Super Bowl Ad Cost by Year, From $42,500 in 1967 to $8 Million in 2026

Super Bowl ad cost in 2026: the $8 million spot

Super Bowl LX was played on February 8, 2026, at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, and NBC carried it. Seattle beat New England 29 to 13. Off the field, the bigger number was the price of airtime: a reported average of $8 million for a single 30-second national commercial, according to the Financial Times.

That average hides a new ceiling. Mark Marshall, who runs advertising sales at NBCUniversal, told Adweek that a handful of spots went for more than $10 million each, the first time any network had sold Super Bowl time at that level. The company had announced the game sold out by September 2025, months earlier than usual.

The audience justified the bet, at least on paper. Nielsen’s final count for Super Bowl LX was 125.6 million average viewers, the most-watched program in NBC history and just behind the 127.7 million record set by Super Bowl LIX a year earlier. The second quarter peaked at 137.8 million people, still an industry high.

Super Bowl ad cost by year, 1967 to 2026

The full series below covers every game from Super Bowl I to Super Bowl LX, sixty in all, with no gaps and no estimated years. Figures up to 2022 are Nielsen averages for a 30-second national spot. From 2023 onward they are the averages reported by named outlets at the time of each broadcast.

The chart plots the Super Bowl ad cost by year for all sixty points. The table keeps to one game every five years, plus the two most recent, and adds what each price would be in 2025 dollars using the American consumer price index. The gap between the two columns shrinks less than you might expect.

The two kinds of figure do not always agree. In 2016 most reports said CBS charged $5 million, while the Nielsen average was $4.8 million; in 2017 the reverse happened, with $5 million reported and a Nielsen average near $5.4 million. The dataset behind the chart records both, so either can be checked.

Read across the decades and the growth rate slows down even as the dollar amounts balloon. Between 1977 and 1987 the price rose almost 17 percent a year on average. Between 2016 and 2026 it rose a little over 5 percent a year, which is still faster than consumer prices but nowhere near the early pace.

Super Bowl I and its two price tags

The first championship game between the National Football League and the American Football League was played on January 15, 1967, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Green Bay beat Kansas City 35 to 10. CBS and NBC both broadcast it, because each network held rights to one of the two leagues.

Each network set its own rate. CBS charged $42,500 for thirty seconds and $85,000 for a minute; NBC asked $37,500 and $75,000. The CBS number became the conventional starting point for every Super Bowl ad cost by year chart since, which is why 1967 sometimes appears as $42,000 or $37,500 in older lists.

Those prices bought an audience split across two channels, in a stadium with thousands of empty seats. Neither network kept a complete recording of the broadcast, and only fragments of the original coverage survive. Commercials of that era were closer to the print-led thinking described in advertising of the 1960s.

The 1970s: from $78,200 to $185,000

Super Bowl IV in January 1970 charged $78,200 for thirty seconds. Then came the first dip. The 1971 game, Super Bowl V, averaged $72,500, a drop of about 7 percent and the second-largest proportional fall in the whole series. After that the price climbed every year of the decade without a pause.

By Super Bowl XIII in January 1979 a spot cost $185,000, more than double the 1970 figure. Inflation explains part of it. Consumer prices in the United States rose sharply through the decade, and a dollar in 1979 bought roughly half of what it had in 1970. The rest came from the game turning into an event.

Super Bowl VII in 1973, played in Los Angeles, averaged $88,100. That is about $640,000 in 2025 dollars, less than a tenth of what a 2026 spot cost after adjusting for the same inflation. So the real growth story is not the 1970s at all. It belongs to the two decades that followed.

1984: the year the price fell and the ad everyone remembers

Super Bowl XVII in 1983 averaged $400,000 for thirty seconds. A year later, at Super Bowl XVIII in Tampa, the average dropped to $368,200. That fall, about 8 percent, is the largest in the series, and it came in the same broadcast that produced the most discussed commercial in the game’s history.

Apple’s “1984”, a sixty-second film directed by Ridley Scott to introduce the Macintosh, aired once nationally during that broadcast on January 22. At the 1984 average, its two 30-second units cost roughly $736,000 in airtime. The ad’s reputation grew so large that it turned the game into a launch venue rather than a sports broadcast with breaks.

Prices recovered fast. Super Bowl XIX in 1985 averaged $525,000, up more than 40 percent in one year, the steepest single jump in the series. The full story of that era’s spots is told in the guide to Super Bowl commercials, and many of them appear among the famous advertising campaigns still cited today.

Crossing $1 million in 1995

The average first passed seven figures at Super Bowl XXIX in Miami in January 1995, at about $1.15 million. Some outlets round that down to an even $1 million, and NBC New York lists $1.15 million. Either way, it had taken twenty-eight years to go from $42,500 to a million, and the next million would arrive in only five.

Then came another small step back. Super Bowl XXX in 1996 averaged $1,085,000, down about 6 percent, before the climb resumed with $1.2 million in 1997 and $1.6 million in 1999. The late 1990s were the first stretch in which rises of $200,000 or more a year became normal rather than remarkable.

One aside worth making here: the price lists rarely mention that a single 30-second unit is the only standard product. Longer commercials are simply two or more units sold together, often at a negotiated rate, which is why a one-minute ad’s true cost almost never appears in the public record.

Dot-com money and the 2000s plateau

Super Bowl XXXIV in January 2000 averaged $2.1 million, a jump of 31 percent on the year before. A wave of young internet companies bought airtime, Pets.com with its sock puppet among them. Several of those advertisers were out of business within two years, and the game became shorthand for the bubble itself.

The decade that followed was almost flat by Super Bowl standards. Prices held at $2.2 million from 2001 to 2003 and reached only $2.5 million by 2006. The 2007 game averaged about $2.39 million, a modest decline, and the 2010 broadcast fell from $3 million to $2.8 million after the 2008 financial crisis cut budgets.

Measured in 2025 dollars, the 2000 spot cost about $3.9 million and the 2010 spot about $4.1 million. Ten years of real growth amounted to roughly 5 percent, a rounding error next to the decades before and after. Few other stretches in the record look anything like it, and none since 2010 has come close.

The 2020s: pandemic, crypto and the $7 million line

Super Bowl LIV in 2020 averaged $5.4 million on Fox, and the 2021 game on CBS reached $5.5 million despite the pandemic. That year Anheuser-Busch kept Budweiser off the national broadcast for the first time in thirty-seven years, and Coca-Cola also sat out, leaving room for a crop of first-time buyers that year.

The 2022 game on NBC, played at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, averaged $6.5 million and was nicknamed the Crypto Bowl. Coinbase ran a sixty-second spot that showed nothing but a bouncing QR code, and FTX and Crypto.com also bought time. Within a year FTX had collapsed, an echo of the dot-com class of 2000.

Fox announced a record of about $7 million for 2023, although its own sales chief said the average landed between $6 million and $7 million, with only select spots above. CBS held the line at around $7 million in 2024. Two flat years in a row had not happened since the early 2000s.

The 2025 game on Fox broke the pattern. At least ten spots reportedly sold for $8 million, and ESPN noted that the usual annual rise of about $100,000 had become roughly $500,000. Super Bowl LXI in February 2027 is scheduled for ABC and ESPN, which will set the next Super Bowl ad cost.

What the Super Bowl ad cost looks like after inflation

Nominal prices exaggerate the climb. The 2026 average of $8 million is about 188 times the $42,500 of 1967. Consumer prices rose roughly 9.6 times between 1967 and 2025, measured by annual averages of the American consumer price index. Divide one by the other and the real increase is about 19 times.

That is still enormous. A 1967 spot costs about $410,000 in 2025 money, so an advertiser in 2026 pays nineteen of them for the same thirty seconds. Over fifty-nine years the nominal price has grown about 9.3 percent a year against inflation of roughly 4 percent, which means the Super Bowl ad cost has outrun prices in most years.

The real price rose fastest between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s, when it nearly quadrupled. Since 2010 it has nearly doubled again in real terms, from about $4.1 million to $8 million. You can see both surges on the advertising timeline, which places each era’s notable campaigns against these figures.

One caveat applies to all of these conversions. The consumer price index tracks what households pay for groceries, rent and fuel, not what television airtime costs, so a real price here means purchasing power, not a like-for-like media rate. It is the clearest yardstick available across six decades, and it is the one most economists would reach for first.

Price per second and per viewer

At $8 million for thirty seconds, the Super Bowl commercial cost for LX worked out to about $266,700 a second. The spots that sold above $10 million worked out to more than $333,000 a second. In 1967, a second on CBS cost about $1,417. The comparison is striking, but it ignores how many people were watching.

Divide the 2026 average by Nielsen’s 125.6 million viewers and the price comes to roughly $64 for every thousand people reached. That is expensive by television standards but not absurd, because no other broadcast in the American calendar delivers an audience of that size live, to people who expect the breaks to be part of the show.

Here is the short version. The headline price keeps rising faster than inflation, but the audience has grown too, from two networks sharing one game in 1967 to more than 125 million people watching across television, streaming and Spanish-language coverage in 2026. Cost per viewer has risen far less than the sticker price.

Why the Super Bowl ad cost keeps rising

Supply is fixed. A broadcast carries a little over eighty national commercial slots, and NBCUniversal said it added none for Super Bowl LX despite the demand. When the number of buyers grows and the number of units does not, the price climbs, and sellouts now happen in the autumn before the game rather than in January.

Audience behaviour helps. Most television advertising is skipped, muted or ignored, but Super Bowl commercials are reviewed, ranked and replayed the following week. A brand gets the broadcast audience plus days of free coverage afterward. That second audience is hard to price, which is part of why buyers accept a premium that looks irrational on paper.

Bundling matters too. In the 2025 and 2026 cycles, networks sold Super Bowl time alongside other events: NBCUniversal tied many of its 2026 deals to the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, which opened two days before the game. The reported per-spot average is therefore a blended figure, and individual advertisers may pay well above or below it.

What Canadians see during the Super Bowl

In Canada the game airs on CTV, and for most of its history Canadian viewers have seen Canadian commercials instead of the American ones. The mechanism is simultaneous substitution, which lets a Canadian broadcaster replace an American channel’s signal, ads included, when both air the same program at the same time.

The CRTC ruled in 2015 that the practice would no longer apply to the Super Bowl, and the change took effect with the 2017 game. Bell Canada and the NFL challenged it. On December 19, 2019, the Supreme Court of Canada quashed the order, finding the regulator had exceeded its powers under the Broadcasting Act.

The three games from 2017 to 2019 are therefore the only ones where viewers in Canada reliably saw the American commercials on a Canadian channel, including the 2019 broadcast from Atlanta. Canadian spots are sold separately by the domestic broadcaster. The country’s own ad tradition is covered in the guide to Canadian commercials.

How these figures were compiled

The series covers all sixty Super Bowls from January 1967 to February 2026. Prices for 1967 to 2022 are Nielsen averages for one 30-second national spot, as compiled and published in 2023. Prices for 2023 to 2026 are the averages reported at the time by ESPN, the Financial Times, Adweek and NBC stations.

Networks publish no rate cards, so every figure is a reported average, not an audited invoice. Where outlets disagree, the dataset keeps the Nielsen or most widely reported value and records the alternative. Inflation uses annual averages of the American consumer price index, in 2025 dollars. No missing year was estimated. The figures are reviewed after each new game.