Claude Opus 5 pricing in 2026
What one task costs on Claude Opus 5
Per-million-token prices are hard to feel, so here are typical token counts for common jobs priced with Claude Opus 5. Figures are USD at the rates above and exclude prompt caching and batch discounts.
| Task | Tokens (in / out) | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Code review of a 500-line pull request | 60,000 / 4,000 | $0.400 |
| Debug one failing test | 40,000 / 6,000 | $0.350 |
| Generate a landing page in one shot | 3,000 / 30,000 | $0.765 |
| Draft a 1,200-word article | 2,000 / 2,500 | $0.072 |
| Answer a question from a 20-page document | 25,000 / 800 | $0.145 |
| Multi-step agent run (10 tool calls) | 250,000 / 25,000 | $1.88 |
| All of the above, once | $3.61 |
Cheaper at the same or better capability: GLM-5.3 FlashX runs the same set of tasks for $0.226 instead of $3.61.
Claude Opus 5 by Anthropic costs $5 per 1M input tokens and $25 per 1M output tokens — about 50.0k tokens per $1. Prices last verified 2026-09-19.
The verdict
Anthropic's frontier workhorse and the best all-round Claude, with an intelligence index of 51 — just behind the new premium tier (Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra both score 53). It's the coding and long-context favourite, but at $5 / $25 it's expensive on output. It's worth the premium for complex code, agents and documents where the last few points of quality genuinely matter.
A concrete example: sending 100,000 input tokens and getting back 20,000 output tokens with Claude Opus 5 costs about $1 at current prices.
Who is Claude Opus 5 for?
Claude Opus 5 is Anthropic's frontier workhorse (index 51) and the coding and long-context favourite among practitioners. For complex refactors, agent-driven work and long documents, it's the model people pay for when they need to get it right.
The trade-offs are real: it's slow — it thinks a lot, and simple tasks can take a long time — and at $5 / $25 per 1M it's expensive on output. For straightforward work, Sonnet 5 or a cheaper rival delivers most of the value for a fraction of the price. Pick Opus when quality on hard tasks is the whole point.
Strengths & weaknesses
- Strength: Coding and long-context favourite
- Best for: Design, Quality, One-shot
- Weakness: Slow and 'lazy' — it thinks a lot, and simple tasks can take up to 30 minutes.
Claude Opus 5 key facts
| Provider | Claude pricing |
|---|---|
| Input price | $5 / 1M tokens |
| Output price | $25 / 1M tokens |
| Tokens / $1 | 50.0k |
| Intelligence / $1 | 25,500 |
| Context window | 1.0M tokens |
| Tier | frontier |
| Speed | Very slow |
| Intelligence index | 51 / 100 |
| Released | 2026-07-24 |
| Last verified | 2026-09-19 |
What Claude Opus 5 delivers for your budget
For a coding workload, here is roughly what each monthly budget buys:
| Budget | Tokens / month | Months of workload |
|---|---|---|
| $20 | 2.1M | 3.2x |
| $50 | 5.2M | 8.0x |
| $100 | 10.4M | 16.0x |
Other Claude models
How Claude Opus 5 compares to its closest rivals
Rather than repeating the full catalog on every page, here are the three current models nearest to Claude Opus 5 on the intelligence index — and why you might still pick one instead:
- GPT-6 Astra (ChatGPT) — $10 input / $50 output per 1M tokens. Why you might pick it: Frontier reasoning inside ChatGPT Plus and Pro.
- Claude Fable 5.1 (Claude) — $10 input / $50 output per 1M tokens. Why you might pick it: Top of the intelligence index — first-pass quality.
- Muse Spark 1.3 (Meta) — $1.25 input / $4.25 output per 1M tokens. Why you might pick it: Frontier index at roughly a tenth of the premium tiers' price.
Claude Opus 5 — frequently asked questions
How much does Claude Opus 5 cost?
Claude Opus 5 by Anthropic costs $5 per 1M input tokens and $25 per 1M output tokens.
How many tokens per dollar does Claude Opus 5 give you?
On a typical 1:3 input-to-output mix, Claude Opus 5 delivers around 50.0k tokens per dollar — an intelligence-per-dollar score of 25500.
What is Claude Opus 5's context window?
Claude Opus 5 supports a context window of 1.0M tokens.
Is Claude Opus 5 worth it in 2026?
Claude Opus 5 is Claude's frontier tier model. Use the AI Intelligence Calculator to see how its value compares to every other model at your budget.