Raspberry Pi 5 16GB Now Costs $385 After a Fourth Memory Price Rise
The 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 goes up $80 to $385, more than three times its $120 price a year ago. The 16GB Compute Module 5 rises $40; the Pi 500+ holds.
The 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 got $80 more expensive today, and now costs $385. Raspberry Pi says it can't find an alternative supply of 16GB DRAM, and that other component shortages have made things worse. The 16GB variants of Compute Module 5 go up by $40 each.
It's the fourth price rise for the board in under a year. Until December 2025 the 16GB Pi 5 cost $120; it now costs more than three times that.
What changes, and what doesn't
- Raspberry Pi 5, 16GB: up $80, to $385, from today.
- Compute Module 5, 16GB variants: up $40 each; Raspberry Pi has put the new prices in the product brief on the Compute Module 5 page.
- Raspberry Pi 500+: price held, even though the keyboard computer also has 16GB of RAM.
- Everything else: no change this time. Raspberry Pi says it has again avoided "blanket increases across the entire product line".
How the 16GB Pi 5 got here
Every step so far comes from Raspberry Pi's own announcements:
- 1 December 2025: $120 to $145, the first memory-driven rise for the 16GB model.
- 2 February 2026: up another $60, to $205, in a round that hit every Pi 4 and Pi 5 with 2GB or more.
- 1 April 2026: up $100, to $305. Raspberry Pi said then that the LPDDR4 memory used on the Pi 4 and Pi 5 had risen seven-fold in price over the previous year.
- 2 November 2026: up $80, to $385.
The cause is the same one pushing up PC parts everywhere: memory makers are selling as much as they can to AI data centres, which leaves less for everyone else. We've explained why RAM and SSD prices are rising, and SK hynix has said it expects the memory shortage to last until 2030.
Do you actually need 16GB?
Raspberry Pi's own advice is to make sure "you're not paying for more memory than you need". For most projects, a lower-memory Pi 5, an older model or some memory tuning in your software will do the job for much less. The 16GB board mostly makes sense for heavy desktop use, local AI models or big containers.
If you want 16GB in a full desktop, the Pi 500+ is the one 16GB machine whose price didn't move today.
Watch out for inflated prices
Raspberry Pi also warns that "a few bad actors" are using the shortage to sell its boards above official prices, or to sell products that "aren't what they seem". Its advice: buy from an Approved Reseller, listed on its website.
The company repeats that it sees the memory crunch as "ultimately temporary", and says it will roll the increases back "when memory costs fall once again". It said the same in February, and prices have gone up twice since.
