The new rules on auto-renewing subscriptions have been coming for a while. The timetable has moved around more than once. On 19 October the government finally published the detail: the draft Consumer Subscription Contracts (Cancellation and Information) Regulations 2026 were laid before Parliament, along with 77 pages of draft guidance from the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade.
The short version: if you sell subscriptions to individuals that renew and charge automatically, you have about ten weeks to get your sign-up pages, reminder notices and cancellation process in order. The rules apply to contracts entered into on or after 1 January 2027.
The regulations still need Parliament's approval, and the guidance is marked as draft. But the date has been public since August, when the PPA reported it had been brought forward from spring 2027. It would be brave to plan on another delay.
Who it covers (and who it doesn't)
This matters a lot for B2B publishers, so it's worth being precise.
The rules cover business-to-consumer subscription contracts. A consumer is an individual acting wholly or mainly outside their business. The guidance's FAQ is clear that a business subscribing for itself, or buying subscriptions for its employees, is a business-to-business contract and is out of scope.
So a company paying for twenty seats on your title isn't affected. But most B2B and specialist titles also have readers who pay with their own card, for their own reasons: students, retired members of the profession, enthusiasts. Those are probably consumers. If your title has a meaningful number of them, the rules apply to that part of your file.
The other test is auto-renewal. The rules cover contracts that renew, with the consumer charged automatically, unless they act to stop it. That includes free or cheap trial periods that roll onto full price. A subscription that simply ends unless the reader chooses to renew, by paying a renewal invoice for example, doesn't fit the definition.
If you're not sure which side of the line some of your readers fall, the guidance itself says to take legal advice. That's sensible. What follows is a practical summary, not legal advice.
What you'll need to do
Key information before they sign up
Before a consumer commits, you must give them the key information (what they'll pay, how often, and so on) together, set apart from everything else and in plain language. Online, they should be able to read it during the purchase without clicking a link to find it. The order button needs to make it clear they're agreeing to pay.
The full pre-contract information can sit behind a prominent link online, but it must then be sent to them on a durable medium such as email before supply starts.
Reminder notices
This is the bit that will touch most subscription systems. Reminders are required:
- roughly every six months for rolling weekly, monthly or quarterly subscriptions;
- before a free or discounted period ends;
- before a contract renews for 12 months or more, plus an additional, earlier reminder.
You have to state in the key pre-contract information when reminders will be sent, the period has to be reasonable, and you then have to stick to it. The reminder must be on a durable medium (email, letter, SMS), clearly a reminder, and the required information must be more prominent than any marketing sent with it.
That last point is worth reading twice if your current renewal notice is mostly a sales message.
An easy way out
Consumers must be able to end the contract at any time, in a straightforward way. If they can sign up online, they must be able to end it online, for example with a clearly labelled button or a simple web form. The guidance says offering an email address on its own doesn't count as a straightforward online exit.
The stated intention is that "exiting should be as easy as signing up". Retention offers are allowed, but they mustn't drag out the process. Feedback can be asked for but not made compulsory.
Once someone ends their contract, you must send an end of contract notice giving the date it ends: within 24 hours if they did it online, within three working days otherwise.
Cooling-off periods
There's a 14-day cooling-off period at the start, and a new 14-day renewal cooling-off period after a trial converts or after a renewal onto 12 months or more. Where goods are supplied, as with a print magazine, the initial period runs from when the first delivery arrives. Fail to give the cooling-off information properly and the period can be extended by up to 12 months.
When you take the money
One that's easy to miss: the rules say a consumer can't be made liable for a renewal payment before the new contract period starts. If you currently take continuous card payments a few weeks before expiry, look at that.
What happens if you get it wrong
Some of these duties become implied terms of the contract. If you fail to give the key information, fail to send a required reminder, set an unreasonable reminder period or make leaving too hard, the consumer can cancel and may be entitled to refunds. Offences, private redress and enforcement are covered separately in the guidance, on top of that.
Existing subscribers
The rules aren't retrospective. They apply to new contracts from 1 January 2027, not to existing ones. But the guidance adds that best practice would be for consumers to get the same protections whenever they signed up.
In practice, running two sets of rules side by side for years isn't much fun either. Most publishers will find it simpler to bring everyone onto the new process.
A practical checklist for the next ten weeks
- Count your consumers. Pull out the auto-renewing subscribers who pay personally. That tells you how big the job is.
- Read your sign-up pages as a customer. Is the price, frequency and renewal plain before the order button, without a click?
- Map your reminders. For each product, when does a reminder go out, by what channel, and what does it say first?
- Write down your reminder period. Then make sure your renewal series actually follows it, for every title.
- Build the online exit. A button or a short form, plus an automatic end of contract notice.
- Check your payment timing against renewal dates.
- Talk to your fulfilment partners. The duties sit with you as the trader, even if someone else sends the emails or runs the billing.
We wrote about the wider job of building a renewal series that works last month. Most of it still stands. The difference now is that, for consumers, some of the reminders are compulsory and their timing has to be what you promised.
Where we fit in
In Avio, our platform for larger publishers, renewal series intervals are set per product and renewal batches are tracked from open to despatched to closed, so you can show what went out and when. In Adeptis, our platform for smaller publishers, the renewals desk shows who's coming up for renewal, by issues remaining. If you'd rather hand the whole thing over, our circulation and subscriptions bureau runs renewals, notices and cancellations for publishers.
We've since written a fuller guide to the new subscription rules for publishers, with example reminder and notice wording and a checklist you can tick off.
If you'd like to talk through what the rules mean for your titles, get in touch. No hard sell, just a conversation.
Rob Sherwood is Managing Director of Adept Data Services. He has spent his career in subscriptions and circulation, at WDIS, Optima and CDS Global before founding Adept.