(Credit: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Verizon, which has hiked various wireless rates and fees five times over the last year, is now taking a stand for price stability.
The carrier announced today that current and new subscribers will get a three-year price lock on their rates. This applies to the myPlan wireless offerings the company introduced in August 2023 and the myHome Fios and fixed-wireless home broadband plans it rolled out in June.
Note that this does not cover the entirety of your bill, just the base rate. As Verizon’s fine print spells out, that leaves wireless subscribers open to price creep on “taxes, fees, surcharges, additional plan discounts or promotions, and third-party services.”
Verizon provided a real-world demonstration of that inflationary risk in December when it ratcheted up the “Administrative and Telco Recovery Charge” that wireless subscribers pay from $3.30 to $3.50 a month for each voice line and from $1.40 to $1.60 for each data line.
The lock for home broadband has similar limits; it only applies to “the then-current base monthly rate exclusive of any other setup and additional equipment charges, discounts or promotion, plan perk, and any other third-party services.” But home broadband has fewer add-on costs and surcharges than wireless, thanks in part to it not being subject to universal-service fees levied on voice service.
The other caveat to remember: If you’re on an older Verizon wireless or wired plan, no such guarantee applies.
Verizon is also offering $649.99 in credit for the purchase of a new phone to new myPlan subscribers who trade in any Apple, Google, or Samsung phone, no matter its condition. And it’s committing to free satellite messaging to myPlan subscribers with devices that support messaging via its partners Globalstar and Skylo. That means the iPhone 14 and its successors as well as the Pixel 9 and Galaxy S25 series phones.
Finally, residential-broadband myHome subscribers will no longer have to pay a rental fee for Verizon’s routers, although many Fios subscribers have avoided that $15 fee for years by buying their own wireless routers.
Even with these carveouts, this new policy should be welcome news after the last year of Verizon wireless-plan inflation. In addition to December’s admin fee increase, it raised rates for its unlimited-data plans by $4 a month last January, jacked up smartwatch rates by $5 a month last April, bumped up its international-roaming “Travel Pass” surcharge from $10 a day to $12 a day in October, and increased the monthly cost of an optional device-protection plan for four phones from $60 a month to $68 in February.
Fios subscribers haven’t been exempt from this, with Verizon adding $6 to existing plans last June and then cutting a monthly autopay discount from $10 to $5 for people on older plans this January. (I am a Fios subscriber, and I only found out about the last change on Reddit.)
Lest anybody think we're beating up on Verizon, it doesn't have a monopoly on this kind of behavior.
AT&T raised its unlimited-data plans by $0.99 a month (with an offsetting increase in mobile-hotspot data allocations) last January, added a $7 “Turbo” option for “enhanced data connectivity,” and increased its own international-roaming day-pass charge from $10 to $12 in April, hiked rates for now-retired data plans by $10 a month on single lines and $20 a month for multiple-line bundles in June, and restricted its best autopay discount to subscribers who authorize direct bank withdrawals in March.
T-Mobile, meanwhile, stopped selling its cheaper Magenta plans online last May while imposing rate increases of $2 or $5 on some older plans, then pushed out a round of $5 rate hikes on additional older plans last month. Many of these older plans came with a price-lock guarantee somewhat like Verizon’s new one that, in practice, only meant that T-Mobile would pay the final bill for subscribers who canceled service when the carrier unlocked their prices.
One of those plans, the T-Mobile ONE plan, had been marketed in early 2017 with an explicit pledge that "T-Mobile will never change the price you pay."