From 12 January 2027, a cloud provider serving EU customers cannot charge you to leave. Not a reduced fee, not a cost-recovery fee — nothing (Article 29(1), Regulation (EU) 2023/2854). That date is a hard deadline in a phased regime that has already been running since September 2025, and most infrastructure teams are treating it as a legal department problem. It isn't. The EU Data Act switching rules change what you should sign this year, what leverage you have at renewal, and — critically — what they don't touch on your monthly bill.
Sources: LEXIA (July 2026); Turing Law (2025); Garrigues (2025).
As of mid-2026, the full free-of-charge regime is not yet in force (LEXIA, 2026). You are currently in the middle stage: your provider may still charge you to migrate, but only at genuine cost, and only if it was disclosed in your contract before you signed.
What "reduced switching charges" actually permits
This is the part worth reading carefully, because it's where providers have room to manoeuvre until 2027.
Article 29(3) limits interim charges to costs that do not exceed those incurred by the provider and directly linked to the switching process concerned. In practice that means bandwidth to transfer the data, technical assistance time, and use of specific export tools are chargeable — while profit margins, general infrastructure costs, and unrelated penalties are not (Garrigues, 2025). Recital 89 further indicates that certain costs cannot be passed to the customer, such as those arising from services the provider itself outsources.
The practical test: ask your provider to itemise the switching charge. If the line items don't map to bandwidth, engineering hours, and tooling, the charge is likely not compliant with the interim regime — and you can say so in writing before you pay it.
What survives 2027 — and this is the part nobody leads with
The headline is "switching becomes free." Four categories of charge survive that headline, and together they determine whether your bill actually changes.
Early termination penalties remain legal. Article 29(4) preserves proportionate early termination penalties for fixed-duration contracts, and Recital 89 backs this. The Act does not clearly define what degree of penalty is permissible (Lexology, 2025). So a three-year commit with an exit penalty is still a three-year commit with an exit penalty in 2027 — the switching fee goes away, the termination penalty does not. Providers must take care that early termination penalties are not characterised as switching charges, but that is a line drawn case by case, not a bright rule (Penningtons, 2026).
Multi-cloud egress stays chargeable. Article 34(2) permits charging for data egress in in-parallel use — running services across two providers simultaneously — provided the charge does not exceed the actual cost. Recital 99 addresses multi-cloud deployment strategies specifically (Penningtons, 2026). If your architecture runs continuously across two providers, January 2027 does nothing for that line item. This is the single most common misreading of the Act among engineering teams, and it matters because multi-cloud egress is frequently the larger number.
Standard service fees are untouched. The Act regulates the cost of leaving, not the cost of staying.
And the cost will look for somewhere to live. Industry observers expect providers to restructure pricing during the transition window, moving residual switching costs into base subscription fees (Global Law Experts, 2026). A prohibition on a specific charge does not remove the commercial instinct behind it.
The three largest providers moved ahead of the deadline with free-exit programmes — Google on 11 January 2024, AWS on 5 March 2024, Microsoft on 13 March 2024 (UK Competition and Markets Authority, Appendix N). Those programmes are one-time and conditional on actually leaving. They are not a discount you can apply to a running workload.
The contract terms the Act now forces — check yours against these
Chapter VI imposes specific contractual requirements. These are the clauses that should now be in any in-scope contract, and their absence is a flag:
- Notice period of no more than two months for the customer to initiate a switch (Article 25(2)(d)).
- A transitional period of 30 days, extendable where technically infeasible.
- A data retrieval period of at least 30 calendar days, starting after the termination of the transitional period (Penningtons, 2026).
- Pre-contract disclosure of standard service fees, early termination penalties, and any reduced switching charges — Article 29(4) requires this before you sign, and Article 29(6) requires it to be publicly available on the provider's website or another easily accessible place.
- Disclosure where switching is highly complex, costly, or impossible without significant interference in your data or service architecture (Article 29(5)).
- For IaaS: functional equivalence — the provider must supply capacity, documentation, technical support and, where necessary, tools to facilitate the transition (Articles 30 and 34(2)).
- For SaaS: open interfaces free of charge, equally available to all customers and to the destination provider, plus compatibility with open interoperability specifications or, failing that, a structured, commonly used, machine-readable export format (Article 30(5)).
Point 5 deserves attention. A provider disclosing that switching from its service is "highly complex" is making a compliance statement — and simultaneously handing you a written admission of lock-in that you can use at renewal. It is the first clause INXY reads when reviewing a client's existing provider agreements, because it tells you what the provider already knows about its own portability.
What no vendor will tell you
Your existing contract is probably non-compliant, and that is leverage, not a problem. The majority of Chapter VI obligations already apply, and existing contracts are likely to be non-compliant, with regulatory enforcement and customer scrutiny expected to increase through 2026 (Penningtons, March 2026). Providers are working through contract remediation right now. A customer who arrives at a renewal conversation already knowing which clauses are missing is negotiating from a materially stronger position than one who doesn't — because the provider has to fix those clauses regardless, and would rather do it as a concession than as a correction.
Throttling and performance limitations count as obstacles. Legal analysis of the Act flags that technical and contractual policies which obstruct switching — performance throttling during migration, exclusivity terms, penalties — need to be progressively adapted to the portability framework (Garrigues, 2025). Article 28 requires good faith cooperation and prohibits obstacles to switching. If your provider's export path is technically available but throttled to the point of impracticality, that is a compliance question, not just an engineering annoyance.
Enforcement is national, not centralised. Enforcement is delegated to Member States, which must implement penalties that are effective, proportionate and dissuasive. Customers can lodge complaints with the relevant national supervisory authority, and have a right to judicial remedy if that authority fails to act (Lexology, 2025). This means the practical strength of your position varies by which Member State's authority has jurisdiction — worth knowing before you rely on it.
What breaks in production
Treating the free-exit programme as a migration budget. It covers data transfer out. It does not cover dual-running two environments, engineering time, or the period where you pay both providers. The regulation removes a toll; it does not fund a project.
Assuming the Act covers your provider. The obligations apply to providers of "data processing services." Providers should evaluate whether their offerings fall within scope (Lexology, 2025) — and so should you, before building a switching plan on the assumption that a niche or non-EU-established vendor is captured.
Confusing the 2027 date with your renewal date. The free-switching regime applies from 12 January 2027 including to contracts already in force. But if you sign a three-year fixed term in 2026 with an early termination penalty, that penalty survives 2027 intact. The date that constrains you is your own commit length.
Planning a switch without the 30-day retrieval window. The minimum retrieval period starts after the transitional period ends. Teams that plan the cutover but not the retrieval window discover the data export clock hasn't started when they thought it had.
What to do this quarter
- Inventory which contracts are in scope and when each renews. The renewal calendar, not the regulatory calendar, is your action timeline.
- Request itemised switching charges from any provider currently quoting them. If the items don't reduce to bandwidth, engineering hours and tooling, challenge them in writing under Article 29(3).
- Audit each contract against the seven-point clause list above. Missing clauses are both a compliance gap for the provider and a negotiating lever for you.
- Separate your exit cost from your run cost. Model them independently — the Act addresses one and not the other, and conflating them produces a business case that won't survive scrutiny.
- If you run multi-cloud, model that egress separately. Article 34(2) leaves it chargeable. Any savings forecast that assumes 2027 zeroes it out is wrong.
- Check which Member State authority has jurisdiction over your provider relationship, before you need to rely on it.
The decision framework
The Act changes the cost of leaving, which changes the value of staying — but only if you act on it.
- If you are signing new in the next 12 months: push for short commit terms. The switching fee is disappearing anyway; the early termination penalty is what will actually hold you, so that is the clause to negotiate hardest.
- If you are renewing: arrive with the clause audit. Compliance remediation is work the provider owes you regardless — trade it for terms rather than accepting it as a favour.
- If you are already planning to leave: the interim regime means you may still be charged, but only at cost, and only if disclosed pre-contract. Check both conditions before paying.
- If you run multi-cloud in parallel: none of the above materially reduces your ongoing egress. Treat that as a delivery-architecture problem, covered in our [breakdown of cloud egress pricing → /blog/cloud-egress-fees-comparison].
INXY brokers cloud, dedicated and colocation capacity across multiple providers on a single contract, which means the exit path is a procurement question rather than a legal one — we can move a workload between providers we already hold agreements with, without you running a fresh contract negotiation each time. If you want your current provider contracts checked against the Chapter VI clause list before your next renewal, send them over. [Request an infrastructure audit → /book-a-demo]. To review capacity options: [dedicated and cloud servers → /hosting-solutions].
This article describes regulatory requirements for general information. It is not legal advice — INXY is an infrastructure consultancy, not a law firm, and contract decisions with legal consequence should be reviewed by qualified counsel in the relevant Member State.
FAQ
Does the EU Data Act ban egress fees? It bans switching charges, including egress charged for the purpose of moving to another provider, from 12 January 2027. It does not ban egress charges for ongoing use, and Article 34(2) explicitly permits charging at cost for egress in in-parallel multi-cloud deployments. Your monthly running bill is unaffected.
When do the EU Data Act switching rules take effect? Chapter VI has applied since 12 September 2025, requiring cost transparency. From 12 January 2026, switching penalties are prohibited and migration charges reduced to the strict minimum. From 12 January 2027, switching becomes entirely free, including under contracts already in force.
Can my cloud provider still charge me to leave in 2026? Yes, but only reduced charges not exceeding the provider's own costs directly linked to the switch — bandwidth, technical assistance time, and export tooling. Profit margin and general infrastructure costs are excluded, and the charge must have been disclosed in your contract before signing.
Do early termination penalties survive the 2027 deadline? Yes. Article 29(4) preserves proportionate early termination penalties for fixed-duration contracts, and the Act does not precisely define what level is permissible. A long commit term signed today will still carry its exit penalty after switching fees are abolished, which makes commit length the clause worth negotiating.
What contract terms does the EU Data Act require? A notice period of no more than two months, a 30-day transitional period, a data retrieval period of at least 30 calendar days after that, pre-contract disclosure of fees and penalties published accessibly, functional equivalence for IaaS, and free open interfaces with machine-readable export formats for SaaS.
Who enforces the EU Data Act? Enforcement is delegated to EU Member States, which must implement penalties that are effective, proportionate and dissuasive. Customers can complain to their national supervisory authority and pursue judicial remedy if that authority fails to act, so practical enforcement strength varies by jurisdiction.
