Google AI Plus Free for Students: 12 Months, One Deadline, One Auto-Charge (2026)

Google’s student offer is back — and most write-ups get two things wrong: they recycle the 2025 offer that already ended, and they say “free for a year” without mentioning that redemption has a hard deadline and the plan auto-charges the day the offer ends. Everything below comes from Google’s own pages, with each source named.

Last checked: 2026-08-22. (The official student offer terms page is stamped “last updated 19 August 2026”.)

The short version

Eligible higher-education students get Google AI Plus (400 GB) free for 12 months, but you must redeem by 31 December 2026, and the subscription auto-bills at the standard monthly price the day the offer period ends unless you cancel first.

This is not last year’s offer

Our student-deals roundup recorded on 2026-08-09 that Google’s student page then read “the previous student offer ended on 9 December 2025”. This is a new round: the official terms page (one.google.com/offer/studentoffer8) is stamped 19 August 2026, and Google One’s help centre has published a new “Claim your Google One student offer” article. If you checked earlier and gave up, check again.

What the free year is worth

Per our verification log of Google’s Traditional-Chinese site, Google AI Plus lists at NT$165/month in Taiwan (read directly from the official localised page on 2026-08-09 — not a currency conversion; US list price US$4.99/month). Twelve months therefore works out to roughly NT$1,980.

⚠️ That local price was checked on 2026-08-09, not today. Prices change; go by the amount shown at checkout in your own account.

What AI Plus actually includes

Figures below are from Google’s official plan comparison table (one.google.com/about/google-ai-plans/):

For comparison, paid AI Pro is 5 TB, 4x usage and 1,000 Flow credits/month. AI Plus is the entry-level “more quota” tier — not Pro for free.

Google uses words (“More”, “Expanded”, “Higher”) rather than numbers for most of these tiers, so we don’t estimate concrete request counts.

Eligibility, straight from the terms

1. Be at least 16 years old.
2. Be a current student at a higher-education institution in a country where Google AI Plus is offered. The terms explicitly exclude Bolivia, Albania, Canada, Hong Kong, Macau and Tunisia.
3. Verify student status through SheerID using a valid school-issued email address.
4. Hold a personal Google Account.
5. Have a Google Payments account with a valid payment method at sign-up — yes, the free offer still requires a card on file.

Is Taiwan covered? Google’s help-centre country list for the AI Pro + YouTube Premium student plans explicitly includes Taiwan, and the exclusion list names only Hong Kong and Macau. We have also verified a Taiwan list price for AI Plus, which means AI Plus is sold there. On those two official signals, Taiwanese students appear to be in scope.

Three things people miss

1. Redemption deadline: 31 December 2026

The terms read: the offer “must be redeemed by 31 December 2026” or it lapses. The 12 free months run from the day you redeem, not from the academic year — so redeeming late just starts the clock late, but after 31 December you cannot redeem at all.

2. It auto-charges, and it will not ask first

From the terms: on the day the offer period ends, Google “will automatically charge your payment method monthly at the standard price for the plan in your country” until you cancel. The terms also state you must cancel before the offer period ends to avoid the charge; cancelling still lets you keep membership through the end of the offer period.

Practical advice: set a calendar reminder for month 11 on the day you redeem.

Also note: if you cancel while over the free 15 GB storage allowance, Google states you must delete files or buy a plan before you can store new ones. Getting used to 400 GB and dropping back to 15 GB bites.

3. Usage caps “may differ” from paid members

This one deserves its own heading. Under “Usage limits”, the terms say your caps during the offer period may differ from those of paid Google One members, and that Google may adjust those limits for various reasons including capacity constraints, without notice.

In other words, Google explicitly reserves the right to give the free student tier less than paid AI Plus, and to cut it further at any time. Chinese-language outlets have covered this under headlines about the free student plan being “watered down”; we have no official figure for how much smaller the allowance is, so we only quote the clause and mark the gap as unverified.

Three more disqualifiers

• Existing Google One subscribers are excluded. The terms limit the offer to users not currently subscribed to Google One, and further exclude family-group members, business customers, discounted Pixel bundles, third-party subscriptions such as Google Fi, and supervised Google Accounts.
• School-issued accounts don’t work. The terms state the offer does not apply to school-provided Workspace for Education accounts. You subscribe with a personal Google Account while using your school email for SheerID verification — two separate things.
• Upgrading is one-way. Per the help centre, if you upgrade from the 12-month trial to a paid plan, you will not be eligible for the trial offer again. Upgrade mid-trial and the remaining free months are gone.

AI Plus free year vs. AI Pro student discount

Google is running three student offers at once — don’t conflate them:

How to choose:

• Just want to try it without paying → AI Plus, 12 months free. Set the expiry reminder.
• Certain you’ll use it heavily (Deep Research, Flow video, lots of image generation) → the AI Pro student discount’s 5 TB and 4x limits are the better deal, at the cost of paying and re-verifying yearly.
• Already paying for YouTube Premium → price out the bundle, but note Google’s own warning that subscribing to a student plan with YouTube benefits while already on Premium or Lite can create a duplicate subscription.

Miss a re-verification and, per the help centre, you lose the offer and may be charged the plan’s full price.

How to claim

Google One’s help centre gives these steps:

1. Go to one.google.com/ai-student
2. Select the student offer
3. Verify your student status through SheerID when prompted
4. Complete sign-up, including adding a payment method

The .edu.tw question

Taiwanese universities use .edu.tw, not .edu. Google’s terms and help centre both say only “a valid school account email address” and hand the decision to SheerID — no domain-suffix rule is published, and .edu.tw is not addressed. Whether it passes therefore cannot be answered from official documentation; run the SheerID flow and see (SheerID generally also accepts document uploads such as student ID or enrolment proof). We mark this unverified and make no promise.

Sources

Every figure and quotation above comes from Google’s own pages; no second-hand reporting was used as a source for numbers.

• Terms, redemption deadline, eligibility, auto-billing, usage limits → Google AI plan student offer terms (page stamped 2026/8/19)
• The three student offers, country list, re-verification, claim steps → Claim your Google One student offer (Help Centre)
• AI Plus contents and per-tier allowances → Google AI plans
• Taiwan list price NT$165/month → our own 2026-08-09 direct read of the official Traditional-Chinese page

Marked unverified: (1) the actual size of the gap between the free student allowance and paid AI Plus — Google says only that it “may differ”; (2) whether .edu.tw addresses pass SheerID — not documented officially.

Prices, allowances and offer terms can change at any time; the official Google student offer page is authoritative. For the full Gemini plan comparison and free-tier breakdown see our Gemini tool page and Gemini free-tier guide; for other vendors’ student deals see our AI student discounts roundup.