The EU Data Act and cloud switching: what changes on 12 January 2027

On 12 January 2027, Article 29 of the EU Data Act (Regulation (EU) 2023/2854) takes full effect, making it illegal for cloud providers to charge switching fees—including data egress fees—when an EU customer moves to another provider or to on-premises infrastructure. Since 12 September 2025, providers have only been allowed to charge at-cost rates for switching and have been bound by strict contract rules, such as a maximum two-month notice period and a 30-day transition window. While the January 2027 deadline eliminates the financial penalty for exporting your data during a migration, it does not ban standard ongoing egress fees for everyday traffic, abolish fixed-term contract commitments, or solve the technical work of rebuilding your infrastructure on a new cloud.

Key takeaways

Zero switching fees from 12 January 2027: Cloud providers can no longer charge data egress fees or administrative penalties when you export your data and metadata to switch providers.
Contract rules already apply: Since 12 September 2025, Chapter VI of the EU Data Act has capped customer notice periods at two months and required a mandatory 30-day transition period.
Everyday egress is still billed: The fee ban applies only to switching and parallel multi-cloud use (which remains capped at provider cost). Standard internet traffic and cross-region transfers in normal operations remain billable.
Commitments still hold: Fixed-term contracts, reserved instances, and savings plans are not invalidated by the law. Early termination penalties remain legal if they are proportionate.
Financial lock-in ends, technical work remains: Removing egress bills makes leaving a hyperscaler cheaper, but engineering teams still have to translate networks, IAM policies, and deployment pipelines.

What the EU Data Act actually does for cloud customers

Regulation (EU) 2023/2854, known as the EU Data Act, entered into force in January 2024 and became generally applicable across the European Union on 12 September 2025. While much of the law deals with connected IoT devices and industrial data sharing, Chapter VI (Articles 23 to 31) targets a major operational headache for European software companies: cloud vendor lock-in.

In the text of the regulation, cloud platforms are called “data processing services”. This definition covers Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Importantly, the law applies based on where the customer is located, not where the provider has its headquarters. Whether you buy cloud infrastructure from AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, or a European provider, Chapter VI applies to your contracts if your company is established in the EU.

The law breaks vendor lock-in down into three categories: contractual barriers, commercial barriers (fees), and technical barriers. Most of the contractual and technical rules took effect in September 2025. The commercial phase-out finishes on 12 January 2027.

The timeline: 2024 to 2027

The rollout of the cloud switching rules follows a three-stage schedule under Articles 29 and 50 of the regulation:

11 January 2024 – 12 January 2027 (Transitional period for fees): Under Article 29(2), providers were immediately barred from increasing switching charges and could only pass on the direct, actual costs incurred to execute a customer switch.
12 September 2025 (General application): All contractual obligations under Article 25 and technical assistance obligations under Articles 26 through 30 took effect. Providers had to update their terms of service to allow switching upon request.
12 January 2027 (Complete ban on switching charges): Under Article 29(1), switching charges drop to zero. Providers cannot charge for data egress, specialized export tooling, or support actions required to complete a migration to a new provider.

What changes on 12 January 2027 (and what does not)

Many summaries of the EU Data Act claim that “cloud egress fees are banned in 2027”. That is inaccurate and can lead to expensive mistakes in architecture planning. The regulation draws a sharp line between switching (leaving a service), in-parallel use (running a multi-cloud setup across providers), and ongoing operations (serving your application to users).

1. Switching to another provider: Free from January 2027

When you formally initiate a switch to move a workload from one cloud provider to another—or back to your own hardware—Article 29(1) prohibits the source provider from charging switching fees. This includes outbound data transfer (egress) fees for moving your databases, object storage buckets, virtual machine images, and configuration metadata to the destination provider.

2. Multi-cloud and parallel use: Capped at cost permanently

What if you are not leaving AWS or Google Cloud entirely, but want to run a database on one cloud and your Kubernetes cluster on an EU cloud? The Data Act calls this “in-parallel use”. Under Article 34(2), providers are allowed to charge data egress fees for ongoing traffic between two clouds used in parallel, even after 12 January 2027. However, those fees cannot exceed the provider’s actual technical cost of transferring the data. They cannot add a commercial markup to punish multi-cloud architectures.

3. Normal operational egress: Still billed at standard rates

The Data Act does not regulate what a cloud provider charges you to serve web traffic, software downloads, or video streams to your end users over the public internet. It also does not cap internal transfer charges, such as traffic crossing Availability Zones (AZs), NAT gateway processing fees, or inter-region replication within the same provider.

Scenario	Rule until 11 Jan 2027	Rule from 12 Jan 2027	Legal Reference
One-time data export to switch providers	Capped at provider’s direct cost	0 EUR (Banned)	Article 29(1) & (2)
Provider support & export tools for switching	Capped at provider’s direct cost	0 EUR (Banned)	Article 29(1), Art. 2(36)
Ongoing egress for multi-cloud (parallel use)	Capped at provider’s direct cost	Capped at provider’s direct cost	Article 34(2)
Standard internet egress (serving end users)	Standard list price	Standard list price	Outside scope
Cross-AZ or inter-region traffic within one cloud	Standard list price	Standard list price	Outside scope
Early termination of fixed-term commitments	Proportionate penalty allowed	Proportionate penalty allowed	Article 25(2), Recital 89

Your contractual rights under Article 25

While the removal of egress fees gets the most attention, the contractual timeline rules in Article 25 are just as important when planning an infrastructure migration. Every cloud contract with an EU customer must include these baseline terms:

Maximum 2-month notice period: You have the right to initiate a switch at any time by giving notice. The provider cannot require a notice period longer than two months.
Mandatory 30-day transition period: Once the notice period ends, the provider must assist with the migration and complete the transition within a maximum of 30 calendar days. If the provider can prove that a 30-day transition is technically impossible, they must notify you within 14 working days and may extend the transition period once, up to seven months. As a customer, however, you always have the right to extend the transition period to a timeframe that fits your engineering schedule.
Continuity and security: During the transition, the source provider must maintain business continuity, provide reasonable assistance, and keep a high level of security for your data and services.
Minimum 30-day data retrieval window: After the transition period concludes, you have at least 30 calendar days to retrieve any remaining exportable data before the provider deletes it.
Automatic termination: Your old contract terminates automatically once the switching process is successfully completed, or at the end of the two-month notice period if you decide not to migrate your data and simply want to close the account.

How hyperscaler exit programs work in practice

In response to the regulation, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure introduced formal data transfer waivers for customers leaving their platforms. However, as of 2026, these waivers are rarely automatic at the billing level.

Instead of simply making outbound transfers free when you delete an S3 bucket or a Cloud Storage bucket, hyperscalers generally require you to open a support case before you begin the migration, declare your intent to switch under the EU Data Act terms, and specify the accounts and timeline involved. You then pay the standard egress invoice and receive a credit refund afterward, or operate under a time-limited fee waiver tied to account closure. If you copy 50 terabytes of object storage to a new provider before submitting the formal switching notice, you risk paying standard list prices for that transfer.

The catch with Reserved Instances and Enterprise Agreements

The EU Data Act gives you the right to exit a cloud contract with two months’ notice, even if you signed a three-year enterprise commitment. However, Recital 89 and Article 2(36) explicitly state that proportionate early termination penalties are not considered switching charges.

If you signed a three-year spend commitment or bought three-year Reserved Instances in exchange for a 40% discount, the provider can still bill you an early termination fee to recoup the unearned discount or require you to pay out the remaining committed balance, depending on your contract terms. Furthermore, you must continue paying standard service fees for the compute and storage you consume while the migration is underway.

Differentiating the EU Data Act, DORA, and data sovereignty

For European founders, CFOs, and CTOs, the EU Data Act sits alongside two other major considerations: financial sector compliance (DORA) and foreign legal jurisdiction.

DORA and cloud exit strategies

If your company is a financial entity—or a critical ICT third-party provider selling to banks, insurers, or payment processors—the Digital Operational Resilience Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/2554, or DORA) has applied to you since 17 January 2025. DORA requires documented, tested exit strategies for ICT services supporting critical or important functions.

Previously, DORA created a frustrating mismatch: financial regulators required you to have a credible cloud exit plan, while cloud contracts and egress fees made executing that plan slow and expensive. The EU Data Act fixes the supplier side of this equation. By mandating a 30-day transition window, documented export formats, and zero switching charges from January 2027, the Data Act gives regulated companies the legal enforcement mechanism to make their DORA exit plans work in reality.

Switching vs. sovereignty

It is also helpful to separate data portability from legal sovereignty. In response to European regulatory pressure, US hyperscalers have launched specialized regions, such as the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. While the AWS European Sovereign Cloud keeps data and operations physically inside the EU and is run by EU-resident personnel, it still belongs to Amazon, a US parent company. As a result, it remains subject to US jurisdiction and extraterritorial laws like the US CLOUD Act.

The EU Data Act does not force you to leave US providers, nor does it solve US CLOUD Act exposure on its own. What it does is remove the financial penalty if you decide that moving to an EU-owned cloud—such as UpCloud, Scaleway, Hetzner, OVHcloud, STACKIT, IONOS, or Exoscale—is the right step for your company’s compliance posture and infrastructure budget.

Checklist: preparing for a cloud switch in 2027

Because the commercial barriers drop to zero on 12 January 2027, late 2026 and early 2027 are practical windows to review your cloud infrastructure. However, the Data Act only requires providers to give you “functional equivalence” for basic IaaS (like virtual machines and block storage). For PaaS and managed services, providers only have to export your raw data and specify open interfaces—they do not have to rebuild your architecture on the new cloud.

Use this checklist before triggering a formal switch:

Audit commitment end dates: Check your billing console for active Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Committed Use Discounts (CUDs), or multi-year enterprise discount agreements. Align your migration window with their expiration to avoid early termination fees.
Separate portable services from proprietary lock-in: Identify which workloads run on open standards (Linux VMs, Docker/Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, S3-compatible object storage) and which rely on proprietary services (such as AWS DynamoDB, Google BigQuery, or Azure Cosmos DB) that require application code changes before moving.
Measure your total data volume: Calculate the exact size of your databases, persistent disks, and object storage buckets. Check how long a full initial sync and checksum verification will take over your available network bandwidth so you know if the standard 30-day transition window is sufficient.
Read your provider’s Data Act switching addendum: Locate the specific support ticket workflow your current provider requires to waive egress fees under Article 29. Do not start transferring large datasets before receiving written confirmation that your switching window is active.
Plan for parallel run and rollback: Budget for running your old and new environments side-by-side during the cutover, and keep reverse replication active for at least a few weeks after switching DNS so you have a safe rollback option.

Frequently asked questions

Are all cloud egress fees banned in the EU starting 12 January 2027?

No. Only egress fees and administrative charges incurred as part of switching to another provider (or moving to on-premises infrastructure) are banned under Article 29(1). Standard outbound internet traffic to your end users, cross-AZ traffic, and inter-region transfers remain billable at your provider’s normal rates. Egress for ongoing multi-cloud (in-parallel) use remains billable, though capped at the provider’s actual technical cost.

Does the EU Data Act apply to existing contracts signed before September 2025?

Yes. The switching rules in Chapter VI of the EU Data Act apply to all contracts for data processing services provided to EU customers, regardless of when the contract was originally signed.

Can I cancel a 3-year AWS or Azure commitment early without paying a penalty?

You have the legal right under Article 25 to terminate the contract with a maximum of two months’ notice to switch providers. However, the provider is still legally allowed to charge a proportionate early termination penalty to recover discounts granted for the fixed-term commitment.

Does the EU Data Act apply in the UK, Norway, or Switzerland?

The EU Data Act applies directly across the 27 EU Member States. For EEA countries (Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein), it takes effect once formally incorporated into the EEA Agreement. It does not apply in the United Kingdom or Switzerland, though UK regulators have conducted their own investigations into cloud switching barriers and many providers apply similar switching workflows across their European customer base.

How MoveInfra can help

While the EU Data Act removes the egress fee penalty for leaving a hyperscaler, your team still has to rebuild the infrastructure, sync the data, and cut over without losing writes. MoveInfra moves companies from AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and DigitalOcean to EU-owned clouds like UpCloud, Scaleway, Hetzner, and OVHcloud for a fixed price. We rebuild your environment as clean Terraform code, keep your databases and object storage in live sync during the transition, help update your CI/CD pipelines, and maintain 30 days of reverse replication after the DNS switch so you always have a safe rollback.