The Data Act ends cloud switching fees in January 2027. What stays on the renewal

The date that decides the negotiation

Chapter VI of the EU Data Act, Regulation (EU) 2023/2854, has applied since 12 September 2025 to every provider serving customers in the EU, wherever that provider is established. Its switching rules are already enforceable. What changes on 12 January 2027 is the price of leaving: from that date a provider may not impose any switching charge on a customer at all, under Article 29(1).

Until then, Article 29(2) and (3) allow reduced charges that do not exceed the costs directly linked to the switching process concerned. That is a cost-recovery ceiling, not a rate card, and it is the sentence to put in front of a vendor that quotes a per-terabyte export fee in a renewal. A customer signing a three-year term this quarter is signing across the date on which the charge disappears.

Egress is a switching charge by definition

The regulation defines the term rather than leaving it to the contract. Under Article 2(36), switching charges include data egress charges, meaning fees for transferring data over the network to another provider or to the customer's own infrastructure. A vendor that has renamed its egress line as network optimisation, migration support or archive retrieval has renamed the same charge.

What must move is defined just as tightly. Article 2(38) covers input and output data, including metadata, generated directly, indirectly or jointly through the customer's use of the service, plus digital assets the customer has the right to use independently of the contract. Material protected by the provider's or a third party's intellectual property, or constituting their trade secrets, is excluded, but the exception is narrow: the excluded categories must be listed exhaustively in the contract and must not impede or delay switching. A renewal that leaves the exportable data set to a schedule the vendor writes later is a renewal that has not tested the clause. The test is concrete: name one data category the contract excludes, and ask the vendor to point at the line that lists it.

Three clocks the contract has to fix

The first clock is notice: the customer may give at most two months' notice, so a contract cannot stretch the exit decision over a year. The second is the transition, which must be completed within 30 days. The third is retrieval, where the customer keeps at least 30 days to pull its data after the switch. Those three numbers are the negotiation, because everything else in the chapter hangs off them.

The contract also has to say what happens during the transition. The provider must give reasonable assistance, maintain business continuity, flag known continuity risks and keep security at the same level, and it must support the customer's exit strategy with the relevant information. Article 26 adds a duty to inform customers about switching procedures, methods and formats, and Article 27 requires good-faith cooperation from all parties, including the destination provider. Article 28 requires the provider to publish which jurisdiction its infrastructure for each service is subject to, and to describe its measures against unlawful access by third-country authorities, with those pages referenced in the contract.

For a buyer, Article 28 is the cheapest diligence in the chapter: it turns a sovereignty question into a documented page the vendor must already maintain, and it gives procurement a citation when the answer is vague.

What stays chargeable, and where the law is thin

Steady-state egress is not a switching charge. A data platform that ships 40 TB a month to its own analytics estate is paying for traffic that has nothing to do with leaving, and the Data Act does not touch that line. The saving is real but it is a migration event, not a permanent discount, which is why the renewal should still negotiate the ordinary egress rate separately from the exit clause.

AI workloads are the unsettled part. The practitioner reading of Article 2(38) is that a customer's prompts, uploaded documents and generated outputs are input and output data, while logs, embeddings and models fine-tuned on customer data may combine customer data with protected technology, and the treatment of those is not settled. A contract that defines them precisely is worth more than one that asserts a principle.

Geography decides whether any of this applies. The Data Act has not been incorporated into the EEA Agreement, so it does not yet apply in Norway or Iceland, and a Norwegian public buyer has no equivalent statutory right today. A vendor selling into the Nordics will often extend the terms anyway, but that is a commercial choice and should be written as one.

The decision rule

If the renewal is for an estate that could plausibly move inside two years, sign only with the switch clause attached: two months' notice, 30-day transition, 30-day retrieval, no charge from 12 January 2027, and the exportable data set listed in an annex. If the workload cannot move because it is tied to proprietary services, the clause costs the vendor nothing and tells you which of the two situations you are in.

If the buyer sits outside the EU, the same terms are still worth asking for, because the provider that has industrialised switching for European customers will extend the machinery elsewhere before it builds a second process. The number to take into the meeting is not a discount percentage. It is 12 January 2027, and the clause that names it.