Samsung has opened Galaxy S26 Certified Re-Newed sales, adding the standard Galaxy S26, S26 Plus and S26 Ultra to its refurbished-phone lineup at a discount from retail price. Every unit ships with a new battery, a one-year warranty and the option to add Samsung Care Plus with Theft and Loss protection, and prices start at $759 for the base S26, $929 for the S26 Plus and $1,099 for the Ultra, according to AndroidAuthority.
For buyers, the appeal isn’t just the lower entry price. A fresh battery removes the main wear point on a used phone, and a one-year warranty is more cover than most resale marketplaces offer on a secondhand device. Certified Re-Newed already runs for older Galaxy phones; this extends it to Samsung’s current flagship generation while those models are still on sale new.
Galaxy S26 Certified Re-Newed pricing and what’s excluded
The refurbished units are sold directly by Samsung rather than through a third-party reseller, which is what makes this an official channel rather than a grey-market alternative. Samsung detailed the expanded lineup in its own announcement. The only Galaxy S26 model left out is the Galaxy S26 FE, which only recently launched as a new device and hasn’t been in the market long enough to generate a refurbished supply.
The timing is notable given Samsung has separately been reported to be weighing higher launch prices for the Galaxy S26 range. If that happens, an official refurbished tier at a fixed discount becomes a more meaningful option for buyers priced out of a new unit, rather than just a way to save a couple of hundred dollars on a phone already several months old.
Even pricing steps across the tiers
By our arithmetic, the three tiers step up by exactly $170 apiece: S26 to S26 Plus is $170, and S26 Plus to Ultra is another $170. That consistency means there’s no standout bargain hiding at one tier over another, the discount scales evenly across the range, so the decision comes down to which screen size and camera tier a buyer wants, not which model happens to be marked down harder.
What to watch: whether Samsung eventually folds the Galaxy S26 FE into Certified Re-Newed once enough of them have cycled through trade-ins, and whether a launch price increase on the next Galaxy generation pushes more buyers toward this refurbished tier instead of buying new.
Image: Dinkun Chen via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
