Aug 1, 2026
Follow us on Google for more Moneywise news
Add us on GoogleApple will lease you an iPhone 17 Pro for $31.99 a month, with Klarna providing the lease. Pay for two years, you’ll have spent $767.76. Sounds cheap — until you notice the phone isn’t yours at the end, and buying it costs extra.
The program is called Apple Upgrade, and it opened on July 28. You’ve probably seen Klarna at checkout, offering to split a purchase into payments. You can sign up online or in an Apple store, and the application pulls a soft credit check, which leaves your score alone.
Advertisement
Under the old iPhone Upgrade Program, your monthly payments were slowly buying you the phone. The new program is a rental: When the term runs out, you ship the phone back, buy it or sign up again.
Thanks for subscribing!
Take control — get our free newsletter.
By signing up, you accept Moneywise Terms of Use, Subscription Agreement, and Privacy Policy.
Apple pushed prices up on several products in June, by $100 to $500, depending on the model, and pointed at memory chips, which have gotten expensive as AI data centers buy them in bulk. More iPhones land in September. Mike Howard, Vice President of Memory Coverage at TechInsights, told CNN this month that the figure buyers should have in their heads is “a $1,500 iPhone.”
So we did the math on the phone Apple uses as its own example.
4 ways to get the same iPhone
Apple charges $1,099 for an iPhone 17 Pro with 256GB of storage. Leasing it costs $31.99 a month over 24 months, or $45.99 over 12.
Option 1: Buy it. You pay $1,099 plus tax and the phone is yours.
Option 2: Lease it, then buy it. After 24 payments of $31.99, you’ve paid $767.76. Apple’s own FAQ spells out what buying the phone costs at that point: The list price, minus the lease payments you’ve made, minus any trade-in credit left on the account. No financing charge.
On this phone, that works out to about $331. And $767.76 plus $331 is $1,099, exactly the shelf price. The two-year lease is interest-free financing — Apple’s FAQ says you’ll never pay more than the device’s full list price, excluding tax and any damage fees.
Option 3: Lease it and send it back. Same $767.76, except you mail the phone off in a prepaid box and own nothing. That only makes sense if a two-year-old iPhone 17 Pro is worth less than $331 used, so check resale prices first. If yours would sell for more, pay the $331, keep the phone and sell it yourself.
Option 4: The 12-month lease. A year at $45.99 comes to $551.88, half the price of the phone for 12 months of use. Do it twice and you’ve spent $1,103.76 over two years, more than the phone costs, and you still have to give it back.
Advertisement
Must Read
- The ultra-rich use these 5 real estate strategies to build wealth while they sleep — you can start with just $100
- Here’s the average income of Americans by age in 2026. Are you keeping up or falling behind?
- Insurance companies profit most from drivers who auto-renew without shopping around. Comparing 100+ quotes takes 2 minutes and costs nothing
Join 250,000+ readers and get Moneywise’s best stories and exclusive interviews first — clear insights curated and delivered weekly. Subscribe now.
How long you keep a phone changes the answer
The average American buys a new phone about every 29 months, according to a Reviews.org survey of 1,000 U.S. adults from September 2025. A 24-month lease is five months shorter than that, so signing one means shopping for a phone a little more often than you probably would on your own.
Hold onto phones longer and the gap widens. Buy the 17 Pro and use it for four years, and you’re at roughly $23 a month, plus whatever the phone sells for at the end. Lease a fresh one every two years and you’re at $32 a month for as long as you stay in the program. Over the same four years, that’s $1,535.52 in lease payments against $1,099 spent once. The $436 difference is what always having the newer phone actually costs.
What else is in the lease
AppleCare is a separate bill now. Coverage came bundled into the old iPhone Upgrade Program’s monthly price. But under Apple Upgrade, it’s optional and billed on its own. Some of the drop in the monthly figure is insurance you’re now buying separately.
Going without it is a gamble, because Apple requires the phone back in good working condition and charges damage fees if it isn’t.
Some of the terms work in your favor, and they’re worth knowing before you weigh the rest. There’s no deposit and no down payment. A trade-in at signup lowers the monthly bill for your first term. Apple Card holders earn 3% Daily Cash on every payment. Apple will tell you when you’ve paid enough to upgrade without a fee, and you get 60 days after enrolling to add AppleCare if you skipped it at checkout.
Advertisement
You also get 14 days from the day the phone arrives to change your mind, return it and cancel the lease at no cost. After that, the exit fee equals every payment you haven’t made yet, through the end of the term. Apple’s fine print calls these fees “substantial,” and that’s accurate — quit a 24-month lease at month six and you owe the other 18 months at once.
Doing nothing has a price, too, though Apple gives you room to think. When your term ends, you have six months to pick an option, and monthly payments keep running during that window. They can rise if you had a trade-in credit, since the credit only applies to the first term. Let all six months lapse without choosing and Klarna charges you the full purchase fee, so the default outcome is buying the phone.
Klarna won’t charge you a late fee, but miss three payments in a row and it cancels the lease, with the rest of the balance due at once, according to CNBC. One more catch for iPhone leases: you have to connect to AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon, and prepaid plans don’t qualify.
Morgan Stanley analysts figure the iPhone 18 Pro has to cost roughly $200 more before Apple’s margins are safe, according to CNBC. If that shows up in September, $31.99 a month is going to sound a lot friendlier than the sticker. The total is the same either way. Get the buyout number in writing before you sign, and put your lease-end date on the calendar.
Klarna didn’t respond to a request for comment by publication.
You May Also Like
- JP Morgan sees gold hitting $6,000/oz before 2027 — and a Gold IRA lets you hold the physical metal while deferring the tax bill. Get your free guide from Priority Gold
- Dave Ramsey warns nearly 50% of Americans are making 1 big Social Security mistake — here’s what it is and the simple steps to fix it ASAP
- Thanks to Jeff Bezos, you can now become a landlord for as little as $100 — and no, you don't have to deal with tenants or fix freezers. Here's how
- Millionaires under 43 are reshaping investing — just 25% of their portfolios are in stocks. Here’s where their money is going
Godwin Oluponmile is a content specialist, SEO strategist and copywriter with seven years of expertise in finance, Web 3.0, B2B SaaS and technology. His work has been featured in publications such as Entrepreneur, HackerNoon, Blocktelegraph and Benzinga.
