Times of India Paywall: How to Read TOI+ Articles for Free

The Times of India is the largest-selling English-language newspaper in the world, and its website is one of the most visited news sites anywhere. Most of it is free. What is not free is TOI+, the subscriber tier launched to hold the paper's long reads, investigations, court explainers and columns. Those are the stories people share, and they are the ones that stop at a subscription prompt. This guide explains how the gate works and how to read a full TOI+ story.

How the Times of India paywall works

The Times of India runs a freemium model. Breaking news, city reports and most wire stories are open to everyone, with the usual advertising. Stories published under the TOI+ banner, which live at addresses containing toi-plus, are marked for subscribers, and a non-subscriber sees the opening paragraphs followed by a prompt to join. Some TOI+ pieces are also metered, so a visitor can open a few before the gate closes for the month.

The gate is applied in the browser. The paper wants Google to index every TOI+ story in full, so the complete text is delivered in the page, and a script then checks whether you are signed in and hides the body if you are not. A crawler-style reader that never runs that script receives the whole article. This is the same mechanism our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls describes for Western titles, and it is why the Times behaves differently from Indian papers that enforce their limits on the server.

Our tests on 30 September 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 1,709-word Times of India TOI+ legal story on the Supreme Court reopening a 14-year-old Karnataka murder case loaded in full.
• An 841-word Times of India city investigation into counterfeit cancer drugs sold to hospitals at a discount loaded in full, all 25 paragraphs.

Read a Times of India article in full

• Copy the article link. TOI+ links look like timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-plus/section/headline-slug/articleshow/ID.cms, and ordinary stories drop the toi-plus segment.
• 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 page's advertising and app prompts.

Other approaches

• The app and e-paper. A TOI+ subscription covers the app, the e-paper and the website, and the paper runs frequent introductory offers, often bundled with other Times Group titles.
• Newsletters. The free daily briefings summarise the main stories and sometimes link to TOI+ pieces that are open for a limited time.
• Private windows. Where a TOI+ story is metered rather than locked outright, the count is held in a cookie, so a private window resets it.
• Print. TOI+ stories usually appear in the printed paper, which is still very cheap in India.

How it compares with other Indian titles

The Times is the easiest of the big Indian papers to read around. Mint, HT Media's business daily, applies its premium gate the same way and loads in full, and so does the legal news site LiveLaw. The Hindu also loaded in full in our earlier tests, though it is not on the home page list. The Indian Express returns only the opening of a premium story, and Business Standard blocks automated requests altogether, so neither works. The full list of sites that work is kept up to date.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

TOI+ is priced for the Indian market and is cheap by the standards of any Western paper. If the long reads and court explainers are why you visit, a subscription is the honest way to keep them coming, and it removes the advertising too.