How to Read The Times (UK) Articles Without Subscribing

The Times was the first British national newspaper to put its whole website behind a paywall, back in 2010, and it has never looked back. Open almost any link on thetimes.com without a subscription and you get a headline, a standfirst and a "Subscribe to continue reading" panel. It looks like a hard paywall. In practice, it is not quite that simple.

Why The Times paywall can be read around

Like every publisher, News UK wants its stories to appear in Google Search and Google News. To be indexed, the article text has to be available to Google's crawler. The Times handles this by serving the full article to search engines and to readers who arrive from a Google search, then relying on scripts in the browser to hide the body from everyone else.

This is sometimes called a "leaky" or crawler-friendly paywall. The server decides what to send based on who seems to be asking. A request that looks like Googlebot, with a Google referrer, gets the whole story. A request from an ordinary browser with no subscription cookie gets the teaser.

Skip the Paywall takes advantage of this by fetching the page from the server the way a search crawler would, then extracting the article with a readability parser. In our latest tests, Times business and economics pieces of 700 to 800 words came through complete, with the byline, the standfirst and every paragraph.

Step by step: read a Times article for free

• Find the article link. Times links look like thetimes.com/section/article/headline-slug-xxxxxxxxx.
• Paste it into the box on the Skip the Paywall home page and press Read Article.
• Read the full story in a clean, ad-free layout. Images are included where the page provides them.

The Sunday Times shares the same domain and the same paywall, so the same steps apply to its articles.

Older tricks and why they mostly stopped working

For years the standard advice was to search for the headline on Google and click through, because The Times gave Google-referred visitors a free read. That still works occasionally, but News UK has narrowed it considerably and now uses a device-verification challenge on some visits.

Reader mode in Safari, deleting cookies and using incognito windows are less effective on The Times than on metered sites like The New Yorker, because The Times does not send the article body to a plain browser in the first place. The reader approach works because it changes how the page is requested, not just how it is displayed.

How it compares with other UK papers

British newspapers vary a lot in how strictly they enforce their paywalls. From our testing:

• The Times and The Sunday Times: full text available through the reader.
• The Independent and The i Paper: metered paywalls that the reader handles without trouble.
• The Telegraph: blocks automated access aggressively, and the reader cannot fetch its pages.
• The Financial Times: a genuine hard paywall. The article text is never sent to non-subscribers, so no reader can retrieve it.

If you want the background on why these behave so differently, our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls walks through it.

Consider a subscription if you read it daily

The Times often runs introductory offers at a pound a week or less, and a digital subscription includes the puzzles, the app and the archive. This tool is best for the occasional article a colleague shares, not as a permanent substitute for paying for a paper you read every morning.