How to Read The Philadelphia Inquirer Without a Subscription

The Philadelphia Inquirer is one of the oldest daily newspapers in the United States and the dominant news source for Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania suburbs and South Jersey. It is unusual among big metro papers in being owned by a nonprofit institute rather than a chain, and it has kept a sizeable newsroom covering City Hall, the Eagles and Phillies, the state legislature and the region's universities and hospitals. It also meters its website, so readers from elsewhere hit the subscription screen quickly. This guide covers how that paywall works and how to read a full story.

How the Inquirer paywall works

The Inquirer uses a metered paywall. Visitors without a subscription get a limited number of free articles a month, tracked with a cookie, after which the article body is replaced by a subscription prompt. The paper does not publish the exact number and has reduced it over the years. Some public-service coverage, such as major breaking news, is occasionally left open.

The mechanism is the same as at most metered papers. The full article is present in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script running in your browser decides whether to hide it. A crawler-style reader gets the whole thing. In our test on 28 September 2026, a 1,152-word Inquirer lifestyle feature on unconventional family living arrangements loaded in full through Skip the Paywall, all 39 paragraphs.

Read an Inquirer story in full

• Copy the article link. Inquirer links look like inquirer.com/section/headline-slug-20260928.html.
• 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.

Other approaches

• Library access. The Free Library of Philadelphia and many suburban library systems in Pennsylvania and New Jersey offer free digital access to the Inquirer with a library card. It is the best free option for regular readers.
• Private windows. The meter is cookie-based, so a private window resets it. The allowance is small.
• The e-edition. The print replica is subscriber-only and not available through any reader tool.

US regional papers compared

We test the major metro dailies with the same method. At the time of writing:

• Work in full: the Inquirer, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Seattle Times and Star Tribune, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Newsday and the New York Daily News.
• Blocked: the Gannett and USA Today Network papers, which in this region include the Bucks County Courier Times and the Asbury Park Press, refuse automated requests.
• Intermittent: nj.com loaded one article in full but was blocked on others.
• Teaser only: The Washington Post. The New York Times blocks automated access entirely.

The complete list is in every site you can read for free, and metered versus hard paywalls explains why the categories differ.

Support the paper if you read it often

Because the Inquirer is owned by a nonprofit, subscription revenue goes back into the newsroom rather than to shareholders. Introductory digital offers are usually a dollar a week or less. If it is part of your daily routine, that is the right way to keep it going.