Samsung has raised US prices on the Galaxy S26 lineup by $100 or more, pushing the base Galaxy S26 with 256GB of storage to nearly $1,000, Phone Arena reports. The increase is the second for the device this year. Combined, the two hikes add $200 to the price of the entry-level model compared with what the base Galaxy S25 would have cost.

The move lands in a smartphone market already squeezed by component costs. When the Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus launched earlier this year, they carried prices $100 above their S25 predecessors. Samsung attributed part of that initial increase to RAM price hikes — the same memory market pressure that has rippled through the supply chain and into consumer devices. The new increase stacks on top of that earlier adjustment.

What exactly changed on Samsung's site?

Nearly every phone in the S26 lineup now costs $100 more on Samsung's official US store. The 1TB version of the Galaxy S26 Ultra saw an even larger increase, according to the report. That leaves the base S26 at just under the four-figure mark — territory previously reserved for the Ultra tier.

For buyers, the practical picture looks like this:

• Base Galaxy S26, 256GB: now nearly $1,000, up $100 in the latest adjustment
• Cumulative increase over the S25 generation: $200 for the base model
• Galaxy S26 Ultra, 1TB: raised by more than $100
• Nearly the entire S26 lineup: $100 pricier on Samsung's US website

Why does this matter beyond Samsung?

Samsung is not acting alone. Apple and Google have both raised prices on their phones this year, a pattern that points to industry-wide cost pressure rather than a single vendor's pricing strategy. Memory pricing is a central driver: RAM price hikes have escalated through the year, and Samsung — itself one of the world's largest memory manufacturers — has explicitly cited those costs as part of the reason for its earlier S26 increase.

That dynamic carries weight for the semiconductor supply chain. When a vertically integrated player like Samsung passes memory costs through to its own flagship handsets rather than absorbing them, it signals that DRAM and NAND pricing has tightened enough to bite even the largest buyers. Smaller handset makers without in-house memory production face the same input costs without the same margin cushion.

Is this the end of the increases?

Nothing in Samsung's statements rules out further adjustments. The company has now repriced the S26 family twice within a single product cycle — once at launch, citing RAM costs, and again now. If memory prices continue to climb, the gap between this generation's pricing and the last will widen further, and rival flagships from Apple and Google, which have already seen their own 2026 increases, will face the same arithmetic. For now, US buyers shopping Samsung's site are paying $200 more for a base flagship than they would have a year ago, and the direction of component pricing suggests the pressure on handset margins — and sticker prices — is not yet relieved.