Kaspersky Premium Review 2026: Identity Cover and Expert Support Tested

Fix it now

Kaspersky Premium is Plus plus seven published items: the Identity Protection Wallet, Remote Access Detection, the Smart Home Monitor, 24/7 Remote IT Support, Expert Virus Check and Removal, Expert PC Health Check and a free year of Kaspersky Safe Kids. The protection engine does not change, and the thing that actually separates this tier from Plus is a support service rather than a security feature.

1. Buy it if you are currently the unpaid help desk for a relative’s computer and would like that call to go somewhere else.
2. Buy it if the household would use Safe Kids, but treat it as one year included rather than as a permanent feature.
3. Buy it if you want the Identity Protection Wallet, Remote Access Detection or the Smart Home Monitor specifically.
4. Skip it if you are technical. The remote support is the main addition and you would never call it.
5. Skip it if you assumed it comes with more devices than Plus. No device counts are published on Kaspersky’s reachable pages, so do not buy on that assumption.
6. Confirm on the storefront you are buying from which identity components are offered there before you pay for them.

Ask which languages the 24/7 Remote IT Support is delivered in for the country the person actually lives in. Support in a language they do not speak is not the service you thought you were buying.

If that settles it you can stop here. If you want the full list of additions and who they suit, read on.

Why it happens

Kaspersky Premium is the top consumer tier, and the honest description of it is that it is a services tier rather than a protection one. Kaspersky’s own comparison shows it carrying everything in Plus and adding seven things: the Identity Protection Wallet, Remote Access Detection, the Smart Home Monitor, 24/7 Remote IT Support, Expert Virus Check and Removal, Expert PC Health Check and a free year of Kaspersky Safe Kids. Kaspersky’s Premium page names the same shape in its own words: 24/7 Remote IT Support, Identity Protection, Documents Vault, Smart Home Protection and Safe Kids free for one year.

Nothing at this tier makes a machine harder to infect. Detection, the firewall, phishing filtering, payment protection and scam protection are identical across Standard, Plus and Premium. This is worth stating plainly, because the top of a range is invariably presented as the most protective option and in this range it is not.

The remote support is the feature that justifies the tier for the households it suits, and it is a genuine one. For a non-technical person living alone, or a relative whose computer problems currently arrive as a phone call to you, having a vendor engineer connect and deal with it moves a recurring obligation off a family member. That is worth real money to the right household, and worth nothing to a reader of this article who would fix it themselves in ten minutes.

Two questions decide whether that support works in practice and neither appears on a feature list. Which languages is it delivered in for the country the person lives in, and what are the hours. We cannot tell you either, because Kaspersky does not publish them per country on the pages we could reach. Ask before you buy, because remote assistance available only in a language the person does not speak is a line item rather than a service.

Note also that Kaspersky publishes three separate expert line items rather than one: 24/7 Remote IT Support, Expert Virus Check and Removal, and Expert PC Health Check. Reviews that describe this as priority support with remote assistance are merging three things and dropping two. If you are buying the tier for the support, it is worth knowing there are three distinct services to ask about.

Safe Kids is the addition most likely to be misread. What Kaspersky publishes is a free year of Kaspersky Safe Kids, which is a separate product with its own term rather than an expansion of a family feature the lower tiers carry. A free year is a year. If parental controls are the reason you are buying, plan for what happens in month thirteen.

Full reference

The seven additions over Plus

What does not change

Read the first five rows and then decide how much a support line is worth to you, because that is the actual question this tier poses.

On the identity components

Keep expectations proportionate. Encrypted storage for identity documents is convenient, and it is not a substitute for a backup of those documents held somewhere else. Monitoring services can tell you when credentials appear in a breach; none can prevent identity theft or undo a breach after the fact. Any tier sold on that promise is overstating a monitoring feature, and this one should be bought for the support rather than for the word identity.

We could not find a regional availability statement for the identity components on Kaspersky’s reachable pages, so we are not going to tell you they vary by country and we are not going to tell you they do not. Confirm on the storefront you are buying from, before you pay for them.

Devices and terms

Premium is licensed by device count and term with slots pooled across Windows, macOS, Android and iOS from the My Kaspersky account. We are not stating a device allowance for this tier, because none is published on the pages we could reach. If somebody tells you Premium carries the largest allowance in the range, ask them to show you where Kaspersky says so, and get the number written on your order either way.

Buying it for someone else

1. Confirm the support languages and hours for the country the person lives in.
2. Confirm the device count on the order covers their computer and their phone.
3. Set the subscription up in an account they can access, not only in yours, or you will still be the help desk for the account.
4. Show them once how to start a support session, on the day you install it, rather than leaving them to find it during a problem.
5. Diary the renewal, and diary the Safe Kids anniversary separately if you are using it.

The other half of the decision

Everything our Kaspersky Standard review says about jurisdiction, procurement rules and sector restrictions applies here without change. If you are buying this for a relative rather than for a workplace it is less likely to bite, but it is the same question and it is worth settling before rather than after.

Questions people ask about this