Current and potentially upcoming Verizon users, hold onto your wallets. The carrier giant is reportedly looking to hike the pricing of several services and fees.
Indication about a series of price hikes has made its way to customers, who are now reporting the changes on platforms like Reddit. Said hikes impact everything from activation fees, tablet plans, and even some Administrative and Telco Recovery charges.
The increased activation fee is clearly the most noticeable of the bunch. Regularly priced at $35, the fee is going up by $5 to $40, as pointed out by user boofsnacks on the r/verizon subreddit, alongside a few other users (via PhoneArena).
The hike is expected to kick in starting September 1st, and users will receive a heads-up after August 1st. Reportedly, this applies to upgrades as well, which is essentially when you add a new phone to an existing line of service.
Hidden charges tick up
Elsewhere, the carrier giant’s cheapest tablet plan (Unlimited) currently costs $20 per month without any discounts. Users can expect this to hike by $5, bringing the cheapest plan’s cost to $25.
Further, Administrative and Telco Recovery charges are reported to see a notable bump, going from $3.50 to $3.78 per line for voice plans and from $1.60 to $3.97 per line for data-only plans. For reference, this is an additional fee that is added to your monthly Verizon bill that helps the carrier “defray and recover certain direct and indirect costs [it] or [its] agents incur,” including costs of operations, maintenance, regulatory and industry obligations, property taxes, and more. It’s essentially a charge that Verizon passes on to you as a customer.
Lastly, the Verizon Regulatory Charge, which is another of those junk fees the carrier imposes that you can not get rid of, will go from $0.19 per line to $0.21 per voice line. There’s no fee change for data-only devices.
The last time Verizon raised its junk fees was back in December 2024. Keep an eye out for official communication from Verizon in your email.
