Mint Paywall: How to Read Livemint Premium Articles for Free

Mint is the business daily of HT Media, published in Delhi and Mumbai and read online at livemint.com. It launched in 2007 with an editorial partnership with The Wall Street Journal, and it has kept the Journal's habits: tight markets reporting, a strong policy desk and a Long Story section that is closer to a magazine. It has also kept a paywall. A growing share of Mint's own reporting is marked premium, and readers following a link about Sebi, a stock or a start-up often land on a subscription prompt. This guide explains how the gate works and how to read a full Mint story.

How the Mint paywall works

Mint uses a metered paywall with premium stories. Agency copy and short market updates are free. Reporting, analysis and columns from Mint's own staff are marked premium, and a non-subscriber can open a limited number before the article body is replaced by a subscription prompt. The count is kept in a browser cookie, and the allowance is not published.

The gate is applied in the browser rather than on the server. Mint wants its premium stories indexed by Google, so the full text is delivered in the page HTML, and a script then hides it for readers who are over the limit. A crawler-style reader that never runs that script receives the complete story. It is the same arrangement used by Business Insider and the Financial Post, and it is the reason Mint works where Business Standard, which blocks automated requests outright, does not.

Our tests on 30 September 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• An 898-word Mint markets story on a talent shortage complicating Sebi's overhaul of portfolio management rules loaded in full, all 20 paragraphs.
• An 893-word Mint global feature on Chinese cities dressing up civil weddings to lift the birth rate loaded in full, all 27 paragraphs.
• A 911-word Mint stock market story on Indian data-centre and semiconductor suppliers rallying loaded in full, all 19 paragraphs.

Read a Mint article in full

• Copy the article link. Mint links look like livemint.com/section/headline-slug-ID.html, with a long numeric ID at the end.
• 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 body text, without the sign-in prompts and app banners.

Other approaches

• Subscription bundles. Mint sells its digital subscription on its own and bundled with The Wall Street Journal and with the Hindustan Times, often at a steep introductory discount.
• The e-paper. The page-by-page edition is part of the subscription and carries every premium story; it is not available through any reader.
• Newsletters. Mint's free daily and topic newsletters summarise the premium stories and occasionally unlock one.
• Private windows. The meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets it for the metered stories, though not for those locked from the first view.

How it compares with other business titles

Among Indian papers, Mint sits alongside the Times of India, whose TOI+ stories load in full, and the legal site LiveLaw. The Economic Times and Business Standard were not confirmed either way in our tests, and Business Standard blocks the reader. Internationally, Mint behaves like Business Insider and the Financial Post, both of which load in full, and unlike the Financial Times, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, which do not. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls covers why, and the full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Mint's newsroom is small by the standards of the Indian press and its subscription is cheap by the standards of business news anywhere. If its markets desk or Long Story section is part of your working day, a subscription is the right way to keep it funded.