Claude Opus 5.5
How much does Claude Opus 5.5 cost?
Claude Opus 5.5 costs $4.00 per million input tokens and $20.00 per million output tokens on Anthropic's own API. Input read from the prompt cache costs $0.20 per million tokens. Checked against Anthropic's pricing page on October 12, 2026.
- Input Price
- $4.00
- per 1M tokens
- Output Price
- $20.00
- per 1M tokens
- Context Window
- 1.0M
- tokens
- Speed Score
- 66
- out of 100
Benchmarks
Avg 98/100- Coding99/100
- Reasoning99/100
- Extraction97/100
- Creative97/100
- Vision96/100
Pricing
Input
Prompt / context tokens
$4.00/ 1M
Output
Generated tokens
$20.00/ 1M
Batch API
Async processing discount
$2.00 / $10.00
50% off standard price
List price from the Anthropic pricing page, verified October 12, 2026.
Its tokenizer produces about 43% more tokens than OpenAI's for the same text, so the real cost runs higher than the list price suggests. This is an estimate: the tokenizer has not been measured yet.
Check the sourceBest For
Claude Opus 5.5 in context
On a typical 70% input / 30% output mix, Claude Opus 5.5 blends to $8.80 per million tokens. That puts it above 80% of the 46 models tracked here, and 3 other models in the same flagship tier undercut it. Tier is a capability label, not a price band — the spread inside one tier is often wider than the gap between tiers, which is why picking by tier alone tends to overspend.
Input runs $4.00 per million and output $20.00 — a 5.0x ratio. That ratio matters more than either number on its own: a summarisation or classification workload reads far more than it writes and will track the input price, while a code-generation or long-form writing workload inverts that and will track the output price. Compare models on the ratio your own traffic actually has, not on the input price alone.
The benchmark profile is unusually flat — coding leads at 99/100 but only 3 points separate the strongest category from the weakest. That makes Claude Opus 5.5 a safe default for mixed workloads where you cannot predict in advance which capability a request will lean on, and a poor choice if you need a specialist.
The context window is 1M tokens and the throughput score is 66/100. Context only earns its keep if you fill it, and filling it is also what makes a request expensive — a large window is an option, not a discount. For a flagship-tier model, judge the speed score against what you are doing: it decides everything for interactive chat and almost nothing for overnight batch work.
Nothing cheaper in the table matches Claude Opus 5.5 on combined coding and reasoning, so its $8.80 blended price is buying capability you cannot get for less right now. That is the case for paying it — and it is worth re-checking, because this is exactly the position that a new release takes away.
The closest comparison is Claude Opus 5 from Anthropic, at $11.00 per million against $8.80. 3 models in this tier score higher on combined coding and reasoning, which is the useful framing: the question is rarely whether a model is good, it is whether it is the cheapest thing that is good enough for the specific work you are sending it.
What it costs in production
At 10M + 2M tokens a month — a realistic mid-size production workload — Claude Opus 5.5 runs about $80.00. Routing the latency-tolerant share through the batch API at 50% off would bring that to roughly $40.00, which is usually a bigger saving than switching models.
What you actually pay
The list price is only the start. Prompt caching, batch processing and long prompts change the bill, and each provider sets them differently. Prices per 1M tokens.
| Pricing term | Claude Opus 5.5 |
|---|---|
| List price (input / output) | $4.00 / $20.00 |
| Cached input | $0.205% of the input price |
| Batch API | 50% off input and output |
| Long prompts | No surcharge across the 1M window |
| Input with 80% cache hits | $0.96 |
The last row assumes 80% of input tokens are read from the cache, as in a chat app that re-sends a long system prompt or RAG over the same documents. Cache-write and storage charges are not included.
Claude also bills cache writes: 1.25× the input price for a 5-minute cache, 2× for one hour.
Checked on October 8, 2026 against the pricing pages of Anthropic.
Price History
No price changes since launch
Strengths
- 20% cheaper per token than Opus 5
- Cache reads at $0.20/M — 5% of the input price
- Fast mode on the Claude API at $8 / $40
Avoid For
- High-volume classification, where a fast-tier model is 4–40x cheaper