iRacing: Should You Renew Before August 18?

On August 18, iRacing raises its subscription price. It is only the second time it has done so in nearly twenty years, which, to be fair, is a record of restraint that plenty of streaming services could only dream of, given they raise prices while quietly removing features. But records do not pay bills, and half the community is now asking one very specific question: **do I renew now, or do I just let it happen?**

I have had a calculator open for two days. Here is where I landed.

The numbers, no decoration

Here is what goes up: the monthly plan moves from $13 to $14.75, three months from $33 to $37.50, the annual from $110 to $124.50, and the two-year from $199 to $222.50. Somewhere between 12 % and 13.5 %, with the shorter plans taking the worst of it in percentage terms. What does *not* go up, and this matters far more than the headlines suggest, is the price of cars and tracks.

Now, the detail almost nobody puts in the headline and that hits some of us directly: iRacing lists its prices without tax. Its own membership page says so in the small print. So depending on where you live, you add your local VAT or sales tax on top. Where I am, that is 21 %, which turns the annual plan from roughly $133 into roughly $151, and the two-year from about $241 into about $269.

Translated: renew a year now and you save around $17. Stretch it as far as the rules allow and stack two years, and you save around $28.

Twenty-eight dollars. Less than a car and a half in the store. That is the whole drama.

What someone actually saves by being clever

This is where it gets interesting, because the trick has a very low ceiling. You can extend by up to two years before August 18, and the time stacks onto the end of your current subscription instead of replacing it. So you lose nothing you have already paid for. But two years is the hard limit, which means there is no legitimate way to become the person who bought a subscription through 2048 just to laugh at the system.

So we are talking about a maximum saving of roughly $28 in exchange for putting $241 on the table today. And there is the mental trap: the discount is real, but so is the outlay.

If you have auto-renew switched on, you do not need to do anything clever. You will simply move to the new price at your next billing date. Nobody is going to charge you a lump sum or do anything strange. You will just pay more.

My answer, which is probably not the one you want

I have been around this long enough to recognize a pattern: prepaid subscriptions are wonderful for people who already know they will be there, and a beautiful cage for people who are on the fence.

If you raced four nights a week last month, if you have a team lined up for the next endurance rounds, if your setups folder is bigger than your family photos folder: renew and stop thinking about it. The $28 is free money. It was lying on the ground and all you had to do was bend down.

If instead you have spent two months saying “I will hop on this week” and you have not hopped on: do not prepay two years to save roughly the cost of a decent lunch. I say that with affection and from personal experience, because I have been that guy. Prepaying does not generate the desire to race. It generates guilt, which is a much worse fuel and has no grip map.

And there is a third case, the person thinking about joining for the first time. There I would wait, or at least look at it calmly. New member promotions still exist after the change, and the big annual discounts tend to land in November, not August. Chasing a 12 % saving in the summer and missing a far larger one on Black Friday is the accounting equivalent of braking too late into turn one.

The subscription is not the real cost

Here is where I want us to pause, because this whole conversation about $1.75 a month is covering up something considerably heavier.

A car costs $11.95. A track runs from $11.95 to $14.95. There are volume discounts, 10 % on three or more items, 15 % from six, and a permanent 20 % once you pass forty pieces of content. All perfectly reasonable, right up until a new season arrives with a new calendar and you discover you need six tracks you do not own. In one afternoon you have just spent more than the price increase will cost you across an entire year.

That is the uncomfortable math of iRacing. The subscription is the ticket into the theme park. The rides are sold separately. And we have spent two weeks arguing passionately about the price of the ticket.

What if I just leave?

It is the logical question, and it deserves an answer with numbers rather than slogans.

Assetto Corsa EVO currently sits around $40, one payment, and it is on version 0.8 of early access, with Kyalami freshly added, a serious VR overhaul and, at last, community content verified for multiplayer. It is a magnificent piece of software. It has also been in early access since January 2025, its Steam reviews sit at “mixed” with 60 % positive, and the career mode they promised quietly fell off the roadmap.

Le Mans Ultimate also costs around $40 at base and is in better shape review-wise, roughly 79 % positive. That said, if you decide to add every DLC currently published, the bill climbs by about $188. Add the base game and you are at almost exactly what two years of iRacing costs once tax is included.

This is not a defense of iRacing. It is a reminder that the “one-time purchase” model in sim racing is, most of the time, a lovely fiction. They all bleed you. Some do it with a visible monthly charge and others with a shopping cart that refills itself every six months. Pick your preferred method of having your wallet emptied.

So what do I do?

Three sentences, which is what you actually wanted when you opened this article.

If you race regularly and plan to keep racing, log in before the 18th, extend as far as you comfortably can without squeezing yourself, and forget about the whole thing for a year or two. If you are in a lukewarm phase, let it rise, pay month to month, and reassess when the September build lands. And if you are just starting out, breathe, buy nothing in a hurry, and save the money for tracks, because that is where it is really going to go.

Because in the end, and this is the only thing I have been thinking about since the notice went up, nobody has ever quit this hobby over $1.75 a month. People leave for other reasons: the calendar stopped fitting their life, the team fell apart, or one night somebody wrecked them in turn one and they suddenly remembered that books exist.

The price rise is a perfect excuse to ask the better question, which is not “how much does it cost” but “how much do I use it”. I worked out my cost per hour based on last month’s racing, and the number is embarrassing to publish, but in the good direction.

Which is why I renewed.

• Remember, you can join iRacing clicking here.