Claude Ultra has removed the rolling five-hour usage window. On 30 October 2026, Anthropic announced a renaming of its Claude subscriptions: the former Max 5x becomes Max at $100 per month, and the former Max 20x becomes Ultra at $200 per month, with no price change and no action needed from existing subscribers. The real change sits in Ultra: verified Ultra accounts are no longer subject to the five-hour limit, with the change covering most existing subscribers from that day; newer accounts keep a temporary limit until they are verified, and Anthropic will send an email when it is lifted.
Two different caps need to be kept apart. Only the cap inside the five-hour window has gone; the weekly cap is untouched. Ultra's weekly allowance remains 10 times the Pro plan's, and Max keeps both its five-hour and weekly limits as before. In other words, users can work longer in a single session, but the total amount available over a week has not increased. Reading Ultra as unlimited usage would misjudge what the subscription is worth; the people who benefit are those whose long tasks — hours of coding, debugging and multi-step agent work — kept hitting the five-hour break. The renaming also clears up an old misunderstanding: the 20x in the old name referred to usage inside the five-hour window, while the weekly cap was always 10 times Pro. The new names no longer use a multiplier, so the difference between Ultra and Max comes back to price and window rules.
For ordinary subscribers, the change costs almost nothing in effort: neither name nor price changes in any way that requires action, and the plan name updates automatically. The point to watch is verification — the temporary limit on new accounts exists to prevent fraud and resale, and when it is lifted depends on verification progress, not on how much was paid. Max users are not covered by this relaxation either, and their five-hour window remains. Whether to upgrade to Ultra should turn on whether you regularly hit the mid-session limit, not simply on the extra $100 a month.
