Back-to-school month is the busiest time of the year for VPN providers who rely on students for a substantial chunk of their annual subscriptions. Labor Day coincides with this time perfectly, making it a great opportunity to grab low-priced deals from almost every major provider.
Once you sign up with a Labor Day promotion, your discounted prices stay locked in for the entire subscription period. That means you can get a two- or three-year VPN subscription for as much as 80% off the usual price—a substantial savings boost for new customers.
I put together a list of the best early deals on VPN platforms for this Labor Day. Surfshark, Express VPN, and Nord have some of the most lucrative offers, followed closely by competitors who aren’t ready to be outdone.
That said, you don’t need to commit to a long-term subscription right away if you don’t want to. ExpressVPN is also offering 66% off on its annual subscription, with an additional three months extra. Discounts also apply to all other ExpressVPN plans, including the Advanced plan and Express Pro.
I’ve tested a lot of VPNs throughout my career, and ExpressVPN is my personal preference for bypassing streaming site restrictions when traveling. It’s consistent in its ability to avoid detection by maintaining a lot of server locations in different parts of the world. VPN bypassing is legal in most North American and European nations, but you may want to consult local laws if you’re in a region known for state censorship.
Surfshark generally offers some of the best VPN deals in the industry, so it’s unsurprising to see them offer a $67.23 deal on the first 27 months of Surfshark Starter. That said, I’d actually recommend going one tier up for Surfshark One, which is also offering a 27-month subscription for the exact same price of $67.23.
It doesn’t cost you anything extra to go for the middle tier, but the catch is that their renewal prices are much higher at $284.25 a year for Surfshark One. In this case, I’d actually recommend getting the 27-month deal on Surfshark One—but disable auto-renewal so you can wait for another promotion or switch providers at renewal.
Surfshark’s biggest differentiator is that your subscription is good for unlimited devices with no restrictions on concurrent usage. You also get premium features like split tunneling, rotating IPs, and VPN MultiHop without paying anything extra. Surshark One even lets you generate alternate IDs with masked emails for identity theft protection.
NordVPN has three tiers: Basic, Complete, and Complete Max. Right now, all NordVPN plans are discounted across the board at 69-75% off their usual 2-year price. NordVPN Complete, which sits right in the middle, gets the most value among the three with 75% off for two years at $118.53, plus an additional three months extra.
NordVPN also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, but you’re unlikely to need it since their service is considered industry-leading. Along with multiple VPN servers across the world, you also get antimalware protection for your browser, SSN monitoring, and 1 TB of free cloud storage on the Complete plan.
Like ExpressVPN, Nord is known for high speeds and strong privacy protection that evades most VPN detectors that online platforms use. Another great feature is Nord’s Dark Web Monitoring tool, which is included with all plans and lets you monitor up to five emails for dark web leaks.
IPVanish keeps things simple with only two subscription tiers, both of which come with zero restrictions on the number of connections or devices. There’s Essential, which has all your standard VPN features with 3GB of eSIM data, available at $59.76 for the first two-year period. Then there’s the Advanced tier, which throws in 5GB of eSIM data, a secure browser, and 1TB of cloud backups at $86.16 for the first two years.
Like with Surfshark, IPVanish places no restrictions on the number of devices or concurrent connections you can have, making it a good buy for individuals and businesses. Unlike Surfshark, IPVanish does not raise prices as sharply on renewal. They also have native support for a wide range of devices and operating systems, including Android, iOS, ChromeOS, visionOS, AppleTV, Fire TV, and Linux. You can even buy an IPVanish-enabled router from the store to have VPN features configured at the router level.
Personally, I like IPVanish for the value it offers, even if it isn’t as polished an experience as ExpressVPN on Nord products. As someone who needs to flick between their Android phone, iPad, Macbook, and Windows desktop constantly during work, it also helps to have router-level configuration options to avoid dropping the VPN every time I switch devices.
Compared to other VPNs on this list, and especially the aggressive offers from Surfshark or Nord VPN, Norton’s promotional offer feels pretty conservative. You can get 50-54% off on VPN plans depending on the tier you choose, with support for no more than ten devices per subscription.
