Can my cloud provider still charge egress fees under the Data Act?

During the transition period, a provider may charge only reduced switching costs not exceeding what it actually incurs, and standard egress fees for switching are being phased out entirely. The exact position depends on the current stage of the phase-out. The direction is toward no switching charge, but confirm what applies in your migration window.

Does the Data Act mean migration is now free?

No. It removes the artificial financial penalty (egress and switching fees) and unenforceable contractual barriers. It does not remove the engineering effort of re-platforming, and it does nothing about proprietary service dependencies in your own architecture. The legal cost of leaving falls; the technical cost of a lock-in you built remains yours to pay down.

Does the Data Act guarantee my new provider works the same?

No. It requires providers to remove switching obstacles and to support functional equivalence where feasible for infrastructure services, but "where feasible" is a real limit. Managed services differ between providers, and the law does not force identical behaviour. Portability still has to be designed into your architecture; the Data Act clears the contractual path, not the technical one.

EU cloud-switching law

The EU Data Act and your right to leave a cloud

The Data Act did something the market had refused to: it made the right to switch cloud providers a legal one, and it put the removal of egress fees on a clock. If lock-in has ever been the reason you stayed on a provider you had outgrown, this is the regulation that changes the economics. This page covers what the Data Act requires of providers, the timeline for switching charges, and where its promises still have gaps.

This is general information about the EU Data Act, not legal advice. For how it applies to your contracts, ask a qualified lawyer.

What the Data Act covers, and who it binds

The Data Act (Regulation (EU) 2023/2854) entered into force in January 2024 and became applicable in September 2025. It is a regulation, so it applies directly across the EU. Most of it is about who can use data generated by connected products, but one chapter, on switching between data processing services, speaks directly to cloud.

That chapter binds providers of "data processing services", which covers cloud infrastructure, platform and software services broadly. The obligations run to the provider, in favour of the customer. For once, the party the law is protecting is the one trying to leave.

The obligations placed on providers

Providers must remove contractual, commercial, technical and organisational obstacles that prevent a customer from switching to another provider or to on-premises systems. Concretely, that means maximum notice periods for switching, capped by the regulation, a transition period during which the provider must assist, and an obligation not to design gratuitous barriers to exit.

Providers must also offer functional equivalence where feasible for infrastructure services, and be transparent about the technical arrangements needed to switch. The law reaches into contract terms: clauses that lock a customer in beyond what the regulation allows are unenforceable to that extent.

The end of egress fees, on a timeline

The Data Act targets the single most effective lock-in tool: data egress charges, the per-gigabyte toll for taking your own data out. It sets a transition. During the initial period, providers may only charge reduced switching costs that do not exceed the costs they actually incur. After the transition, switching charges are to be withdrawn, so that moving your data out should no longer carry a punitive fee.

This matters because egress pricing was never really a cost-recovery mechanism; it was a moat. Removing it does not make migration free (the engineering effort remains), but it takes away the artificial financial penalty that kept workloads parked on a provider long after the technical case had gone.

What the Data Act does not do

The Data Act gives you a right to switch; it does not make your architecture portable. If your application is wired to a provider’s proprietary database, queueing and identity services, the legal right to leave meets an engineering wall that no regulation removes. The obstacle is now technical debt, not a contract clause or an egress bill.

It also does not, by itself, resolve sovereignty. Switching between two US-controlled providers is easier under the Data Act, but it does not change the jurisdiction either answers to. The right to switch is the precondition for reversibility; using it to reach genuinely sovereign infrastructure is a separate, deliberate choice.

Where the promises get slippery

"Functional equivalence" is the phrase doing the heavy lifting, and it is genuinely contested. The Data Act asks infrastructure providers to help a customer reach it where feasible, but what counts as equivalent, and where feasibility ends, is exactly the sort of thing that will be argued case by case and refined through guidance. Do not read it as a guarantee that your new provider will behave identically to the old one.

The egress-fee timeline, too, is a phased removal with cost-based charges permitted in the interim, not an overnight abolition. The direction is clear and the end state is favourable, but the exact charges you can be billed depend on where you are in the transition. Read the current rules for your migration window rather than assuming zero cost today.

Common questions about the Data Act

Can my cloud provider still charge egress fees under the Data Act?: During the transition period, a provider may charge only reduced switching costs not exceeding what it actually incurs, and standard egress fees for switching are being phased out entirely. The exact position depends on the current stage of the phase-out. The direction is toward no switching charge, but confirm what applies in your migration window.
Does the Data Act mean migration is now free?: No. It removes the artificial financial penalty (egress and switching fees) and unenforceable contractual barriers. It does not remove the engineering effort of re-platforming, and it does nothing about proprietary service dependencies in your own architecture. The legal cost of leaving falls; the technical cost of a lock-in you built remains yours to pay down.
Does the Data Act guarantee my new provider works the same?: No. It requires providers to remove switching obstacles and to support functional equivalence where feasible for infrastructure services, but "where feasible" is a real limit. Managed services differ between providers, and the law does not force identical behaviour. Portability still has to be designed into your architecture; the Data Act clears the contractual path, not the technical one.