Private Internet Access Review (2026): Prices, Audits, Flaws

Private Internet Access (PIA) is the cheapest audited VPN in our data on a long plan. On 5 November 2026, it cost $2.03 a month for 40 months. That is billed as $81.20 up front, and the plan renews at the same $81.20 every three years.

PIA pairs that price with a combination the bigger brands do not offer together:

• fully open-source apps
• port forwarding
• unlimited simultaneous connections
• three Deloitte reviews of its no-logs configuration

The reasons to hesitate are structural rather than technical:

• PIA is a Denver company under Colorado law in the United States.
• It belongs to Kape Technologies, the group that also owns ExpressVPN and CyberGhost.
• It no longer accepts cryptocurrency.
• It publishes no server count.

This review sets out both sides, with the date and source for every number. It leaves the ranking to our score for PIA, shown above.

Privacy and logging

PIA Private Internet Access, Inc. is registered at 2590 Welton St in Denver, and Colorado law governs its terms. The United States is the founding member of the 5 Eyes intelligence alliance, a group of countries that share intelligence. That is the weakest jurisdiction in our data set, and our methodology scores it accordingly.

The US has no mandatory data-retention law for VPN providers. But it has subpoenas, warrants, national security letters and gag orders, and a US company has to answer them. What limits the damage is PIA’s design rather than the law. A provider can only hand over what it keeps.

PIA’s privacy policy refers to Kape Technologies, and PIA’s own blog describes joining the group. Kape also owns ExpressVPN and CyberGhost, so three of the twelve providers we track share a parent company.

Shared ownership is not a privacy leak in itself, and each service runs its own apps and infrastructure. But if you want your subscription to go to an independent company, you should know this before you buy. Mullvad, Windscribe and IVPN are independent.

PIA’s list of what it keeps is as short as any policy we have read. The privacy policy is dated 3 November 2025. It states that PIA collects and retains zero user logs. It keeps none of these:

• browsing history
• connected content
• user IP addresses
• connection timestamps
• bandwidth logs
• DNS queries

The servers run in RAM and wipe their data on every scheduled reboot.

Three kinds of evidence back the policy up. Together, they are stronger than what most competitors can show.

The first is auditing. Deloitte Audit Romania has reviewed PIA three times under the revised ISAE 3000 standard. ISAE 3000 is an international standard that auditors use to check claims that are not financial.

• The first review found the server configurations aligned with the no-logs policy as of 30 June 2022. It was announced on 30 August 2022.
• The second, announced on 25 April 2024, covered the server network, incident management and the dedicated-IP token system.
• The third, announced on 8 December 2025, covered the VPN configuration, operational processes and the dedicated-IP token system again.

The reports are available inside a PIA account. As with NordVPN, that means you pay before you read.

The second kind of evidence is rarer: court records. On 12 March 2016, TorrentFreak reported on an FBI subpoena in a Florida bomb-threat case, United States v. Preston McWaters. The subpoena had sought PIA user logs. According to the report, PIA could only state that the IP addresses in question belonged to its US East Coast cluster, because it had no activity logs to search.

The second case was the San Jose federal trial of Ross Colby for hacking Embarcadero Media. On 6 June 2018, PIA’s general counsel testified there that the company keeps no activity logs. The testimony added that PIA could not link the defendant to the PIA IP addresses that were used.

In both cases, a US provider under legal compulsion produced nothing. That is the closest thing to a real-world test of a no-logs claim that exists. PIA is one of the few providers with that on the record.

The third kind of evidence is a seizure. In July 2016, Russian authorities seized several PIA servers without notice or due process. PIA cited its no-logs policy and encrypted servers, and it pulled every server out of Russia rather than operate under the logging law that followed.

Our data layer records this as a medium-severity incident, because hardware was taken. The incident is more than five years old, so our methodology does not deduct points for it today. We list it on this page because it happened.

PIA publishes a transparency report every quarter. A transparency report lists the legal requests a company receives and how it answers them. The most recent one covers 1 April to 30 June 2026. It lists:

• 4 subpoenas
• 2 warrants
• 7 other government, law-enforcement and civil requests
• 6 foreign or informal requests

PIA produced zero logs in every category. That makes 19 requests, with nothing handed over.

PIA does not publish a warrant canary, and it says so deliberately. A warrant canary is a regularly updated statement that a company has not received a secret government order. A PIA blog post, last updated on 30 January 2024, argues that a canary only signals after the damage is done. It says “the right way is to not have any collectable information in the first place”.

The post adds that PIA would shut down rather than start logging under compulsion, as it did in Russia. Reasonable people disagree about canaries. The transparency part of our score gives points for having one, so this policy choice costs PIA a little.

PIA’s help center no longer lists a cryptocurrency option, which hurts privacy-minded buyers. Cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Amazon Pay are linked to you by definition. To buy without a linked account, you can use:

• a gift card
• a prepaid Visa or Mastercard
• iDEAL and Qiwi, through Paymentwall

All of these are one-time purchases that do not auto-renew. That is enough for our anonymous-payment criterion. But it is a step back from the days when PIA took Bitcoin.

Security features

PIA runs WireGuard and OpenVPN. These are protocols, the methods a VPN uses to build its encrypted tunnel. On OpenVPN, the default cipher is AES-128-GCM, with AES-256 as an option and an RSA-4096 handshake. WireGuard uses ChaCha20 with Curve25519 key exchange.

PIA’s encryption page still mentions IPsec for iOS, but the iOS download page lists only WireGuard and OpenVPN. We could not resolve this inconsistency from the official pages. So treat the iOS app as a two-protocol app.

Post-quantum encryption is designed to resist attacks from future quantum computers. PIA documents no post-quantum key exchange. ExpressVPN, NordVPN, Mullvad and Windscribe do, so PIA is behind them on that one point.

A kill switch blocks your internet if the VPN connection drops. PIA has one everywhere: an Advanced Kill Switch in the desktop apps, and an in-app kill switch on iOS and Android.

Split tunneling lets you choose which apps skip the VPN. It works on Windows, macOS, Linux and Android, but not on iOS.

Obfuscation adds an SSL layer, so that VPN traffic looks like ordinary web traffic on networks that block VPNs. Multi-Hop routes the connection through an additional proxy after the VPN server.

Port forwarding lets other devices reach yours through the VPN, which matters to torrent users. PIA offers it on selected servers, which is why PIA appears on our torrenting shortlist. Most of the large brands do not offer it at all. NordVPN offers it only through a paid add-on, and Surfshark not at all.

MACE is PIA’s DNS-level filter for ad, tracker and malware domains, on the apps that support it. PIA DNS is the default resolver, with leak protection. A leak is traffic that slips outside the VPN and can reveal your real address.

While you are connected, IPv6 traffic is blocked rather than tunneled. That prevents leaks, but it also means you lose IPv6 connectivity for the duration. Check the result with our IPv6 leak test.

A dedicated IP add-on and an antivirus add-on are offered at checkout. The order page we loaded showed no prices for either, so we cannot tell you what they cost.

PIA describes its network as 180 locations in 113 countries, including all 50 US states. It runs on a 10-Gbps backbone with RAM-only servers. PIA publishes no server count and does not say which servers it owns. So the ownership field in our data reads “unknown”.

Some locations are virtual. A virtual location gives you an IP address in one country from a server in another. The India location, for example, runs on hardware in Singapore, which PIA discloses on its server page.

Apps and usability

The download page lists apps for:

• Windows, macOS and Linux
• Android, iOS and iPadOS
• Android TV, and Apple TV through tvOS
• smart TVs, consoles and routers

It also lists browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Edge. The Fire TV app is in the Amazon Appstore.

Every app and client is open source, at github.com/pia-foss. Open source means anyone can read and check the code. Among the providers we track, only Proton VPN, Mullvad and IVPN also publish all of their client code. Windscribe publishes part of it.

A subscription covers unlimited simultaneous connections. So one account can cover a household’s phones, laptops, television and router.

PIA offers Smart DNS for smart TVs and consoles. Smart DNS helps devices that cannot run a VPN app reach streaming services in other regions. But PIA’s own help center says it is no longer compatible with streaming services. So do not buy PIA for Smart DNS streaming on a device that cannot run the app.

PIA’s streaming page lists Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, BBC iPlayer, Prime Video and HBO Max, with streaming-optimized servers in selected locations. We record those as PIA’s documented claims, because we have not yet tested streaming access. Speed is not yet tested in our lab either, which is why speed is left out of the score.

We have not yet published our own usability notes or screenshots. Those will come with the lab described on the how we test page. The feature matrix above is built from PIA’s official pages as of 31 October 2026.

Support

PIA offers 24/7 live chat and email. Its help center at helpdesk.privateinternetaccess.com is the source for several of the facts on this page. We have not measured response times, so the support score reflects which channels exist rather than their quality. The Deloitte reports are behind the login, so support cannot send them to someone who has not bought yet.

Plans, prices and renewal

PIA sells one VPN tier under three terms. On 5 November 2026, it ran an “Early Access” promotion that advertised up to 83 percent off. These were the prices:

• 3 Years + 4 Months Extra: $2.03 a month, billed as $81.20 up front for 40 months.
• 1 year: $3.99 a month, billed as $47.88 for the first year.
• Monthly: $11.95.

The 40-month plan auto-renews at $81.20 every three years. That works out at $2.26 a month once the four bonus months fall away. On 31 October, under a “Halloween Price Slash” label, the same plan ran 39 months for $79 and renewed at $79. The 1-year plan renews at $47.88 a year. The renewal is the price you paid, not three times it.

For comparison, NordVPN’s 27-month Basic plan renews at $139.08 a year. IPVanish’s 2-year Essential plan renews at $99.99 a year.

Our PIA pricing page keeps the price history, so you can see whether that changes. The PIA deals page tracks the promotions. They have run under one seasonal name or another for most of the year.

The 30-day money-back guarantee applies to new subscribers. Purchases through app stores, gift cards or third-party deals can only be refunded by the payment processor. A repeat purchase within three months of a refund is not refundable. There is no free tier and no trial.

At $11.95, the monthly plan is cheaper than NordVPN’s and IPVanish’s, which both cost $14.99. It costs more than Windscribe’s at $9 and Mullvad’s at $5.63. So PIA is a long-term purchase rather than a month-to-month one.

If you pay the $81.20 and set a reminder for three years out, you pay the same amount again at renewal.

Who it is for and who should skip it

PIA fits:

• torrent users who need port forwarding
• households that want unlimited connections
• Linux users and open-source advocates
• anyone who wants the lowest audited price without a renewal shock

It also suits people who value court evidence over marketing. Two US cases in which PIA had nothing to hand over are a stronger signal than any press release. The quarterly transparency report keeps that signal current.

Skip it if:

• a non-US jurisdiction is a condition for you
• independent ownership matters to you
• you want to pay in cryptocurrency
• you need split tunneling on iOS
• you want a documented post-quantum protocol
• you buy a VPN mainly for Smart DNS on a television

If you want the whole decision reduced to a ranking, our ranked reviews page lists every provider by its current score. The best VPNs for privacy page weights jurisdiction more heavily than this general review does.

Alternatives

NordVPN costs more on its long plan and renews at $139.08 a year. But it operates from Panama, outside every intelligence-sharing alliance. It has six no-logs engagements behind it and documents a post-quantum option. It has no port forwarding on standard servers and allows 10 devices. Our NordVPN vs Private Internet Access comparison goes through the two line by line.

Surfshark is the other option with unlimited devices at a low introductory price. It had Deloitte no-logs audits in 2023 and 2025, and it is under Dutch jurisdiction. Like NordVPN, it has no port forwarding, and its SmartDNS was discontinued in February 2026. See Private Internet Access vs Surfshark.

Proton VPN matches PIA on open-source apps. It adds Swiss jurisdiction, yearly Securitum audits and a usable free tier. It costs $3.49 a month on its 24-month Plus plan, or $83.76, renewing at $83.88 a year. It has a 10-device limit, and the free plan limits streaming.

Mullvad is the privacy choice. It charges a flat €5 a month, needs no email address, accepts cash and has independent Swedish ownership. It makes no streaming claims, caps you at 5 devices and runs WireGuard only.

Windscribe also offers port forwarding, but only with a paid static IP. It sells Pro at $69 a year, with a 7-day refund. Its no-logs policy has not been audited.

How we verified this review

We read every price, plan term, renewal amount, location count and feature on this page from PIA’s official pages on 31 October 2026:

• the order page
• the terms of service
• the server page
• the features pages
• the help center

The three Deloitte reviews are dated from PIA’s own announcements. The two court cases are dated from the TorrentFreak reports of 12 March 2016 and 6 June 2018, which our data record cites. The Russia seizure is dated from PIA’s blog. We loaded the transparency report and the warrant-canary post the same day.

We have not run speed or streaming tests. So speed is left out of the score, and every streaming entry is labeled a claim. The data record behind this page is public, and the methodology page explains each score input.