Mailchimp Pricing: Plans, Contact Tiers and Overage Charges

Mailchimp pricing starts at $0 on the Free plan, $13 a month on Essentials, $20 on Standard and $350 on Premium. Those are Mailchimp's list prices on 25 October 2026. The paid prices cover 500 contacts (10,000 on Premium); Free covers 250.

From there, the bill follows the number of contacts you store, including people who have unsubscribed. A 2,500-contact list costs $540 a year on Essentials and $720 on Standard.

Mailchimp pricing by plan: Free, Essentials, Standard and Premium

Mailchimp has four marketing plans. Each one sets a starting price, a ceiling on contacts and an email allowance tied to the contact limit you pick.

Plan	From (a month)	Contacts at that price	Most contacts	Monthly sends	Users
Free	$0	250	250	500, at most 250 a day	1
Essentials	$13	500	50,000	10 times your contact limit	3
Standard	$20	500	100,000	12 times your contact limit	5
Premium	$350	10,000	200,000, custom above	15 times your contact limit	Unlimited

Every price here comes from the tier data that Mailchimp's own pricing page loads, captured on 25 October 2026. All prices are in US dollars. The $13 and $20 figures are regular monthly prices, not first-year offers.

The paid plans differ in more than price. Essentials limits automation flows to four steps and offers email and chat support around the clock.

Standard adds longer flows with branching, multivariate testing, dynamic content and one onboarding session; Premium adds phone support.

If your welcome series or another automated flow needs more than four steps or a branch, Essentials won't run it.

Is Mailchimp free?

Yes: the Mailchimp free plan covers up to 250 contacts and 500 sends a month. It has one user and one audience, no email scheduling, and Mailchimp's branding stays in your emails. Email support lasts for the first 30 days.

When a Free account passes 250 contacts, Mailchimp holds all sending, test emails included, until you upgrade or shrink the list. You can move from a paid plan back to Free only once in the life of an account.

How much Mailchimp costs as your list grows

Mailchimp pricing rises in contact tiers: Essentials goes from $13 a month at 500 contacts to $385 at 50,000, and Standard from $20 to $450.

Contacts up to	Essentials, monthly	Standard, monthly
500	$13	$20
1,500	$26.50	$45
2,500	$45	$60
5,000	$75	$100
10,000	$110	$135
15,000	$180	$230
20,000	$230	$285
25,000	$270	$310
30,000	$300	$340
40,000	$340	$410
50,000	$385	$450

Standard continues to 100,000 contacts for $800 a month, and Premium runs from $350 at 10,000 contacts to $1,600 at 200,000.

What counts as a contact in Mailchimp

Mailchimp pricing is based on every contact stored across your audiences, not only the people you can email. Its help centre lists which statuses add to the bill.

Contact status	Counts towards the bill	Can receive marketing emails
Subscribed	Yes	Yes
Unsubscribed	Yes	No
Non-subscribed, such as shop customers who never opted in	Yes	No
Cleaned, after a hard bounce or repeated soft bounces	No	No
Pending, waiting to confirm a double opt-in	No	No
Archived	No	No
Deleted	No	No

Two more rules raise the count. A person in two audiences counts twice. And the bill uses the peak contact total in each billing period, so a large import followed by a clear-out still costs that month.

Archiving inactive contacts lowers the next bill, not the current one. A dead address imported as subscribed keeps counting until a bounce turns it into a cleaned contact. That is one reason to check a list before you import it.

Mailchimp overage charges: what happens over the limit

Mailchimp pricing has no hard stop on paid plans: sending continues and the excess is billed. If your contacts or sends pass the tier limit, it charges for add-on contact blocks. On Standard, one block adds 1,000 contacts and 12,000 sends.

Block prices are not on Mailchimp's public pages. They appear once you are logged in, and the help centre sends you to Support for your plan's figure.

Moving up a tier stops further add-on charges, and Mailchimp bills the price difference straight away. Two more rules affect the total:

• Test sends and transactional emails draw on the same monthly allowance as campaigns.
• If you exceed a limit during the 14-day trial, Mailchimp may move you to a higher contact tier when billing starts, and tells you when it does.

Mailchimp pricing for a small UK business: a worked example

An independent refill shop in Canterbury, invented for this sum, has 2,300 subscribers and 200 contacts who unsubscribed. Mailchimp bills it in the 2,500 tier, at $45 a month on Essentials or $60 on Standard.

Four newsletters to 2,300 subscribers use 9,200 sends, well inside either plan's allowance. Mailchimp sells annual plans only for Standard and Premium at 10,000 contacts or more, so at this size a year means twelve monthly payments.

The same tiers answer a common question: how much it costs to send 10,000 emails. On Mailchimp the price follows the list, not the sends. On Essentials, 10,000 emails a month to 2,500 contacts cost $45, and to 1,000 contacts $26.50.

When the list passes 2,500 contacts

The shop's list fills its tier exactly, so the next sign-up takes it over the limit. From then on, the bill carries add-on blocks until the shop moves to the 5,000 tier. There, Essentials costs $75 a month and Standard $100, an extra $360 or $480 a year for the same four newsletters.

In a month with 40 sign-ups and 10 unsubscribes, the count still rises by 40.

Mailchimp pricing in the UK: paying in pounds

You can pay in pounds, but the price is set in US dollars. Mailchimp calls its sterling prices estimates, and each monthly charge uses the exchange rate on the day of payment. When we captured the prices, the 2,500 tier showed as £33.86 on Essentials and £45.15 on Standard.

Mailchimp accepts cards and PayPal, plus direct debit in some countries. A bank or card issuer may add its own fee for a cross-border payment.

Mailchimp add-ons and other costs

A few costs sit outside the plan price:

• Pay As You Go: email credits instead of a monthly plan, one per email, from 5,000. Credits expire after 12 months, and their prices appear only inside an account.
• Transactional email: order confirmations and password resets through Mailchimp's API, on Standard or Premium only. Smaller volumes cost $20 for each block of 25,000 emails.
• SMS: available for UK numbers after an application, with monthly credits that expire if unused.
• Discounts: 15% for charities and non-profits on request, and 15% off the first 12 months for new customers with 10,000 or more contacts.
• Pausing: a monthly plan can pause for three or six months, twice in any 12 months, and billing stops meanwhile.

What the same list costs on MailGraf

MailGraf charges for the emails you send each month, so contacts carry no price. The shop's 9,200 sends sit in the 10K a month plan, which costs $29 a month or $290 for a year paid upfront.

The shop's 200 unsubscribed contacts add nothing to that price, and neither does sign-up number 2,501.

Automation, pop-ups and ten user seats all come with that one plan (plan allowances). Mailchimp's audience export puts each contact status in its own spreadsheet file (CSV) inside a compressed file (ZIP), so the unsubscribed file can go straight into the Upload unsubscribed contacts import (file import help).

If your list is close to Mailchimp's next tier, compare your monthly send volume on the pricing page before accepting the higher contact bill.

For the wider choice beyond price, see how MailGraf compares with Mailchimp for UK businesses.