Raspberry Pi 5 Price Rises for the Fourth Time in 2026, Now Triple Its Launch Price

The Fourth Price Increase of the Year

On November 3, 2026, Raspberry Pi Holdings announced a new price increase for the 16 GB RAM models in its lineup, according to a Tom's Hardware report republished by the Russian site CNews. It is the company's fourth price adjustment since the start of 2026.

The standard Raspberry Pi 5, the top-of-the-line configuration with 16 GB of RAM, went up $80 and now costs $385 in the United States. The 16 GB Raspberry Pi Computer Module 5 (CM5), a version aimed at integration into industrial projects, went up $40: the variant without built-in eMMC and without wireless connectivity now costs $375, while the top configuration (64 GB of storage, integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) reaches $415.

The Raspberry Pi 500+, a mini PC with a built-in keyboard and 16 GB of RAM, was the only device in that memory tier to escape the current price increase. It still costs $485.

From Launch to Today: Price More Than Tripled

The Raspberry Pi 5 lineup went on sale in September 2023. At the time, the 16 GB RAM version cost $120. With the increase announced on November 3, 2026, the same model now costs $385, more than triple in just over three years.

For comparison, that price now approaches the cost of a mid-range smartphone from a global brand sold in the United States. A Raspberry Pi 5, which was born as a low-cost alternative for prototyping, education, and automation, now competes in the price range of a full-featured phone.

Four Rounds of Price Increases in Less Than a Year

Since January 2026, Raspberry Pi Holdings has raised prices four times:

• February 2026: a repricing of nearly the entire current lineup, with increases of 20% to 40% depending on the model. The 2 GB Pi 5 went up $10; the 4 GB version, $15; the 8 GB version, $30; and the 16 GB version, $60. The 2 GB Pi 4 now costs $55, the 4 GB version $75, and the 8 GB version $115.
• April 2026: another adjustment to the Pi 4 (seven years on the market) and the Pi 5 (four years), with increases of $25 on the 4 GB versions and $50 on the 8 GB versions. The 16 GB Pi 5 went up another $100. An intermediate Pi 4 version with 3 GB of RAM also appeared, at $83.75. The Pi 500 went up $50, and the Pi 500+ had the biggest increase of the round.
• Early October 2026: a price increase on the 2 GB RAM models of the 4th and 5th generations. The 2 GB Pi 4 went to $67.50 and the 2 GB Pi 5 to $77.50.
• November 3, 2026: the most recent round, focused on the 16 GB models, described above.

The Stated Reason: More Expensive RAM

Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi Holdings and founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, attributed the series of price increases to a sharp rise in the price of memory components over the past two years. In a statement published on the company's official website, he said other computer manufacturers face the same cost pressure and that Raspberry Pi has been trying to minimize the impact passed on to the end buyer.

The justification has been repeated since the previous round, announced less than a month before the current one. The escalating price of RAM and NAND memory chips affects the hardware supply chain as a whole, not just development boards: it is the same bottleneck that has been pushing up prices for laptops, consoles, and servers throughout 2026.

What Changes for Raspberry Pi Users in Brazil

In Brazil, the Raspberry Pi has never reached consumers at the dollar list price. Between import duties, ICMS (Brazil's state value-added tax), and the margins of local distributors and resellers, the final price has always been several times higher than a direct dollar conversion would suggest. It is a pattern that repeats in markets outside the United States: the Russian report itself cites the 16 GB Pi 5 being resold for 43,000 rubles on a local marketplace, well above the official dollar price converted.

This means that every round of increases to the base dollar price amplifies the price gap in Brazil, because proportional taxes apply to a higher starting value. Those who buy through local distributors or directly from import marketplaces feel the increase multiplied, not just passed on.

For hobbyist users, the practical effect is delaying the purchase or switching to a version with less RAM: the 16 GB models, precisely the ones most affected in this and previous 2026 rounds, are no longer the natural choice for projects that don't require that much memory. For those using it in production (IoT gateways, small-scale embedded systems, edge computing nodes), the cost-per-unit calculation changes every few months, which complicates budgeting for medium- and long-term projects.

In short: Raspberry Pi is no longer automatically synonymous with cheap hardware. Boards like the Orange Pi line, BeagleBone modules, or more robust microcontrollers based on ESP32 variants, for workloads that don't require a full Linux stack, tend to gain ground in this scenario. None of these alternatives, however, replicate the software ecosystem and documentation built by the Raspberry Pi Foundation over more than a decade.

What Remains Unclear

Raspberry Pi Holdings has not indicated whether the 2026 cycle of price increases has come to an end, nor whether it depends on the trajectory of memory prices in the global semiconductor market. The company also did not specify a timeline for eventual stabilization, nor did it say whether older lines, such as the Pi 4, will be discontinued before going through the same increases.

For the Brazilian developer who relies on Raspberry Pi for hardware projects, the most concrete signal so far is that the launch price is no longer a reliable reference: any budget based on the price a model launched at runs a real risk of being outdated within a few months.