Amazon Prime is the name of the company’s subscription service that includes fast, free delivery, Prime Video streaming service, Amazon Music and quite a bit more. And you’re allowed to share your membership with one other adult and up to four children at no extra cost.
There are a few restrictions, as not every benefit of Amazon Prime can be shared, including Prime Music. Most things can, though, including Prime Video, Prime Early Access, Prime Reading, Prime Wardrobe, and certain Amazon Family benefits, which we’ll explain below.
Sharing Amazon Prime can be especially useful during sales events such as Prime Day which is on 11-12 October 2022. (It’s actually called the Prime Early Access Sale this time around.)
Here’s how to share your Prime membership so others in your household can use it.
How does Amazon know who’s in my family?
It doesn’t. You choose this yourself in the Amazon Household section of your Amazon account. Because you’re required to share the same payment method with a second adult in the same household – and any children – it discourages different households from trying to split the cost of Prime, as you might with a Netflix subscription.
You can only do that if you trust the other adult to pay you back for whatever they spend.
This does not apply to buying physical products from Amazon: each person sharing a Prime subscription can use any payment method.
However, for things like rented or purchased videos on Amazon Prime Video, and other digital goods, the single, shared payment method will be used.
Once you’ve set up a Household (which we’ll explain in more detail below), your family can access a whole range of benefits including Prime Video, which allows you to set up various user profiles (just like Netflix).
Note that you can’t share benefits if you’re a Prime Student, Prime Video-only user, or an invited guest of a Prime member (the member is the person who pays for Prime).
If you haven’t yet signed up, you can get a 30-day free Amazon Prime trial now.
How to share Prime using Amazon Household
The instructions here assume you have already signed up to Amazon Prime and that you want to share that membership with one other adult and up to four of your children.
The first thing to do is to open a web browser, go to the Amazon website in your country and sign in.
Next, click on Accounts & List to the right of the search bar. Then, click Your Prime Membership from the list, or click on Prime – View benefits and payment settings (as shown below) to be taken to a new page that shows the benefits you’re entitled to with your Prime Membership. These will vary depending upon your region.
Scroll all the way down to the bottom and you should see a section that says Share your Prime benefits. Click the button marked ‘Invite someone now’.
Enter the name and email address of the person you would like to share your Prime account with.
Next, you’ll have to authorise the person you’re sharing your benefits with to use the payment card linked to your Prime account. This means that both adults within the Amazon Household will be able to use the same payment details.
The invitee will receive an email similar to the one shown below. They will have 14 days to accept the invitation and can cancel their existing Prime membership if they already have one.
You’ll then see an invitation confirmation and more information about the shareable benefits, which we talk more about below.
Which Prime benefits can you share?
The second adult using your Amazon Prime account will get access to many – but not all – benefits of Amazon Prime. Kids don’t really get these benefits, except indirectly.
For example, they can watch Prime Video and have their own user profile, but they’ll still need to log into the app with your Amazon account.
The other adult in your household gets the following benefits:
Delivery
Digital
Discounts / Exclusives
- Access to Lightning Deals
- Try before you buy
- Prime-exclusive items
- Discounts on Amazon Music, Kids+
- Amazon Family benefits such as 20% off nappies / diapers and baby food subscriptions
Invitees won’t be able to share benefits like Kindle First, Twitch Prime, or be able to invite more people to Prime.
Note: You can’t share Amazon Prime Music or Amazon Video Channels. If you wanted to let your spouse, say, listen to Prime Music, they’d need to log in with your account.
One easy way to share Prime Music is to use a smart speaker such as an Amazon Echo. Anyone in your home can ask Alexa to play music. The only disadvantage is that all the recently played songs will appear in your Alexa app, and you may end up getting recommendations for songs you, personally, don’t like. It’s a small price to pay, however.
If you want to have individual accounts, then you’d need to pay separately for Amazon Music Unlimited or a rival streaming service where you’d need their Family subscription.
Prime Music doesn’t have nearly as many songs, either – around 2 million compared to around 40 million in Music Unlimited. For more, read our in-depth comparison of Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited.
