How to share Amazon Prime with your family – CNET

For most people, Amazon Prime seems to be a great deal, even if you only use it for its primary benefit: free two-day shipping. But Amazon has expanded Prime to include a host of other benefits to make the $119 annual fee even harder to refuse.

What makes the deal even sweeter is that you can share those benefits with other members of your family. Here’s how.

What is an Amazon Household?

Previously, you could share Amazon Prime with practically any of your friends and family. But Amazon cracked down on this back in 2015, likely because it was being abused and overshared. Sharing was always intended to mean shared with members of your family living inside the same house, but there were few limitations to enforce that.

Taylor Martin/CNET

Now Amazon calls its sharing Prime membership benefit an Amazon Household. Your Household can stretch to one other adult, four teens and four children. The catch is that you have to enable shared payment methods between the two adults in order to share all the available benefits.

Second-adult benefits

After linking a second adult account, you can share existing purchased digital content between the two accounts, such as apps and games, audiobooks and e-books. The second adult also gets access to:

• Prime Shipping
• Prime Now
• AmazonFresh (if the main account has that add-on)
• Prime Video
• Prime Photos Family Vault
• Audible Channels
• Kindle Owners’ Lending Library
• Amazon First Reads
• Prime Early Access
• Prime member discounts on Amazon Music Unlimited and Kindle FreeTime Unlimited
• Up to 20 percent off subscriptions on diapers, baby food and other products
• 2 percent rewards when reloading an Amazon Gift Card balance

Teen benefits

When you add a teen (13 to 17 years old) to your account, the teen gets a separate Amazon login. The shared benefits are not nearly as extensive as with an adult account.

Teens in a Household will be able to create orders that have Prime Shipping, but the order has to be approved by an adult on the account before it’s finalized. The adults on the account can choose to share Prime Shipping, Prime Video and Twitch Prime with the teens on the account.

Child benefits

Adding a child (12 and younger) to your Prime Household is more about parental controls than anything else. Child accounts don’t have access to shopping, but they can view digital content that has been allowed by the adult accounts through Kindle FreeTime.

Adults can set parental controls for children accounts for Fire tablets, Kindles and Fire TV ($49.99 at Amazon.com).

How to add family members to your Amazon Household

Taylor Martin/CNET

To begin sharing Prime with your family, you’ll either need to know their login info or have them present when you set them up. Log in to your Amazon account and hover over Accounts & Lists and click Your Account. Under Shopping programs and rentals, click Amazon Household. Click Add Adult and then log in to the second adult’s account.

Once an adult has been added to the account, if you decide to remove that person, you will not be able to add another adult or join another Household for 180 days. (There is a grace period in which you can reactivate the previous adult, in case the deletion was a mistake.)

To add a teen or child, go back to Amazon Household and click either Add a Teen or Add a Child. Then click Get started now. Every teen you add to your account will need to enter either a mobile number or email and a birthday.

To remove any member from the Household, go back to Amazon Household and click Manage Your Household. Underneath the name of the member you want to remove, click Remove.