) have been held flat. The four-tier table further down captures the launch MSRPs; the 'May 2026 reset' callout above it captures the current retail floor at approved resellers.

Yes. The 4GB ($60) and 8GB ($80) tiers held their launch MSRPs through January 2026, and the 16GB ($120) held from its January 2025 launch through the same date. Three things happened in 2026: a February 2026 announcement (raspberrypi.com/news/more-memory-driven-price-rises) raised every variant with 2GB or more of memory by $15 (the 1GB and 2GB tiers were held), citing more-than-doubling LPDDR4X costs as fabs reallocated capacity to AI infrastructure. A second hike in early April 2026 took the 16GB up by roughly $100 in retail listings, with the 4GB and 8GB tiers moving up by smaller amounts. A further adjustment in early May 2026 lifted the 16GB to its current $305 listing on the official product page. The Foundation's historical stance was that price increases were a last resort, and from launch through 2025 they absorbed BOM swings. The 2026 memory market broke that pattern.

After the 2026 memory hikes, the bare 4GB board sits at roughly $110 at approved resellers (CanaKit lists $110 today). Add a 27W USB-C power supply ($12), the Active Cooler ($5), a microSD 64GB ($10), and the official case ($10) and a no-frills 4GB build lands at about $147 out the door before tax and shipping. Swap the SD card for a $30 NVMe HAT plus a $40 250GB SSD and you are closer to $215. The board sticker price is now meaningfully more than half the system cost, where pre-2026 it was closer to two-thirds.

For a headless server, ad-blocker, or single-purpose appliance, 4GB is still the right answer; you will not notice the missing memory. At today's roughly $110 retail it is no longer the deal it was at $60, but it remains the lowest-friction Pi 5 build. For desktop use, multitasking, or anything that compiles, the 8GB tier is the comfort buy. The 16GB tier at $305 is now a much harder sell than it was at $120 last year; if you were buying it specifically to run local LLMs on the Pi, the 2026 retail price has erased most of the cost advantage over a used Apple Silicon Mac, and the matmul story below has not changed. If your project does not need more than 2GB of RAM, the 1GB ($45) and 2GB ($50) tiers were deliberately held flat through both 2026 hikes and are now the genuine value floor of the lineup.

It is a fine machine for tinkering. It is not the right machine if your goal is a local AI agent that drives a real computer (browser, documents, calendar, code) at conversational latency. The Pi 5's CPU is roughly an order of magnitude slower than current Apple Silicon at LLM prefill and has no integrated GPU acceleration for matmul. A used M1 MacBook Air with 16GB unified memory often costs less than a fully kitted out 16GB Pi 5 build and runs a 7B local model around 8 to 10 times faster. If the goal is the agent, not the SBC hobby, the Mac wins on dollars per token.

raspberrypi.com routes to the approved reseller closest to your shipping address; in the US that is usually PiShop or CanaKit, in the UK it is The Pi Hut, in the EU it is Welectron or Reichelt. The Foundation publishes the full reseller list at raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5 and resellers now track the post-hike pricing one-for-one (the older 'committed to MSRP' framing held through January 2026 but has effectively been replaced by a tighter cost-pass-through model after the February and April 2026 announcements). Amazon Marketplace listings exist but routinely add another $10 to $30 on top of the reseller price and ship aftermarket cases bundled with real boards. Skip them.

Compute Module 5 starts at $45 for the 2GB lite (no eMMC) and $95 for the 16GB+64GB version. It is the same SoC in a different form factor for embedded designs; you need a carrier board, which is its own cost. Pi 500 is the keyboard-form-factor desktop kit at $90 for the 8GB version and $120 for the 16GB version, including keyboard, PSU, and cable. If you want a desktop-shaped thing for someone learning Linux, the Pi 500 is genuinely the best deal in the lineup.

Eben Upton has publicly said the Foundation has no plans for a Pi 6 in 2026 and the Pi 5 will be supported through at least 2036. The cadence between major versions has historically been three to four years (Pi 4 in 2019, Pi 5 in 2023). Reasonable expectation is a Pi 6 announcement in late 2027 or 2028. If you need a board now, buy the Pi 5; waiting saves nothing.