Economic Times Paywall: How to Read ET Prime Articles for Free

The Economic Times is India's largest business daily and one of the most-read financial newspapers anywhere. It belongs to the Times Group, the Bennett Coleman company that also publishes the Times of India, and its website at economictimes.indiatimes.com is the first stop for markets, corporate and policy news in India. Most of that news is free to read. The catch is ET Prime, the subscription tier that holds the long analysis pieces, the stock research and the investigative reporting, and a monthly meter on the rest. If you have landed on a story from a search result or a market newsletter and met a sign-in box, this guide explains what is going on and how to read the full article.

How the Economic Times paywall works

The Economic Times runs two gates at once. Regular stories, including market reports, company news and wire copy, are metered: non-subscribers can open a limited number each month before the paper asks them to sign in or subscribe. The count is kept in a browser cookie. On top of that sits ET Prime, a premium tier for in-depth analysis, stock recommendations and long-form investigations. Prime stories are marked as such on the page and show only an opening passage to anyone who is not a member.

For the metered stories, the full text is in the page when it loads, because the paper wants search engines to index it, and a script then checks the cookie and decides whether to hide the body. A reader that fetches the page without running that script sees the whole article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that difference matters. Prime stories are a different matter. The Economic Times appears to enforce at least some of them on its own servers, so what comes back can be a short stub rather than the article. The reader shows the text the publisher serves, no more and no less.

Our tests on 23 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 491-word Economic Times property report on Accenture leasing and renewing 5.84 lakh sq ft of office space across Mindspace REIT's Airoli parks loaded in full, all 15 paragraphs.
• A 1,641-word Economic Times wealth feature on how to become a financial adviser and the best financial planning courses and institutes in India loaded in full, all 39 paragraphs.
• A 1,148-word Economic Times markets analysis of the Jio IPO and why the Ambanis are pitching AI, cloud and 7,220 patents as Jio's tech future loaded in full, all 35 paragraphs.
• A 608-word Economic Times stock-ideas piece on seven private and public banking stocks with an upside of up to 25 per cent in a year, according to analysts, loaded in full, all 90 paragraphs.

One honest caveat. On 1 October 2026 a single Economic Times URL returned only a 71-word stub, which we believe was an ET Prime story. The four stories above all loaded in full on 23 October, including a markets analysis and a stock-ideas piece of the kind ET often reserves for Prime, but a Prime-only article may still come back short. If it does, the reader is not hiding anything from you, the paper simply did not send the text.

Read an Economic Times article in full

• Copy the article link. Economic Times links look like economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/ followed by the headline, then articleshow/ and a long number ending in .cms. Links from the mobile site at m.economictimes.com work in the same way, and two of our four test stories used them.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.

The reader strips the ads, the stock tickers and the sign-in overlay and shows the article as the paper published it. If the piece is a Prime story and the paper served only a preview, you will see that preview.

Other approaches

• Newsletters. The Economic Times sends free morning and markets briefings by email that summarise the day's stories and link to them. Linked stories count against the meter in the usual way.
• Library access. The Economic Times print edition is carried on PressReader, which many public libraries offer free to cardholders.
• Private windows. The monthly meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets it. Prime-only pieces stay closed either way.
• Related free sources. Stock exchange filings on the BSE and NSE websites, RBI statements and SEBI orders are published free, and much of ET's company and markets reporting can be checked against them.

How it compares with other Indian papers

The Economic Times joins a group of Indian titles that load in full through the reader. Its sister paper the Times of India passes, including TOI+ stories. The rival business daily Mint loads in full with its premium stories, and so does The Hindu. Business Standard, by contrast, blocks the reader and is not listed. Earlier guides on this site described the Economic Times as returning only a preview, which was true of the one URL tested at the time, and the 23 October results are the reason it now appears on the full list of sites that work.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

The Economic Times employs one of the largest business newsrooms in Asia, and ET Prime funds the research and analysis that the free pages cannot. If you follow Indian markets or corporate news every day, an ET Prime membership is the right way to pay for the work, and it is the only reliable way to read every Prime story.