Early Termination Fees: Find the Clause That Sets Yours

The number an agent reads you over chat is a snapshot, not a term of your contract.

Ask on the last day of a billing month, then ask again three days later, and it can move. That is not the agent being careless. In most residential broadband agreements the early termination fee is not a fixed amount at all — it is a per-month figure multiplied by however many months the contract says you have left, and the multiplier changes as the calendar does.

So the useful question is not "how much is the ETF." It is: which clause makes that number, and how does that clause count months?

Some providers publish the clause, which makes the shape easy to read without an agent's help. Viasat's residential customer agreement (version 9.21, 14 July 2026) sets the fee at the number of months left in the minimum service term multiplied by $15.00, and states there is no termination fee at all on its month-to-month term. That is not a price. It is a multiplication with one variable in it, and the variable is a month count somebody else maintains.

The number comes from a formula, not a price list

Residential agreements I have read use one of two shapes. Find out which one you signed, because they behave differently near the end of a term.

Shape one — flat per remaining month. The agreement names a figure and multiplies it by months left. Fifteen dollars a month with eleven months remaining is $165. Simple, and it decays in a straight line.

Shape two — a maximum, reduced by completed months. The agreement names a ceiling and subtracts a fixed sum for each full month you have served. A $240 ceiling on a 24-month term reduces by $10 a month; cancel after thirteen months and the calculation lands at $110.

Those figures are illustrations of the arithmetic, not anyone's actual fee. Yours are in your own agreement, and the shape matters more than the size: shape two can be worth waiting a month for, because a completed month is worth the whole monthly reduction, while a partially completed month is often worth nothing.

Then there is the counting language, which is where most of the surprises live:

• "Each remaining month or part thereof." Cancel on the 2nd and you may be charged for that entire month as a unit.
• When the term started. Almost always the activation or install date, not the date of your first bill. Those can sit two or three weeks apart, and the gap is exactly the kind of thing that moves a cancellation from eleven months remaining to twelve.
• What restarts the clock. Look for a sentence saying that changing your speed tier, moving service to a new address, or accepting a new promotional rate may require a new term commitment. A "free speed upgrade" that quietly resets a 24-month clock is the single most expensive thing in this category.

Where the clause actually lives

Three documents, and they are supposed to agree.

1. The broadband label for your plan. Since the FCC's label rules took effect — 10 April 2024 for larger providers, 10 October 2024 for those with 100,000 or fewer subscriber lines, under 47 CFR 8.1 (read 18 August 2026) — every provider must publish a label for each stand-alone broadband service. Contract term duration and any early termination fee are required fields on it, along with a link to a full explanation of when the fee applies. Section 8.1(a)(2) also requires providers that offer online account portals to make your label accessible inside the portal, not just on the sales pages.

2. The residential terms of service. Search the provider's site for "residential services agreement," "subscriber agreement," or "terms of service," then search that page for termination. The ETF clause is rarely under a heading with the word "fee" in it.

3. Your own paperwork. The order confirmation email, the work order the installer had you sign, or the PDF agreement from sign-up day. This is the version that names your term length and start date, and it is the one an agent cannot revise while you are on the phone.

Pulling your own label without the sales page

Do this before you call, not after.

1. Log into the account portal and look for the label attached to your current plan. That access is what 8.1(a)(2) requires, so if you cannot find it, that absence is itself worth writing down with a date and a screenshot.
2. Screenshot the label with the URL and the date visible. Labels change; yours needs to be pinned to the day you looked.
3. If the plan you bought is no longer sold, ask for the archived one. Section 8.1(a)(5) makes providers keep an archive of every label for no less than two years, counted from the point the plan stopped being available to new subscribers and the label came off the website. It also hands you a deadline to hold them to: an archived label must go to an existing customer on that plan, on request, within thirty days. Ask in writing, cite the subsection, and note the date you sent it.
4. Follow the "full explanation" link the label carries for the ETF, and save that page too.

A change is coming that eats two of the four steps above, and the timing is the part people get wrong. On 13 August 2026 the FCC published a final rule, Empowering Broadband Consumers Through Transparency, that rewrites much of section 8.1. Early termination fees and contract term duration stay on the label — that much is not in play. But the same order deletes 8.1(a)(3), the machine-readable spreadsheet at a dedicated URL, and deletes 8.1(a)(5), the two-year archive that step 3 above tells you to invoke.

Read its effective dates closely, because they split in two. The rule takes effect 14 September 2026 except for the amendments to section 8.1(a) — the deletions — which the notice states are "delayed indefinitely," with the Commission promising a later Federal Register document announcing when they take hold. Which means that as I write this on 18 August 2026, both the spreadsheet and the archive are still required, and neither has a published end date.

Two practical consequences. If the CSV you bookmarked last year has already vanished from a provider's site, this rule is not yet the reason, and the absence is worth asking about in writing. And the archived-label request in step 3 is still enforceable — which is an argument for making it now rather than filing it under things to do eventually.

Word that request carefully, because two things in the rule decide whether it can be answered at all. The two-year archive in 8.1(a)(5) is measured from the day the plan stopped being available to new subscribers, not from anything on your account, so name the plan exactly as it prints on your bill and ask them to state that date — a tier retired thirty months ago is outside the window and no letter changes that. And the portal duty in (a)(2) is narrower than the point-of-sale one: providers with online account portals "shall also make each customer's label easily accessible to the customer in such portals," which means your label for your plan, not the sales-page label for whatever is being marketed today.

What the ETF is not

The cancellation total on your final bill is usually several separate things stacked together, and people negotiate the wrong one.

• Unreturned equipment charges come from a different schedule entirely, and they are the most common reason a "settled" cancellation reopens two months later. Return windows run as short as ten days, and the clock starts at the disconnect date rather than at your phone call — equipment return and the final bill works on its own deadlines and deserves reading before you set a cancellation date.
• The final month. Whether the last billing cycle is prorated is a separate clause from the ETF. The FCC proposed requiring prorated rebates on the final cycle — and floated prohibiting ETFs outright — but that proceeding, MB Docket 23-405, addresses cable and DBS video service, not broadband, and I found no final rule when I checked again on 18 August 2026. Do not plan around it.
• Discount recapture. Some agreements claw back an installation waiver or promotional credit on early cancellation as a line separate from the ETF. It can be larger than the ETF.
• Any installment balance on equipment you were financing.

Where there is room to argue

Not much of this is a right you can assert. Most of it is a documented inconsistency, which is a different and more useful thing.

The label did not disclose a term at the point of sale. Section 8.1 requires the label to be prominently displayed and easily accessible where the service is sold, including over the phone. If your archived label shows no ETF and no term duration, the fee is being charged against a disclosure that did not exist.

The three documents disagree. An agent's quote versus the label versus the agreement. Put all three in one email to the provider's billing dispute address, with dates, and ask which one governs.

The term auto-renewed. State automatic renewal laws are about notice, not about ETFs, but the notice failure can be the lever — New York's General Obligations Law § 5-903 and California's automatic renewal provisions at Business & Professions Code § 17600 and following both require advance notice in defined windows. Whether they reach your particular service contract is a question for your state attorney general's consumer division, not for me.

You are moving somewhere they do not serve. Most residential agreements reduce or waive the ETF when the provider cannot deliver service at the new address. The clause usually requires you to request a transfer first and to have it declined, in that order, so doing it backwards forfeits the argument — which is one reason the order you do things in during a move is worth settling before you pick up the phone.

One thing not to count on: there is no federal "click to cancel" rule in force right now. The Eighth Circuit vacated the FTC's 2024 negative-option rule in Custom Communications, Inc. v. FTC on 8 July 2025, days before its compliance date, on the narrow ground that the Commission had skipped a required preliminary regulatory analysis. The FTC then restored the older, much thinner rule in a final rule published 12 February 2026, and reopened the question with an advance notice of proposed rulemaking on 13 March 2026. A replacement is being drafted, not enforced. So the cancellation procedure you are held to is the one in your own agreement, and nothing federal currently overrides it.

Before you make the call

Write these five things down first, from the documents rather than from memory: term start date, term length, formula shape, the per-month figure, and the months remaining as your contract counts them. Then get the provider's own number, in writing, and see whether it matches.

If it does not, the dispute goes to the provider's billing process first, with the label screenshot and the agreement clause attached. Keep paying the undisputed part of the bill while that runs — withholding the whole amount turns a billing argument into a collections problem, and collections is a much worse place to be right. If the provider stops answering, the FCC's consumer complaint center is the next rung, and it wants exactly the record you just built.

One of those five is worth checking against the document rather than assuming: whether something you did during the term quietly restarted it. Viasat names the trigger outright — change your service location or your internet plan, and if the change requires upgraded equipment or a service call to the premises, "you must commit to a new 24-Month Minimum Service Term ... beginning on the date your new Internet Service is activated." Look for those same two triggers in your own agreement, then compare the activation date on the confirmation email with the term start date you wrote down first.

Pick your cancellation date after you know the counting rule. It is the one variable in this whole calculation you still control.