Click-to-cancel is back: the FTC restarts subscription-cancellation rulemaking

The FTC's Negative Option Rule — widely known as the "click-to-cancel" rule — was supposed to take effect on July 14, 2025, requiring that canceling a subscription be at least as easy as signing up for one. On July 8, 2025, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the rule in its entirety, but not on the merits: the court found the FTC had skipped a legally required preliminary economic-impact analysis after the rule's projected cost was found to exceed $100 million, and held that procedural failure was fatal regardless of the rule's substance.

The court was explicit that it wasn't endorsing deceptive negative-option practices, just rejecting the process used to regulate them. That distinction mattered: on January 30, 2026, the FTC submitted a new draft Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, formally restarting the process. FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Christopher Mufarrige reinforced the intent in a March 5, 2026 speech emphasizing the agency's continued commitment to "combating deceptive negative option subscriptions," and the agency opened public comment on the ANPRM shortly after, with comments due April 13, 2026.

In the meantime, the underlying legal exposure hasn't actually gone away for most subscription businesses. The pre-1973 negative option rule remains in force, the FTC continues to bring cases under its general Section 5 unfair-and-deceptive-practices authority (its 2024 case against Adobe over hidden fees and hard-to-cancel subscriptions being one example), and roughly 30 states — including California, Colorado and New York — already have their own state-level requirements that closely mirror the vacated federal rule.

For subscription businesses, the practical situation is less "the rule is gone" and more "the rule is paused at the federal level while state law and case-by-case enforcement continue." Given how closely the FTC has signaled its new proposal will track the vacated 2024 version, building toward click-to-cancel compliance now, rather than waiting for the rule to formally return, is the lower-risk bet.