You know the drill. You signed up for something in 2022, forgot about it, and have been quietly hemorrhaging $14.99 a month ever since. New York City just decided that's a corporate crime, not a personal failing. Starting October 1st, companies that trap New Yorkers in subscriptions they can't easily cancel could face fines of $525 per user subscription, and the city is only getting started.
What the Rule Actually Does
The Guardian reports that New York City's consumer protection office announced a new rule this week banning companies from using deceptive tactics to lock customers into gym memberships, streaming services, and other recurring charges. If a company doesn't provide a simple, straightforward way to cancel, it's looking at $525 per subscription, plus back fees, plus additional fines. That math gets ugly fast.
The rule kicks in October 1st. It came out of the Mamdani administration alongside a second proposed rule targeting so-called junk fees, the kind that make a $2,500 apartment listing magically become $3,100 by the time someone sends you a lease. Under that proposal, any mandatory fees would have to be included upfront in whatever price a company advertises. No more discovering the "lifestyle amenity fee" on move-in day.
New York would be the first US city to put either of these rules on the books. Which raises the obvious question of why it took this long and why it took a city to do it when the federal government has been fumbling this ball for decades.
The Scope of This Is Bigger Than Your Netflix Password
The subscription trap alone is costing Americans a staggering amount of money. The Roosevelt Institute estimates that New Yorkers specifically lose as much as $162.5 million per year to automatic renewals they either forgot about or never fully understood they signed up for. That's not a rounding error. That's a transfer of wealth from distracted working people to company bottom lines, automated and invisible.
The junk fee rule, if it survives the public comment period and hearings, could shake up New York's housing market in a significant way. About 70% of New York City residents rent, according to the Guardian, and apartment fees have become a full industry unto themselves. "Boiler management fees." "Lifestyle charges." These are real things real landlords charge, with a straight face, on top of already brutal rents. The rule would require all of that garbage to be baked into the advertised monthly price.
The rule also covers anyone doing business in New York, not just locals. Hotels hitting out-of-town visitors with undisclosed fees at checkout? Samuel Levine, the city's commissioner of consumer and worker protection, told the Guardian: "You should complain to us." That's an invitation.
The Guy Running This Has Done It Before
Levine isn't some city bureaucrat who stumbled into this job. He's a former head of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission, and he sounds like someone who has been watching corporations lie about prices for his entire career and has finally run out of patience.
"The current situation creates a scenario where rather than competing on price, companies are competing on their ability to hide the true price. That's the worst kind of incentive," Levine told the Guardian. He traces the rot back specifically to the Reagan era, when the FTC and federal regulators stepped back and let the market "self-regulate." What we got, in his words, was "40 years of deceptive pricing."
Hard to argue with that summary.
Industry Hates This, Shocking No One
Junk fee bans are popular with basically everyone except the people collecting the junk fees. The Guardian notes that when the Biden administration introduced a similar federal junk fee rule in 2024, the US Chamber of Commerce called it an attempt to "micromanage businesses' pricing structures." The real estate industry successfully lobbied to have apartment fees cut from that federal rule entirely.
A national click-to-cancel rule that Biden's FTC passed was struck down by a federal judge in 2025, just days before it was supposed to go into effect, over a procedural technicality. Trump's FTC has said it plans to pass a similar rule, which is a strange thing to believe will happen and stranger still to be waiting on. New York decided not to wait.
The city council is also moving on a separate proposed rule to ban "surveillance pricing," where algorithms charge different people different prices for the same thing based on their spending habits and personal data. Maryland banned the practice in April. Colorado's governor vetoed a similar ban last month, which is its own story.
The Bigger Picture Here
This is part of Mayor Zohran Mamdani's explicit governing agenda. He campaigned on making New York City cheaper for the people who actually live there, as opposed to the people who own it. His democratic socialist allies have been running up primary wins across the city in recent weeks, according to the Guardian, as voters show an appetite for a version of economic populism that's actually trying to deliver results.
It's worth watching whether these rules survive industry legal challenges, because they will absolutely face them. The subscription rule is already law as of the announcement; the junk fee rule still needs to clear a public comment period and hearing. Levine told the Guardian he hopes to get the fee rule done by the end of the year.
The Dingo Take
Here is the core absurdity of the last four decades in one clean package: it became standard business practice in America to hide the actual price of things from customers, and the federal government's response was to occasionally propose rules about it that courts killed or lobbyists gutted, and then shrug. We have a word for charging someone money for something they didn't knowingly agree to. We just apparently don't apply it to corporations.
The fact that a city government had to be the one to draw this line is embarrassing for everyone above it in the food chain. Congress could have done this. The FTC could have done this and made it stick. Instead it took a democratic socialist mayor in New York and a former FTC official who clearly got tired of watching Washington fold, to actually put teeth into something that should have been illegal on its face for decades.
Will companies sue? Of course they will. Will some judge somewhere find a procedural reason to pause enforcement? Probably someone will try. But $162.5 million a year flowing back into the pockets of New Yorkers instead of into automatic renewal revenue is a number worth fighting for. And the fact that it took this long to fight for it tells you everything about whose side the system has been on.
