T-Mobile will begin moving several thousand customers off grandfathered plans and onto current comparable plans starting July 13, a billing change that will happen automatically and could raise monthly costs by up to $6 per line for some subscribers.
The carrier is not asking customers to opt in or take action. Allan Samson said “absolutely nothing is required of the customer, and it just is going to happen,” and said affected users are being shifted into newer plans from the current lineup that include essentials such as expanded international roaming, premium 5G speeds and more hotspot data.
The move lands now because it starts with July 13 billing cycles and because the people most affected are long-time customers still holding plans that have sat untouched for years. Some of those plans go back 10 to 15 years, and the group includes older Simple Choice, T-Mobile One, One Plus and Magenta plans, along with grandfathered Sprint plans that carried over after the 2020 merger. Affected subscribers should expect to hear first by text or in the T-Life app, and they can check the details of their new plan after logging in to T-Mobile’s rate plan migration page.
One CNET colleague’s One Plan TE will become Experience More with Appreciation Savings, a special migration plan that keeps the move in the same feature lane. That package includes unlimited high-speed 5G and 4G LTE data, 60GB of mobile hotspot data, Netflix Standard with ads and video streaming up to 4K UHD. Apple TV Plus, however, will no longer be bundled for six months through the Apple TV on Us promotion and will instead cost $3 a month.
That is where the bill pressure enters. Samson said “the price they're going to be paying in a huge majority of cases is still going to be below what that exact plan sells for today,” but he also said the company is “not moving you all the way up to the rack rate.” Even so, some customers are being told their monthly bill could rise by as much as $6 per line. Customers reporting the notices online also said the T-Mobile Kickback program is being retired, and that matters because Kickback gives a credit to customers who use less than 2GB of data in a month.
T-Mobile is presenting the switch as a like-for-like move into newer plans, not a forced upsell. Lines that are already free under old promotions will stay free, but the exact impact will vary from account to account once the automatic migration hits subsequent billing cycles after July 13. The unresolved question is not whether the move is coming — it is whether the promised comparable pricing will hold for the customers who have spent years on these legacy plans.
