McAfee+ Premium Just Swept the Antivirus Labs — but Read the Small Print on the VPN Inside It
McAfee+ Premium has had an unusually good year in the independent labs: first of 19 at AV-Comparatives, 6/6 across the board at AV-Test, AAA at SE Labs. The antivirus deserves the praise. The VPN bundled alongside it comes with conditions most write-ups skip, and the renewal price is roughly double the first year.
Table of contents
If you have seen McAfee recommended more often lately, there is a real reason behind it rather than just a marketing push. Its 2026 lab results are genuinely strong, and Tom's Guide's review of McAfee+ Premium reflects that.
We cover VPNs rather than antivirus, so this is not a full antivirus review — plenty of those exist. What we care about is the part that lands in our subject: McAfee+ Premium bundles a VPN, bundled VPNs are how a lot of people end up using one, and the conditions attached to this one are worth knowing before you rely on it.
What the labs actually found
This is the part that stands up, and it is worth separating from vendor language because it comes from third parties who test independently:
- AV-Comparatives, April 2026 — McAfee placed first out of 19 suites tested, ahead of Bitdefender, Norton 360, Avast and Malwarebytes.
- AV-Test, June 2026 — rated a Top Product, with 6/6 in all three categories: Protection, Performance and Usability.
- SE Labs, June 2026 — an AAA rating, 98% protection accuracy, 99% overall.
Three labs, three methodologies, same direction. The Performance score matters as much as Protection here: McAfee spent years with a reputation for slowing machines down, and the current product does not appear to earn that reputation any more. Tom's Guide's reviewer made the same point about system impact.
If you want to understand why we quote lab results rather than a vendor's own numbers, the same reasoning we apply to VPN speed claims applies to antivirus: the only figures worth anything come from someone with no stake in the outcome and a repeatable method.
The VPN inside it — where this gets conditional
Here is the part that belongs on this site, and it is not in the promotional summaries.
The full VPN requires auto-renewal to stay on. If you switch auto-renewal off, McAfee limits the VPN to 500 MB per month. That is not a VPN you can use — it is roughly an hour of ordinary browsing, and it is gone. So the "unlimited VPN included" line carries a condition that most people only discover after they have turned auto-renewal off to avoid the renewal price. Which, as you will see below, is exactly what many people will want to do.
The VPN itself is mediocre. Reviewers consistently report weak performance on distant servers, to the point where streaming is not realistic. As a convenience layer on public Wi-Fi it is fine. As your actual VPN — the one you would pick on the merits — it is not competitive with standalone providers, and you should not treat a bundled VPN as equivalent to one just because it appears in the feature list.
This is the general shape of bundled VPNs rather than a McAfee-specific failing. A security suite's VPN is a checkbox feature, and it is priced and engineered like one. The difference between that and a full-device VPN app is the same distinction we drew about browser extensions versus full apps: both are called a VPN, and they are not the same product.
The renewal price
McAfee's pricing follows the pattern that makes security software so irritating to buy:
- McAfee+ Premium: around $89.99 for the first year, renewing near $149.99.
- In Europe the gap is wider — roughly €39.95 introductory against €119.95 on renewal, about a 200% increase.
None of this is hidden, and it is standard practice across the category. It just means the price you are comparing against competitors is the introductory one, not the price you will actually pay in year two. And it interacts badly with the VPN condition above: turning off auto-renewal to escape the renewal price is precisely what reduces the VPN to 500 MB.
If you do subscribe, set a reminder before the renewal date rather than trusting yourself to notice the charge — our guide to cancelling a subscription cleanly covers doing it without losing the remaining term.
So who is this for?
Worth it if you want one thing that covers a household. The malware protection is, by independent measurement, currently among the best available, the system impact is low, and the suite includes identity monitoring and a password manager alongside it. For someone who wants a single subscription and no assembly, that is a real proposition — and the labs say the core product delivers.
Not a reason to skip a real VPN. If privacy on untrusted networks, or a consistent connection while travelling, is why you are shopping, the bundled VPN will not do that job well. Buy the antivirus for the antivirus.
Worth knowing what it does not do. Identity monitoring tells you when your data appears somewhere it should not; it does not remove it. That is a different service — see our Incogni review for what data-broker removal actually involves. And no security suite replaces a password manager you actually use and passkeys where they are offered, even when one is bundled.
The honest summary: the antivirus earned its results, the VPN is a bonus rather than a reason to buy, and the second-year price is the one to budget for. If you are still deciding whether you need any of this, our threat-model worksheet is a faster way to answer that than reading another feature comparison.
Lab results cited from AV-Comparatives (April 2026), AV-Test (June 2026) and SE Labs (June 2026) as reported in Tom's Guide's review. Pricing was accurate at the time of writing and varies by region and promotion; check the current figure before subscribing.
