NYC Mayor’s Office
Anyone who has ever signed up for a gym membership in ten seconds and then spent three weeks trying to cancel it is about to get some relief from the city.
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That relief is a new “Click-To-Cancel” rule, which Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has finalized and which takes effect October 1, according to the Mayor’s Office. The premise is simple: if a company let you subscribe with a single click, it has to let you cancel the same way — through the same method you used to sign up, without a maze of retention screens, phone trees or hoops.The rule, enforced by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, also takes aim at hidden “junk fees” — the surprise charges that materialize at checkout or bury themselves in recurring bills. City officials estimate the measure could save New Yorkers up to $162.5 million a year.
“For years, companies have built their business model around making it harder for working people to hold onto their money,” Mamdani said in announcing the rule. “Whether it’s hidden fees that suddenly appear at checkout or subscriptions that take one click to sign up for and a dozen steps to cancel, the result is the same: working people pay more while corporations profit. That ends now. If you can sign up with one click, you can cancel with one click.”
There are teeth behind it. Businesses that break the rule face civil penalties starting at $525 per violation and can be ordered to refund affected customers. Starting October 1, New Yorkers will also be able to file complaints against companies that make canceling a subscription unreasonably difficult.
The city is billing the measure as a first-in-the-nation at the municipal level. It closely tracks a federal “click to cancel” rule adopted in 2024 under then-FTC Chair Lina Khan, which was later blocked in the courts, ABC7 reported. Khan is now an adviser to the Mamdani administration and is helping stand up the city version. “The Mamdani administration’s work to tackle the affordability crisis and promote economic fairness continues to set a new standard nationwide,” she said.
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The announcement came alongside a related tech push: the city says its new in-house “Public Interest Technology” team is building the online portal New Yorkers will use to file those cancellation complaints, part of an effort to modernize how residents interact with city agencies.For consumers, the practical upshot arrives in the fall. Come October 1, the subscriptions that took seconds to start are supposed to take seconds to stop — and the fees that never quite made sense are supposed to be spelled out up front. Until then, the rules of the old game still apply, so it may be worth auditing which recurring charges are actually worth keeping.
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