What NordVPN costs in year two
NordVPN is the brand most people arrive at first, and almost everyone arrives holding one number: $3.49 a month.
That number is real, and you pay it once. It is charged as a single upfront sum covering the first twenty seven months. After that the subscription renews at $139.08 a year, the figure Nord states in its checkout terms, which is $11.59 a month.
A multiple of 3.3, the widest gap in our comparison and the reason this page anchors on renewal prices rather than advertised ones.
Nord does publish that figure, and it deserves credit for it, because Surfshark and Private Internet Access never publish one at all. The complaint is where it lives. The renewal price is in the checkout terms, which you reach after picking a plan, not on the pricing page you compare from. On the page where a buyer is deciding, only the introductory rate appears.
The higher tiers follow the same shape. Complete renews at $18.29 a month and Ultra at $22.49, and a dedicated IP is an add-on on top of any of them.
NordVPN scores 7.8 under how we rate. It is our pick for streaming and coverage, and the score is held down almost entirely by that renewal.
What the money buys, which is a lot
Having spent three paragraphs on the price, the product deserves its due, because on capability this is the strongest mainstream VPN here.
The widest server coverage of the mainstream brands, across 224 locations by the vendor count. Double VPN and Onion over VPN for people who want the extra hop. Meshnet, which links your own devices to each other rather than to a server and has no real equivalent elsewhere on this page. Post-quantum encryption. Apps on every platform including Android TV, and they are the most polished in the category alongside ExpressVPN.
Nord also has a reputation as the most reliable of the seven at getting into streaming services from another country. We have not measured that and we publish no figure for it. It is the consistent finding of TechRadar and security.org, both of which describe hands-on testing programmes, and it is the reason this pick exists.
Support is the best here too: twenty four hour live chat that answers in minutes. ExpressVPN, Proton VPN, Surfshark and PIA all run live chat as well, and at the other end Windscribe puts a bot in front of a ticket queue and Mullvad has email only.
What the upper tiers add is mostly not VPN. Complete brings an antivirus, a password manager and a terabyte of cloud storage; Ultra adds a data removal service. Those are real products and they are a different purchase, and if you would not otherwise buy them the Basic tier is the honest comparison.
The audit, and the part you cannot read
Deloitte has now completed six no-logs assurance engagements for NordVPN, the most recent running from 10 November to 12 December 2025. That is the longest such record in this comparison and it is not nothing.
Two qualifications belong with it, and neither is an accusation.
Nord describes it as an assurance engagement under ISAE 3000 rather than a traditional audit: a point-in-time assessment of whether the systems are configured in line with the no-logs statement, on the days they were examined. That is normal for this category and it is worth knowing what the word covers.
And the full report is readable only by logged-in Nord account holders. Proton VPN publishes all five of its Securitum reports openly, Surfshark publishes its Deloitte report as a public PDF, and Mullvad, Windscribe, ExpressVPN and PIA all publish theirs. Nord is the only one of the seven that asks you to sign up before you can check the claim you are signing up for.
The history also includes a 2018 breach of a rented datacentre server, disclosed in 2019. Nord says it responded by changing how it runs infrastructure. Either way it belongs in the record.
Who owns what
Nord Security and Surfshark merged in 2022 and share a parent, while stating that they run separate infrastructure and separate product plans. So two of the seven brands on our comparison answer to one owner, and two more answer to another, Kape Technologies, which owns ExpressVPN and PIA.
Panama, where NordVPN is based, sits outside the Five, Nine and Fourteen Eyes arrangements and has no mandatory data retention. That is a real advantage over Private Internet Access in the United States, and a weaker signal than an audit you can read.
Who should buy it
Buy NordVPN if server coverage and streaming are what you actually want from a VPN, if you value support that answers immediately, and if you will genuinely reassess in twenty seven months when the price triples. For the length of that first term it is a great deal, which is exactly what it is designed to be.
Do not buy it on the assumption that the advertised rate is the price. Do not buy the Complete or Ultra tiers unless you were going to buy an antivirus and a password manager separately. And if you want to read the audit before paying, Proton VPN and Mullvad both let you.
Prices, plan contents and audit details on this page were read from the vendor checkout with the currency set to US dollars, and from the vendor audit announcement, on .
