Minecraft Realms: what it is and how much it costs

14 August 2026 · 3 min read

GameMapa editorial · how we check facts
Checked: Claude (AI) — fact-checked against the Ukrainian original; not proofread by a native speaker

All the figures in this piece come from the Realms Servers for Bedrock & Java page on the official Minecraft.net site.

What Realms is

Minecraft Realms is Mojang’s official private server service. Unlike self-hosting, Realms doesn’t require technical knowledge: the server is set up and maintained automatically, and the owner just manages friends’ access.

Pricing: Bedrock and Java separate

The plans for Bedrock and Java Edition are officially different — both in price and in player count:

• Realms for Bedrock Edition — $3.99 a month, up to 2 players at once.
• Realms Plus for Bedrock — $7.99 a month, up to 10 players at once, plus access to the Marketplace Pass catalog — ready-made content from third-party creators that would otherwise have to be bought separately.
• Realms for Java Edition — $7.99 a month, up to 10 players at once, with cross-play between Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Important: the Java and Bedrock plans don’t overlap — they run on different servers, consistent with the fact that these editions of the game are generally incompatible with each other (more detail in our piece on Java Edition and Bedrock Edition).

Trial period

A new Realms account gets a free 1-month trial. Once it ends, the subscription automatically renews at the current price of the chosen plan — worth remembering if your goal is just to try the service rather than subscribe long-term.

What’s included in the subscription

• Three permanent world slots. One Realm can hold three different maps at once, and you can switch between them without losing progress.
• Access for friends of an offline owner. Invited players can join a Realm even when the owner isn’t in the game — the server runs independently of whether the host is online.
• Automatic server maintenance. Unlike self-hosting, Realms doesn’t require the owner to do any technical setup or keep a computer running around the clock.

Who Realms is a good fit for

The service is aimed at groups of friends or family who want a stable shared world without the hassle of running their own server. By comparison, a large public community or a server with mods (only possible for Java Edition) usually goes with self-hosting, since it offers more configuration flexibility than the standard Realms plan.

What’s officially not stated

• Regional prices outside US dollars. The Realms page we checked shows prices specifically in USD; whether the final amount differs in other currencies, and by how much, isn’t stated on that page, so there are no specific figures for other currencies here.
• The maximum world size or storage limits on a Realm — such technical details aren’t listed on the page we checked.

Practical takeaway

If you only need a server for Bedrock and a small group of up to two players, the cheapest plan is $3.99 a month. For a bigger group or access to ready-made Marketplace content, it’s Realms Plus at $7.99. Java Edition has a single plan at the same price, $7.99, regardless of player count up to the maximum of 10. Before subscribing, it’s also worth checking that your own device meets the system requirements for stable play on a server with other people.