Cryonics in 2026: what it costs, how it works, and whether it could ever work

Cryonics: preserving a legally dead person at very low temperature in the hope that future technology can revive them.

Cryopreservation: preserving cells, tissue or organs by cooling them to very low temperatures. Cryonics is cryopreservation of a whole person or brain.

Vitrification: cooling tissue so that it turns into a glass-like solid instead of forming ice crystals, which cause much of the damage in ordinary freezing.

Cryoprotectant: a chemical solution, similar in purpose to antifreeze, that replaces water in tissue to prevent ice from forming.

Neuropreservation: preserving only the head or brain, which costs less than whole-body preservation.

Standby team: a team that waits near a member who is close to death, so that cooling and preservation can begin as soon as legal death is declared.

Legal death: death as declared by a doctor under the law, usually when the heart has stopped and cannot be restarted. Cryonics can begin only after it.

Dewar: an insulated storage tank filled with liquid nitrogen, where patients are stored.

Brain preservation: chemically fixing and cooling a brain so that its fine structure is preserved, with the aim of reading that structure in the future rather than reviving the tissue.

Cryonics is the practice of cooling a person who has just been declared legally dead to very low temperatures and storing them there, indefinitely, in the hope that future medicine will be able to repair whatever killed them, reverse the damage done by the preservation itself and bring them back to life. Supporters describe patients as being in biostasis rather than as dead, on the reasoning that a person is only truly gone when the information in their brain has been lost.

The modern idea began with Robert Ettinger, a physics teacher from Michigan, whose book The Prospect of Immortality was self-published in 1962 and published by Doubleday in 1964. Ettinger founded the Cryonics Institute in 1976, and when he died in 2011 at the age of 92, he was preserved there, as were both of his wives (Bangor Daily News). The first person ever cryopreserved was James Bedford, a psychology professor, on January 12, 1967, at the age of 73. He is still in storage at Alcor (Guinness World Records).

The largest provider, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, was incorporated in California in 1972 by Fred and Linda Chamberlain and has been based in Scottsdale, Arizona, since 1994. Fred Chamberlain is himself now one of its patients (Alcor). Today there are providers in the United States, Europe, Russia and Australia.

Cryonics can begin only after a doctor has declared a person legally dead. That is a legal requirement, and it is also the start of a race against time, because brain cells begin to be damaged within minutes once blood stops flowing. The process, as Alcor describes it, runs in stages (Alcor).

The key word is vitrification. Ordinary freezing forms ice crystals that tear cells apart. Vitrification replaces much of the water in tissue with cryoprotectant, so that it cools into a glass-like solid instead. It is not perfect: cryoprotectants can be toxic, and cooling to such low temperatures can crack tissue. But it is far less damaging than freezing, and it is the method used by every serious provider today.

At Southern Cryonics in Australia, for example, a patient is first cooled to about minus 78 degrees Celsius at a funeral home, then moved to the facility, where they are cooled to minus 196 degrees in a chamber and stored head down in a liquid nitrogen tank (Newcastle Herald).

Prices vary widely by provider, by whether you choose whole-body or brain-only preservation, and by whether you are a member. Most providers also charge membership fees or annual dues, and some charge separately for standby and transport, which can add tens of thousands of dollars.

The Alcor and Cryonics Institute prices come from their own websites, checked on October 30, 2026 (Alcor, Cryonics Institute). Alcor's dues work out at $450 a year for someone who joins at 30. Tomorrow Bio's prices were reported by Fortune in 2024, Southern Cryonics' are from its own costs page, and KrioRus's from a March 2026 report by ForkLog. Prices change, so check with any provider directly.

Prices have risen over time. Alcor's 2021 schedule listed $200,000 for a whole body; it now lists $220,000. The Cryonics Institute remains by far the cheapest option in the United States, partly because it offers whole-body preservation only and leaves standby and transport to separate arrangements.

Most people pay with life insurance. A member takes out a policy large enough to cover the cost of preservation and names the cryonics provider as the beneficiary, so the money is there when it is needed. Because the policy is usually taken out years in advance, the monthly cost can be modest. Alcor says coverage can cost as little as $50 to $75 a month for whole-body preservation and $25 to $45 a month for neuropreservation, depending on age and health (Alcor).

Some people pay in cash, or set aside money in a trust. Tomorrow Bio's monthly membership fee and Alcor's annual dues come on top of the preservation cost itself. Anyone considering cryonics should get independent financial and legal advice, because the arrangements can be complicated and they need to work at a moment when the member can no longer act for themselves.

Several hundred people are in storage around the world, and a few thousand more have signed up. The numbers below are each provider's own published figures or reports, and they are not all from the same date.

Added together, these providers hold roughly 650 people. That is a tiny number compared with the millions of people who die each year, but it has grown steadily, and the number of members signed up for future preservation is many times larger. The Cryonics Institute had 1,916 members at the end of 2022 and 1,995 by March 2025, and newer providers such as Tomorrow Bio are signing up younger members on monthly plans (Cryonics Institute, Tech.eu).

Most cryonics members are private people, and providers do not publish their names. A few are known. The investor Peter Thiel signed up with Alcor, the Telegraph reported in 2014, and in 2023 he confirmed on a podcast that he had signed up for cryopreservation, while saying he did not necessarily expect it to work (Fortune). The baseball player Ted Williams, who died in July 2002, is at Alcor, after a long public dispute within his family that ended in 2004 (News On 6).

The founders of the movement followed their own advice. Robert Ettinger is preserved at the Cryonics Institute he founded, and Fred Chamberlain, who co-founded Alcor, is one of its patients. And in a related bet, MIT Technology Review reported in 2018 that Sam Altman was one of 25 people who paid a refundable $10,000 deposit to join the waiting list of Nectome, a startup proposing a different kind of brain preservation (MIT Technology Review). Our guide to the billionaires trying to live forever covers the wider money behind these ideas.

No one has ever been revived from cryonics, and no provider claims that revival is possible today. The honest answer to whether it could ever work is that nobody knows. It depends on two things: whether today's preservation keeps enough of the brain's structure intact to hold a person's memories and identity, and whether future technology will ever be able to repair the damage from dying, from the preservation process and from whatever caused death in the first place.

There is real progress on the first question. In 2016, the Brain Preservation Foundation awarded a prize to 21st Century Medicine for preserving a rabbit brain so well that its connections could be traced under an electron microscope, and in 2018 it paid an $80,000 prize to Robert McIntyre and Gregory Fahy for doing the same with a pig brain (Fight Aging!, MIT Technology Review). That method, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation, uses chemicals that fix the brain in place, which preserves structure beautifully but rules out biological revival. It is aimed at a future in which the brain could be scanned and its information read, rather than restarted.

There is progress on the second question, too, from the medical side. Reversible cryopreservation of organs would transform transplant medicine, and money is flowing into it. In 2023, researchers at the University of Minnesota vitrified rat kidneys, stored them, rewarmed them with nanoparticles and transplanted them, and all five rats survived the 30-day study, though the cryobiologist Gregory Fahy noted that the kidneys showed significant damage (STAT). In September 2025, Until Labs, a startup founded by Laura Deming, raised $58 million to develop organ cryopreservation, after reporting that it had restored some electrical activity in rewarmed slices of rat brain (BioSpace). In October 2026, a preprint that has not yet been peer reviewed reported that human-sized pig kidneys stored in vitrified form, one of them for 366 days, made urine after transplant, though their recovery was incomplete.

None of this revives a person. But it shows that the barrier between cryopreservation and recovery is being pushed back organ by organ, which is exactly the path cryonics supporters have always said the science would take.

Cryonics is one of several bets on outliving the body, and they differ in what they try to save and what they assume about the future.

They are not mutually exclusive, and the newest ideas blur the lines between them. In March 2026, the brain preservation company Nectome posted a preprint, not yet peer reviewed, describing a pig brain preserved in enough detail that its connections could be traced, and built around physician-assisted death (bioRxiv). That kind of work treats the brain as information to be read later, which links cryonics directly to the science of mind uploading and the connectome.

Cryonics is legal in the countries where providers operate, with one fundamental condition: it can begin only after a person has been declared legally dead. Providers cannot preserve a living person, which is why their standby teams wait until death is declared before they start. In legal terms, cryonics patients are deceased people whose remains are stored under arrangements they made in life, and the details vary by country and state.

That condition is also the reason cryonics supporters argue for speed. The longer the brain goes without circulation after death, the more damage occurs before preservation begins. Providers that can station teams near dying members, and members who live near a provider, have a better chance of a well-preserved outcome. Anyone considering cryonics should take legal advice on how it fits with their will and their family's wishes.

Australia has the Southern Hemisphere's first cryonics facility. Southern Cryonics, in the New South Wales town of Holbrook, opened in 2023. Its first patient, a Sydney man in his 80s who died on May 12, 2024, was cooled at a funeral home, driven to Holbrook and stored at minus 196 degrees Celsius (Newcastle Herald). By September 2026, seven patients were reported to be in storage there.

Southern Cryonics' costs page lists A$200,000 for subscribers and A$230,000 for non-subscribers, plus an annual subscription of A$350, with standby services costing extra. As with any provider, prices and services change, so anyone interested should check directly.

We take cryonics seriously, and we respect the people who choose it. It is a bet on future medicine, made with the best preservation methods available today, and the science behind it is better than its reputation. But even its most committed supporters describe it as a long shot, and it preserves tissue, not the story of a life. Until revival comes, if it ever does, the memories and voice of the person inside are not something their family can reach.

Our view is that the safest thing anyone can do, whatever they think of cryonics, is to make a record of who they are while they are alive. Every route to outliving the body, from cryonics to mind uploading, would need to know how a person actually spoke, what they remembered and what they cared about. And unlike revival, that record does not depend on a breakthrough. It can be made now, and it can be heard by the people you love.

That is what a Persona is: an AI likeness of you built from your own memories and your own cloned voice, which your family can talk to and hear after you die. You build your Persona by talking, answering questions and telling stories, by voice or by typing. Building is free: you get 25 memories with no card and no time limit, and your free build never expires. Paid plans start at US$14.99 a month. Executor Lock™, our patent-pending technology, passes control of your Persona to the executor you name, and no third party can ever edit, retrain or impersonate your Persona. Idy® has 78 patents pending, with international protection sought under the Patent Cooperation Treaty.

This page is part of our series on the people and the science behind the race to outlive the body.

• Digital Immortality: Larry Page and the Race to Upload Minds: the story that started it, and how close we are to copying a mind.

• What Is a Von Neumann Probe? Larry Page's Galaxy Plan: the self-copying spacecraft at the center of Page's plan.

• Why Larry Page Called Elon Musk a Speciesist: the argument Musk says led to OpenAI.

• What Larry Page Believes About AI and Living Forever: his record, in his own words and in other people's accounts.

• Mind Uploading in 2026: How Close Are We?: how close science is to copying a human brain.

• What Is a Connectome? Every Brain Mapped So Far: the brain's wiring diagram, and every brain mapped so far.

• The Billionaires Trying to Live Forever: who is spending what on longevity and digital immortality.

• How to Live Forever: Every Way People Are Trying: every approach, from medicine to mind uploading.

Prices come from the providers' own websites, Alcor and the Cryonics Institute, checked on October 30, 2026, and from reports by Fortune on Tomorrow Bio and ForkLog on KrioRus. Patient and member numbers come from Alcor, the Cryonics Institute and Tech.eu. How cryonics works comes from Alcor and the Newcastle Herald.

History comes from Guinness World Records, the Bangor Daily News and News On 6; Peter Thiel from Fortune; and the science from Fight Aging!, MIT Technology Review, STAT, BioSpace and bioRxiv. This page is general information, not financial, legal or medical advice.

None of the people, companies or providers named on this page has any connection to Afterlife.ai™, and nothing on this page suggests that any of them uses or endorses our service.