Memory was cheap for most of 2023 and 2024 and has been getting dearer since. On the ramprices.uk index, built from the Amazon.co.uk price history of 952 kits with a full year of data (updated 11 September 2026), the median DDR5 kit costs £16.71 per gigabyte today against £3.68/GB a year ago, a move of +354%; DDR4 has gone from £2.98/GB to £6.70/GB (+125%). Over the last 90 days DDR5 moved +5% and DDR4 -9%. This guide explains what is behind that and how to buy sensibly while it lasts.
| Generation | Median £/GB now | 90 days ago | A year ago | 12-month change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DDR5 | £16.71 | £15.87 | £3.68 | +354% |
| DDR4 | £6.70 | £7.37 | £2.98 | +125% |
| DDR3 | £3.52 | £3.45 | £1.27 | +177% |
The full index, with a 12-month chart and a breakdown by kit size, lives on the RAM price index page, which is free to cite and publishes its data as JSON.
How it is calculated: for every kit we track that has price history, we take the New price in force today, 90 days ago and 365 days ago, divide each by the kit's total capacity, and report the median across all kits in the generation. Medians rather than averages, because a handful of listings spiking to silly prices would otherwise drag the figure up. The index is recomputed every night from the stored price histories; no single listing can move it much.
Three companies make almost all of the world's DRAM: Samsung, SK hynix and Micron. Since 2023 the most profitable thing any of them can build is high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the stacked DRAM that sits next to the GPU in AI accelerators. HBM uses more wafer area per gigabyte than ordinary DDR and sells for several times the price, so every fab line converted to HBM is a line no longer making the DDR4 and DDR5 chips that go into PCs and laptops. The same accelerators and the servers around them also consume conventional DDR5 in very large registered modules. Consumer memory is what is left after the data-centre orders are filled.
DDR4 has a second problem. The manufacturers are winding it down in favour of DDR5 and, at the low end, moving the older fab capacity to other products. Fewer DDR4 wafers means fewer DDR4 modules, so a generation that should be getting cheaper as it ages is holding its price or rising. That is why DDR4 remains cheaper per gigabyte than DDR5 today, but by less than it was.
On top of the structural shift, memory pricing has always been cyclical: makers overbuild when prices are high, prices collapse, they cut output, prices recover. 2023 was the bottom of the last cycle and prices were always going to recover from it. AI demand turned a normal recovery into a squeeze.
This is the practical problem for a buyer. When a kit spikes to a silly price for a fortnight and then falls back, Amazon's "was" price and any tool that compares against an average will call the normal price a bargain. A mean is dragged up by the spike; a median is not. Every product page on this site shows the price history graph and the 30, 90 and 180-day averages, and our deal alerts judge a price against the kit's time-weighted median for the year rather than against a peak. If a kit is "down 40%" but sits at its median for the year, it is not a deal; it has stopped being expensive. The price drops page applies exactly that test to every drop Keepa flags, every 30 minutes.
Eventually, because they always have. New fabs announced in 2024 and 2025 come online over the next couple of years, HBM demand will be met by dedicated capacity rather than converted lines, and the cycle will turn. Nobody can time it, and a PC that needs memory today needs it today. The index above will show the turn when it comes; the sensible strategy meanwhile is to buy the right capacity at the value speed, from the top of the £/GB ranking, after a glance at the price history.