From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishpay the penalty/pricepay the penalty/priceBAD BEHAVIOUR OR ACTIONSto experience something unpleasant because you have done something wrong, made a mistake etcpay the penalty/price for (doing) something Williams is now paying the price for his early mistakes. → pay
Examples from the Corpus
pay the penalty/price• She makes plenty of money, but there's a high price to pay in terms of long hours.• He warned us that we would pay the price.• Now ordinary people will pay the price, as inflation eats further into fixed incomes and economic growth stagnates.• The customer wanted to flip a coin about paying the price for a photo of his daughter.• It started out with all the wrong assumptions about users and their habits and has paid the price in subscriber unrest.• With data filtering one pays the price of decreasing the effective library redundancy and increasing the number of hybridisations.• He had paid the price of surrendering his loyalty to Jeffries-stag-nation, nostalgia, bitterness.• But I had been caught, well and truly, and had paid the price, time and time again. 