IT Hardware Price Increases 2026: Every Vendor Move, One Tracker
Nearly every vendor a federal or enterprise buyer touches repriced something in 2026, each on its own clock and with its own weight of evidence. Here is the whole family of our price reporting in one rundown, with the confirmed-or-reported label kept on every figure.
By Uniqcli Team · · 12 min read
Key takeaways
- Confirmed and dated: Palo Alto Networks hardware up 10% from early April 2026, and Sophos XGS hardware and its attached subscriptions up a flat 10% from July 1.
- Cisco confirmed list increases on memory-heavy compute effective March 7 and April 18, 2026; its CEO called networking-appliance increases more nominal.
- Reported but not vendor-published: Eaton's August 2, 2026 action averaging 4-12%, Lenovo's July 2026 portfolio-wide round, and Check Point's April 5 appliance surcharge.
- The shared driver is memory: TrendForce guides Q3 2026 conventional DRAM contract prices up 13-18% quarter over quarter and NAND Flash up 10-15%, decelerating but still rising.
- Order-by and ship-by are different protections; the date that actually governs your price is your own quote's stated validity date, and several vendors now reprice unshipped orders.
On this page
Price watch
One page for a year that moved on a dozen separate clocks
Since December 2025 the repricing has been close to continuous, and almost none of it happened on the same day, in the same way, or with the same weight of evidence behind the number. This page is the index to that. It gathers the 2026 vendor price actions, surcharges and repricing terms Uniqcli has published reporting on into one rundown, with the date, what moved, and where the full write-up sits. It aggregates our own coverage rather than adding findings to it: nothing below is a figure the linked post does not already carry, with the same sourcing and the same confirmed-or-reported status attached. It is re-marked as vendors move, and the entries here are current as of the date on this page.
Confirmed, reported, and the difference that costs money
Entries fall into two classes, and the class matters more than the percentage. Some are stated by the vendor on the record: Palo Alto Networks confirmed a 10% hardware increase on its Q3 fiscal-year 2026 earnings call, Eaton confirmed an April 1, 2026 Electrical Americas increase in its Q1 2026 materials with additional price actions anticipated, and Microsoft published its July 1, 2026 Microsoft 365 increase suite by suite. Others reach a buyer through a distributor bulletin, a trade report, or a reseller's repost of a partner notice, and several of those never get a vendor-published number attached at all.
The distinction is not academic. A reported figure is a planning assumption you carry with a caveat; a confirmed one is a number that survives a procurement justification. Eaton is the clearest example on this page, and it is the one place our own coverage does not fully agree with itself: a reported August 2, 2026 action at 4-12% comes from an authorized distributor bulletin, while our Eaton price report finds no public evidence of an Eaton-wide August event and treats January 15 and April 1 as the confirmed dates. Both cards below carry their own link so the sourcing can be read side by side. Where the underlying post flags a figure as reported, this tracker keeps the flag rather than rounding it into fact.
One boundary worth stating up front: this tracks price, not availability. End-of-sale and last-order dates are a different kind of deadline, because they close a part to new orders regardless of what it costs. Those live in our firewall roundup and the August deadline calendar, both linked from this page, and mixing the two categories is how a project ends up chasing a faster purchase order for a part that can no longer be ordered at any price.
Conventional DRAM contract price guidance for Q3 2026, quarter over quarter (TrendForce, July 3, 2026)
NAND Flash contract price guidance for Q3 2026, quarter over quarter (TrendForce, July 3, 2026)
Sophos XGS firewall hardware and the subscriptions attached to it, effective July 1, 2026; virtual appliances excluded
Palo Alto Networks, effective early April 2026, confirmed on its Q3 fiscal-year 2026 earnings call
Cisco compute quote price-protection window, effective March 8, 2026 (IT Channel Oxygen, reported)
End of federal fiscal year 2026; one-year appropriations must be obligated by then or the authority generally expires
Compute, client and rugged
Public reporting on this side of the market names vendor portfolios rather than individual product families, so read these as portfolio-level actions and confirm the figure on your own quote. Each card links to the post that carries the sourcing.
Cisco
Two confirmed list-price increases on memory-heavy compute, effective March 7 and April 18, 2026, with CEO Chuck Robbins describing networking-appliance increases as more nominal because appliances carry less memory. The reported ~3.4% September and October 2025 increases on hardware and technical services remain the honest baseline for switching, routing and SMARTnet. Impact: budget flat to low single digits on appliances, and ask for the price-list effective date behind any quote.
HPE and HP Inc.
No single percentage or portfolio-wide effective date from either company. HPE amended its quoting terms to reserve a right to reprice config-to-order compute between quote and shipment, with quote validity reportedly shortened to 14 days from 30; HP Inc. has said memory is now roughly 35% of a PC's bill-of-materials cost, with cost recovery weighted to its fiscal Q4, roughly August through October 2026. Impact: on ProLiant, Alletra and GreenLake, the quoted price is provisional until it ships.
Dell
A reported ~15-20% commercial PC and server increase in mid-December 2025, then a further reported ~17-18% round effective March 30, 2026, with some commercial configurations cited as high as ~30%. Dell warned commercial customers directly that placing an order today for future delivery does not guarantee current pricing, and the March round reportedly repriced orders not shipped by March 31. Impact: on config-to-order builds, ship date can matter as much as order date.
Lenovo
Three separate pricing events: all then-current quotations expiring January 1, 2026; a March 2026 channel round with hard February order deadlines and a March 31 shipment cutoff; and a reported July 2026 portfolio-wide round, described as broadly in line with the March magnitude rather than carrying a published figure of its own. A separate report put server pricing in that wave at 20-40%, which our Dell and Lenovo piece carries in full (TrendForce, June 10, 2026). No direct Lenovo confirmation of the July round has appeared, so it stays reported. Impact: price a Lenovo refresh against a current quote, never against a list you last checked in the spring.
Getac
No publicly confirmed percentage and no confirmed effective date. What exists is signal: an authorized reseller has publicly run a tariff-driven price-hike promotion naming specific rugged models, and Getac's chairman acknowledged industry-wide component inflation to Digitimes in November 2025. Impact: nobody can quote you a Getac number as fact yet, which is an argument for locking a dated quote rather than waiting for one.
Security appliances and networking
The most sharply dated moves of the year sit here, because appliance vendors tend to publish a flat percentage and a single effective date rather than repricing a configurator continuously.
Sophos and Juniper
Sophos applied a flat 10% worldwide increase on XGS firewall hardware and the subscriptions bundled and attached to that hardware, effective July 1, 2026; virtual appliances and software-only Sophos Firewall subscriptions are excluded. Juniper, now inside HPE, has no confirmed or reported 2026 list increase on SRX, EX, QFX or MX. Impact: two different conversations with one account team, and the software-only Sophos path is a real exclusion worth pricing.
Palo Alto Networks
A 10% hardware price increase effective early April 2026, confirmed by management on the Q3 fiscal-year 2026 earnings call and attributed to rising memory and storage component costs. The transcript does not break the figure out by product line. Impact: any PA-Series hardware quoted after early April reflects the higher list, and a pre-April quote is worth confirming in writing before you assume it still holds.
Check Point
A 5% increase across firewall hardware, subscriptions and support effective January 1, 2026, separate from a subscription increase announced in July 2025. A reported temporary 5% appliance surcharge effective April 5, 2026 came through a reseller-reposted partner notice rather than a Check Point release, and states that base list pricing, support and renewals are unaffected. Impact: have the reseller confirm current surcharge status before signing a hardware-only order.
Ubiquiti
A Memory Surcharge of up to 5.8% on select products in Ubiquiti's own store, effective April 24, 2026, broken out as its own line item rather than folded into a price increase. The affected SKU list was already revised once, as of July 1, 2026 per a reseller posting, and Ubiquiti says it is absorbing part of the cost. Impact: 5.8% is a snapshot and not a ceiling, so confirm the surcharge at SKU level on every quote.
Extreme Networks
A 7% list-price increase disclosed on the company's earnings call, with its CEO saying further increases are possible to offset memory costs. Extreme also opened a time-boxed Deal Registration Price Guarantee running May 4 through November 1, 2026. Impact: the price-lock is real but it is a window, and it closes on November 1 whether or not the refresh is ready.
Power, storage and licensing
The lines where the deadline is often not a price-effective date at all: an allocation queue, a renewal anniversary, or a per-device fee that steps up on a published schedule.
Eaton
A January 15, 2026 Eaton Power notice and a confirmed April 1, 2026 Electrical Americas increase with more anticipated. No Eaton-published percentage exists for either one. Impact: on project power the queue outranks the letter, with Eaton reporting a data-center backlog near 228 GW and orders up about 240% year over year.
Eaton's reported August action
Reported separately and worth reading beside the card above: an August 2, 2026 Electrical Americas and GEIS action averaging 4-12% on Critical Power Solutions and Distributed-IT, sourced to an authorized distributor bulletin rather than an Eaton release. Our Eaton price report finds no public evidence of an Eaton-wide August event, so the two sit in open tension until a vendor price letter settles it. Impact: ask for that letter before you budget the range.
Hard drives and arrays
Seagate said nearline HDD capacity is fully allocated through calendar 2026 and Western Digital said it is pretty much sold out for the same period, with independent tracking putting HDD prices up about 46% on average between September 2025 and January 2026. Everpure, formerly Pure Storage, said list prices rose roughly 70% since the start of 2026. Impact: this is an allocation problem wearing a price tag, so lead time is the field to negotiate.
Enterprise SSD
NAND Flash contract prices were guided up 70-75% quarter over quarter for Q2 2026 and a further 10-15% for Q3. At the midpoint of each guided range, two quarters compound to roughly double, with the smaller increase second. Impact: the deceleration is not relief, and waiting a quarter buys the smaller move rather than a reversal of the first one.
Memory: DRAM and NAND
The upstream driver behind most of this page. TrendForce guided conventional DRAM contract prices up 58-63% and NAND up 70-75% quarter over quarter for Q2 2026, then 13-18% and 10-15% for Q3; Gartner forecasts DRAM up 125% and NAND up 234% across full-year 2026. Impact: memory-dense configurations reprice faster than the rest of a catalog, so lock those lines first.
Microsoft 365
List prices rose effective July 1, 2026, spanning 5% to 33% by plan, with Office 365 E3 up 13% from $23 to $26 per user per month. The increase extends to GCC, GCC-High, DoD and NCOE, with US AGC excluded; government increases above 10% phase in at no more than 10% a year. Impact: existing customers reprice at their own next renewal after July 1, so your renewal date is the deadline, not the effective date.
Citrix and Oracle Java
Citrix retires file-based licensing across its on-premises portfolio on April 15, 2026, after which the License Activation Service is the only supported activation method; Citrix frames that as a technology transition with no change to commercial terms. Administrators separately report post-acquisition renewal increases well above inflation, and Oracle's Java SE Universal Subscription prices per employee across an entire headcount against elevated audit attention. Impact: both are renewal-date deadlines rather than effective-date ones.
Windows 10 ESU
Year 1 runs at $61 per device through October 13, 2026, and Year 2 doubles to $122 per device from October 14. Year 2 cannot be bought on its own, so a fleet that skipped Year 1 buys it retroactively and enters at $183 per device for a single year of forward coverage. Impact: waiting does not defer the cost here, it buys strictly less for the same money.
VMware under Broadcom
Reported rather than vendor-confirmed on every point: per-core VMware Cloud Foundation licensing with a 16-core-per-CPU floor, renewal quotes running 3x to 10x prior perpetual-plus-support cost, a cloud-service-provider partner program narrowed to invite-only, and audit letters to perpetual-license holders. Impact: recount cores before you renew, and confirm your supplier can still sell and provision new licenses.
Timing an order when the list itself is moving
Read the rundown end to end and the useful conclusion is not a percentage; it is that the lever a buyer actually holds is their own paperwork. A written quote states an explicit validity date, set when the quote is issued, and it holds the prices printed on it through that date. Accept it before the date and the order is placed at exactly those prices. Let it lapse and it has to be re-issued at whatever is current that day, which in this market is rarely the same number. A quoted order never requires payment up front, so holding a firm, dated quote through a funding cycle costs nothing and commits nothing, and the only real cost of a quote is letting it expire before you act on it.
Vendor terms sit on top of that, and 2026 is the year several of them started to bite. HPE reserves a right to reprice config-to-order compute between quote and shipment, with validity reportedly as short as 14 days. Dell's March 2026 round reportedly repriced orders that were placed in time but not shipped by March 31. Cisco cut compute quote price protection to 7 days and, per the same reporting, can reopen and reprice an already-approved compute quote where no purchase order has been placed. That is the trap worth naming plainly: order-by and ship-by are different protections, and an order placed ahead of an effective date does not override a vendor's own ship-by language.
The mismatch underneath all of it is arithmetic. Quote-validity windows have compressed to 7 to 14 days at several vendors, while a fleet refresh moves through requirements, funding, technical evaluation and award on a cycle measured in months. Nothing about the percentage on any given line is as dangerous as that gap, because it is what turns a funded, approved, technically-settled configuration into a re-quote. Shortening your own internal loop, and starting the quote earlier than the approval cycle feels like it needs, is the only part of that equation a buyer controls.
For federal buyers there is a second clock running into the first. Federal fiscal year 2026 ends September 30, 2026, and one-year appropriations must be obligated by that date or the authority generally expires, which makes late August through September the heaviest ordering stretch of the year. Mercatus Center research covering 2003 to 2013 found roughly 16.9% of annual contract obligations landing in September alone, against 8.3% under an even spread. That is the collision this tracker exists to make visible: the busiest weeks of the federal buying year overlap precisely the window in which a memory-dense quote is most likely to need reissuing. Back-plan from September 30 rather than from a vendor's effective date, and treat the constrained lines as the ones to quote first.
Turning this page into an order-by plan
There is no market-wide date to beat. Work the rundown against your own open lines, in this order.
- Sort your open lines into confirmed-and-dated versus reported, and carry a caveat on every reported figure rather than budgeting it as fact.
- Get each specific SKU's vendor effective date and any distributor order cutoff in writing; the practical cutoff for you lands earlier than the vendor's date because systems need lead time to process at the old price.
- Ask, per quote, whether the price is locked to purchase-order acceptance or to shipment, and get the answer in writing on any line where the vendor reserves a reprice-before-ship right.
- Lock memory-dense configurations first, since servers, high-RAM workstations and large-capacity storage carry the largest share of the component that is actually inflating.
- For renewals rather than hardware, the operative date is your own renewal anniversary or program year, not a market effective date: Microsoft 365 reprices at each customer's next renewal, Citrix and Oracle Java land on their own renewal cycles, and Windows 10 ESU steps up on its own published schedule.
- On power and large storage, negotiate a firm quoted lead time against your delivery or commissioning date, because allocation slippage can cost more than the list-price delta.
- Federal buyers: back-plan from September 30, 2026 and start the quote earlier than the approval cycle feels like it needs.
- Put the whole multi-brand build on one bill of materials so you are tracking one validity date instead of a dozen vendor calendars.
Buyer questions
Is there one 2026 IT price increase, or one date to beat?
Neither. Each vendor sets its own effective date, its own scope and its own renewal timing, and some reserve the right to reprice an order after it is placed but before it ships. The closest thing to a single deadline is your own paperwork: the vendor effective date for your specific SKU, any distributor order cutoff, and your quote's stated validity window. That is why this page is a rundown of separate moves rather than a countdown to one date.
Which of these increases are actually vendor-confirmed?
Palo Alto Networks confirmed 10% on hardware from early April 2026 on its Q3 fiscal-year 2026 earnings call. Sophos confirmed a flat 10% on XGS hardware and attached subscriptions from July 1, 2026 through its partner channel. Cisco's March 7 and April 18, 2026 compute increases and Eaton's April 1, 2026 Electrical Americas increase were both stated by the vendors, though Eaton published no percentage. Microsoft published its July 1, 2026 Microsoft 365 increases suite by suite, and Citrix published its April 15, 2026 licensing cutover. Treated as reported rather than confirmed: Eaton's August 2 action at 4-12%, Lenovo's July round, Check Point's April 5 surcharge, the per-line Meraki and Catalyst percentages, the Citrix renewal-increase pattern, and everything about Getac, where no figure has been published at all.
If I place the order before the effective date, is my price safe?
Not automatically, and this is the single most expensive assumption on the page. Order-by and ship-by are different protections. HPE reserves a reprice-before-ship right on config-to-order compute, Dell's March 2026 round reportedly repriced orders not shipped by March 31, and Cisco can reportedly reopen an approved compute quote where no purchase order has been placed. What you can rely on is your quote's stated validity date: accept it before it expires and the order is placed at exactly those quoted prices.
Are prices still rising in the second half of 2026?
Yes, more slowly on the memory side. TrendForce's guidance published July 3, 2026 puts Q3 conventional DRAM contract prices up 13-18% quarter over quarter and NAND Flash up 10-15%, a sharp deceleration from Q2 but still a real increase, and Gartner forecasts DRAM up 125% and NAND up 234% across the full year. TrendForce attributes the moderation to consumer demand hitting affordability limits while AI server demand keeps supply tight, which is a demand ceiling on one segment rather than new supply arriving. Nothing in current guidance describes prices falling.
The mechanics, the calendar and the fiscal clock
The posts this tracker indexes that are not a single vendor's move: the cross-brand primer, the dated calendar, the quote mechanics underneath all of it, and the federal year-end deadline every line above runs into.
Beat the 2026 price increase
The cross-brand primer on the wave: the drivers, how pricing flows through distribution, and the order-by logic brand by brand.
August 2026 deadlines
The dated calendar for the August cluster, re-marked after the cutoffs passed: what landed, what is still open, and what comes next.
How long is a price quote valid?
What a validity date actually promises, why quoted lead time is a different clock, and the order-by versus ship-by distinction in full.
Cisco quote validity in 2026
The 7-day compute and 14-day non-compute windows, the reopening clause, and the April 18 Meraki and Catalyst list increases.
Cisco's 2026 EOL wave
The last-order dates running alongside the price moves, bulletin by bulletin — availability rather than price, and a different kind of deadline.
The September FY2026 surge
What the heaviest ordering weeks of the federal year look like this time around, and where they collide with the constrained lines.
Windows 10 ESU budgeting
Modeling the bridge cumulatively instead of per year, and finding the crossover where refreshing beats renewing for a device class.
Federal year-end IT buying
How obligation deadlines actually work and what has to be in place before September 30, 2026.
Price a multi-brand build
Assemble the whole configuration as one bill of materials and get one dated quote instead of a stack that expires on separate days.
Price the build against one date instead of a dozen
Send the full multi-brand bill of materials and get back a single dated quote that holds its prices through its stated validity window. A quoted order never requires payment up front, so locking the number while funding closes costs nothing.