UK RAM prices rose 3.4% between March and July 2026 on a matched basket of 450 kits. Why bigger kits cost more per GB, and why DDR5 is both cheaper and dearer than DDR4.
The common read on DDR5 in 2026 is that it has settled into steady, falling prices. Our own tracking does not support that. On a matched basket of roughly 450 UK memory kits, each one compared only against itself, month over month, RAM prices rose 3.4% between March and July 2026.
That is a smaller rise than storage saw over the same window, and it was not a straight line. But it is a rise, and it changes how you should think about timing a memory purchase.
We track prices for around 2,900 PC components on Amazon UK, recording an observation whenever a listed price changes. For memory, comparing the same kits month over month gives this:
| Period | Kits compared | Change |
|---|---|---|
| March → April | 406 | +2.98% |
| April → May | 455 | −1.82% |
| May → June | 486 | +0.65% |
| June → July | 469 | +1.65% |
| Chained total | +3.4% |
April into May was the largest single-month fall we recorded in any category over this period, giving back around two thirds of March's rise before the trend resumed. Motherboards dipped in the same month, though by less.
For context over the same window and method: storage rose 9.6%, CPUs 4.2%, GPUs 3.1% and motherboards 2.6%. Memory sits in the middle of the pack, but with more month-to-month movement than the others.
Averaging every kit listed in March against every kit listed in July does not measure prices. It measures which products entered and left the catalogue. Retailers rotate lines constantly, and a wave of new high-end kits makes the market look more expensive when nothing has moved.
Every figure above compares a kit only against itself, and only when we hold observations for it in both months. That removes the composition effect entirely.
This is where memory behaves very differently from storage. With SSDs, price per terabyte falls steeply as capacity rises. With RAM, it does not. Above 32GB, it gets worse.
Looking at the cheapest price per gigabyte available in each capacity, relative to the 32GB tier:
| Kit capacity | Kits tracked | Cheapest £/GB vs 32GB |
|---|---|---|
| 8GB | 68 | about the same |
| 16GB | 133 | about the same |
| 32GB | 157 | baseline |
| 64GB | 45 | 78% more |
| 96GB+ | 10 | roughly 3.5x |
The floor is essentially flat from 8GB to 32GB. The cheapest per-gigabyte deal is much the same whether you buy 8GB or 32GB. Above that it climbs sharply. A 64GB kit costs around 78% more per gigabyte than a 32GB one at the keenest prices we see.
Averages tell the same story more starkly, because the high-capacity tiers have fewer budget options to pull them down.
The practical consequence: unless you have a workload that genuinely needs it, 64GB is poor value per gigabyte in the current market. Buying 32GB now and adding more later is a reasonable strategy for memory in a way it is not for storage, provided your board has the free slots and you accept the compatibility risk of mixing kits.
This is the most counterintuitive thing in our memory data, and it explains why builders disagree so sharply about whether DDR5 is "affordable" yet.
At the bottom of the market, the cheapest DDR5 per gigabyte we track undercuts every DDR4 kit we track, at roughly half the price per gigabyte of the cheapest DDR4. On the average, DDR5 runs around 1.8x the price per gigabyte of DDR4.
Both facts are true at once. DDR5 has a far wider spread than DDR4: a competitive budget floor alongside a long tail of high-speed, tight-timing kits that carry a heavy premium. DDR4, a mature standard on a shrinking set of platforms, is bunched much more tightly.
So "is DDR5 expensive?" has no single answer. If you buy at the value end of the DDR5 range, it is now the cheaper standard per gigabyte. If you shop by headline speed and timings, you are in the part of the market that carries the premium.
Live per-gigabyte figures for both standards are on our RAM price tracker. They move too often to print here without going stale.
We record a price observation for each tracked product whenever its listed price changes on Amazon UK, from February 2026 onwards. This article uses observations from 1 March, because February was still catalogue onboarding and coverage is uneven.
Month-over-month figures are matched-basket: a kit contributes to a period only when we hold observations for it in both months, and is compared only against itself. Monthly changes are chained for the cumulative figure. Capacity and standard comparisons use current in-stock listings.
Two limitations worth stating. These are listed Amazon UK prices for the products we track, not a national retail index, and they do not capture other retailers. And the per-gigabyte comparisons use the cheapest available in each tier rather than the average, because averages here are pulled upward by enthusiast kits most builders are not shopping for.
Memory did not get cheaper between March and July 2026. It rose 3.4%, with one real dip in May. Waiting has not been rewarded over this period.
For most builds, 32GB in the mainstream speed tier remains the sensible target, and the data gives a concrete reason beyond convention: it sits at the top of the flat part of the price-per-gigabyte curve. Step above it and you pay a disproportionate premium for capacity you may not use.
If you want DDR5 at DDR4-like value, it exists, but it is at the budget end of the range, not the tier the marketing pushes. Check the RAM price tracker for current pricing, and our CPU and storage trackers if you are pricing a full build, since memory is rarely the component that decides your budget.
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This article was written with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor. Price data is sourced from Amazon UK. For more information, see our About page.