New York City Made It Illegal For Companies To Make Canceling Subscriptions Hard

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on July 10th that the city's Click-to-Cancel Rule will take effect on October 1st, making New York City the first municipality in the United States to legally require businesses to let consumers cancel any subscription as easily as they signed up for it. The rule is simple and direct: if a company allows you to sign up with one click online, it must allow you to cancel with one click online. If it accepts sign-ups through multiple channels, it must offer cancellation through all of those same channels, and businesses that enroll customers in person must also provide an online cancellation option. Free trials that quietly convert into paid monthly charges without clear disclosure are prohibited. Cancellation pages buried under multiple menus, customer retention screens designed to exhaust and confuse, and processes that require a phone call to end a subscription that was started online are all targeted by the new rule. Businesses that violate it face civil penalties starting at $525 per violation and are required to provide restitution to any harmed consumer.

The Roosevelt Institute estimates the rule will save New Yorkers between $21.5 million and $162.5 million annually, and the city also projects at least 600,000 hours of consumer time saved per year, the cumulative result of millions of people no longer being forced through deliberately designed cancellation mazes. The announcement was made alongside a separate proposed rule that would ban junk fees citywide by requiring businesses to advertise the actual total price of anything they sell, including all unavoidable charges, rather than revealing fees only at the point of checkout after a consumer has already committed to a purchase. DCWP Commissioner Samuel Levine said hidden junk fees and subscription traps cost New York families an estimated $3,200 per year on average. Mamdani, who directed DCWP to take action on both issues within days of taking office, described the rules as an end to companies building their business models around making it harder for working people to hold onto their money. He said there is no desire to be punitive for its own sake, and that the goal is simply to ensure that New Yorkers are not taken advantage of. At least nine states including California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Illinois have enacted their own click-to-cancel requirements at the state level. New York City is the first city in the country to do it at the municipal level.

Source:https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/10/new-york-city-deceptive-subscriptions-ban