The EU Data Act bans switching charges, including exit egress fees, from January 12, 2027. Notice-period fees, ongoing egress and early termination penalties stay.
The EU Data Act's ban on switching charges takes the one-time charges for the switch itself off the bill, including the egress fees for moving your data out. Service fees through the notice period, egress from day-to-day operations and early termination penalties all stay chargeable, so the exit terms that matter are the ones you agree when you sign.
The ban takes full effect on January 12, 2027, and the rules around it have applied since September 12, 2025. This post reads Regulation (EU) 2023/2854 the way a CIO or finance lead reads an invoice. It is not legal advice, and your counsel should read your own contracts against the text.
The schedule in Article 29
Article 29 of the Data Act sets two periods. From January 11, 2024 to January 12, 2027, a provider may charge for switching, but only a reduced charge that does not exceed its costs directly linked to the switching process. From January 12, 2027, it may not charge for the switching process at all.
The definitions in Article 2 decide how far that reaches. Switching charges include data egress charges. They exclude two things by name: standard service fees and early termination penalties.
The rules apply to any provider of data processing services serving customers in the EU, wherever the provider is established.
Article 25 also puts a clock on the exit. The notice period to start a switch can be at most two months, and the switch has to finish within a transitional period of 30 calendar days after it. If 30 days is technically unfeasible, the provider has 14 working days from your switching request to justify that and propose an alternative of up to seven months, and you may extend the transitional period once. You then get at least 30 calendar days to retrieve your data, and the contract stays in force until the switch is done.
Lines the ban leaves on the invoice
Each of these can still be billed after January 12, 2027 under the text as written:
- Service fees through notice and transition. The contract keeps running at its standard rates until the switch completes. Two months of notice and a 30-day transition are ceilings, and together they add up to as much as three months of normal fees on the platform you are leaving, and more under an alternative transitional period.
- Egress from ongoing operations. The ban covers the switching process. Traffic your applications send to users, partners or another region as part of normal business is ordinary data transfer, billed on the provider's own tariff, the kind of rate our earlier look at cloud egress pricing set out. On our public cloud, that line is $0.10/GB for public transfer, and private network traffic between your instances is free.
- Egress while two platforms stay in use. When you use services from two providers at the same time, Article 34 lets a provider charge data egress capped at the egress costs it incurs. Where both platforms stay in use outside a switching process, that egress can be billed, up to the provider's own egress costs, for as long as the parallel use lasts. Whether a parallel run during a migration counts as switching or as in-parallel use is a question for counsel. On our private cloud platforms and our Ceph storage, which serves S3 object storage alongside block and file, egress is free, so that line is zero on our side of a parallel setup.
- Early termination penalties. These sit outside the definition of switching charges. Article 29 requires the provider to disclose them, along with its standard service fees, before you sign. It does not remove them.
- Services built for one customer. Article 31 lifts the switching-charge withdrawal for services where the majority of main features were custom-built for an individual customer, or all components were developed for that customer, and which are not offered at broad commercial scale. The provider has to tell you before signing that the exemption applies.
- The work itself. Re-platforming, testing and staff time are your own cost, and a cloud bill never showed them to begin with. Exporting your data does not rebuild a provider's own managed services on the new platform, which our post on what vendor lock-in costs covers.
Proposed changes could widen one of these lines. Amendments under the Digital Omnibus, first put forward by the Commission in November 2025, would, in the Council's compromise text as reported in July 2026, expressly allow proportionate early termination penalties in fixed-term contracts. At that point the amendments were still a proposal under negotiation.
Exit egress was already waived
Three of the largest providers gave up exit egress before the main rules applied in September 2025. Google Cloud announced free data transfer for customers leaving it on January 11, 2024. Within nine weeks, AWS and Microsoft did the same with conditions of their own: AWS from March 5, 2024, with credits for the migrated data on request, and Microsoft, announced March 13, 2024, with an invoice credit once every Azure subscription on the account is cancelled. For their EU customers, the 2027 ban turns a waiver with conditions into a legal rule.
The strongest case for the Data Act sits in Article 25. A two-month notice ceiling, a default transition of 30 calendar days, at least 30 days to retrieve data and erasure after a successful switch, written into every covered contract, turn an exit into a schedule. A finance lead can budget a schedule.
That gain is real, and it is a gain in time and certainty. The service fees for those months on the old platform still arrive.
Estates that read the ban differently
For a large archive that rarely leaves its provider, the one-time move can be the biggest egress line it will ever pay. Until January 12, 2027, a provider outside the waivers above may still charge for it, up to its direct costs.
For that customer, the date of the switch matters. Which side of January 12, 2027 a given switching process falls on is a question for counsel.
The balance also shifts on a contract with no fixed term and no termination penalty, where notice-period fees and the move itself make up most of the exit cost. Our public cloud is billed per minute with no contract or commitment.
A customer outside the EU, which Article 1 does not cover, gets none of these protections from the Data Act.
Renewals before the ban
Contracts signed or renewed before January 12, 2027 deserve the closest read: until that date a provider may still impose a reduced switching charge, and the ban does not touch the notice fees or termination penalties a multi-year contract sets.
Article 29 already obliges the provider to disclose its standard service fees and any early termination penalties before you sign. Add two figures of your own: the egress rate the provider charges for traffic that is not part of a switch, and whether any service you buy is classed as custom-built under Article 31. Then set the total against the one-time exit egress the ban removes.
When the remaining lines outweigh that egress, the sum points at term length and the penalty schedule, which are among the decisions that are hardest to undo once signed. Our private cloud is priced per node, and quotes reflect your footprint and commitment. If you want to see how the commitment changes that price before you choose one, our team can take you through a private cloud quote line by line.
An archive-heavy estate, which holds far more data than it moves, reads the same sum the other way and puts the start date of its switch first. Either way, the ban leaves term length and the penalty schedule in place, so settle both before you sign.
