Cell Phone Plan: Early Termination Fees
If you want to cancel your cell phone plan early, you will generally be charged high cancellation fees.
In this guide, you’ll learn why this happens, what you can do about it, and exactly how much each provider charges.
Terminating the contract early: Why do I have to pay?
Essentially, canceling your cell phone plan before the minimum contract term has expired constitutes a breach of contract. As a result, mobile carriers sometimes impose high cancellation fees, which are legally valid and make sense from a practical standpoint. To avoid such charges, you should always check the minimum contract term and cancellation period of your mobile phone plan when you’re about to submit a cancellation notice. However, even when signing up for a new plan, you should opt for one with no contract term or a very short one whenever possible, so you can enjoy greater flexibility afterward.
Canceling a subscription before the contract ends: Early termination fees at Swisscom and Salt
But what does such an early termination actually cost you—that is, if you cancel your contract early? That depends on your mobile provider. With Swisscom, the costs can be substantial: specifically, the cumulative cost of the monthly subscription fees up until the end of the minimum contract term. In the case of high-priced plans, this can quickly add up to several thousand francs over just a few months. With Salt, as with Swisscom, customers pay the normal cumulative costs of the subscription through the end of the term plus a fee of 100 francs for early termination. However, the total cost cannot exceed 1,000 francs.
By the way, you usually pay nothing or much less if you move abroad or if the provider fails to meet its service standards—for example, if reception was extremely poor for several days.
