What does the EU Data Act change for switching cloud providers?
The EU Data Act, Regulation (EU) 2023/2854, gives customers of cloud and other data processing services a legal right to switch to another provider or to their own infrastructure. Since 12 September 2025, providers must allow a switch with a notice period of at most two months and complete it within a 30-day transition period. Switching charges, including data egress fees for the switch, are limited to the provider’s costs until 12 January 2027 and are banned after that date.
Key dates
| Date | What applies |
|---|---|
| 11 January 2024 | The Data Act enters into force |
| 12 September 2025 | The switching rules in Chapter VI apply, with cost-based switching charges still allowed |
| 12 January 2027 | Providers may no longer charge for switching (Article 29) |
The rules cover infrastructure, platform and software services alike, and apply to providers offering services to customers in the EU, wherever the provider is established.
The switching process
Article 25 requires the contract to contain the switching terms, and sets limits on them:
- Notice period: at most two months to start the switch.
- Transition period: at most 30 calendar days to complete it after the notice period. If that is technically unfeasible, the provider must say so within 14 working days, justify it and propose an alternative of no more than seven months. The customer can extend the period once.
- Data retrieval period: at least 30 calendar days after the transition ends, during which the customer can still retrieve its data.
- Scope of export: all exportable data and digital assets, meaning the customer’s input and output data, including metadata generated by its use of the service. The provider’s own intellectual property and trade secrets are excluded.
- Deletion: the provider must erase the exportable data after the retrieval period and the switch is complete.
The provider must also inform customers about available switching procedures, the data formats it supports and known restrictions.
Switching charges and egress fees
Article 29 phases out charges in two steps. Until 12 January 2027, providers may impose reduced switching charges that do not exceed the costs directly linked to the switch. From 12 January 2027, they may not charge for switching at all. The definition of switching charges explicitly includes data egress charges for the switch.
Two kinds of charges stay outside this ban:
- Standard service fees and early termination penalties. The definition of switching charges excludes both, so the price of the service during the switch and contractual penalties for ending a fixed term early remain possible.
- Parallel use. Under Article 34, when you use several providers at the same time, a provider may still charge egress fees for that multi-cloud traffic, but not more than its costs.
Normal egress, such as traffic from your application to its users, is not affected. How egress pricing works today is explained in what are cloud egress fees.
Functional equivalence and interoperability
For infrastructure as a service, Article 30(1) requires the original provider to take all reasonable measures in its power to help the customer reach functional equivalence on the destination service, meaning a minimum level of functionality for the same service type. For other services, providers must offer open interfaces free of charge and support data export in structured, commonly used, machine-readable formats.
Functional equivalence is not identical capability. A proprietary database, serverless platform or AI service does not have to exist at the destination, and the Data Act does not force the old provider to make one portable. Portability of the application itself still depends on your architecture; see how to avoid cloud vendor lock-in.
Article 31 exempts two categories from most switching obligations: services where most features were custom-built for one customer and are not offered at broad commercial scale, and services provided as a non-production test or evaluation version for a limited time.
What the Data Act does not do
- It does not migrate your workloads. The customer still plans and executes the move, as described in how to migrate from a US hyperscaler to a European cloud.
- It does not regulate data location or foreign government access. Those questions belong to the GDPR and to data sovereignty.
- It does not end committed-spend contracts automatically. Commentators note that how the right to switch interacts with fixed-term contracts and early termination penalties is still unsettled.
Pending amendments
On 19 November 2025 the Commission proposed the Digital Omnibus (procedure 2025/0360(COD)), which would amend parts of the Data Act. For cloud switching, the proposal adds targeted exemptions for custom-made services and for some small and mid-cap providers under existing contracts. As of November 2026 the proposal is still in the legislative process, and the switching rules above apply unchanged. The longer guide to cloud sovereignty, data residency and portability places the Data Act among the other EU rules.
Portability on Cloudfleet
Cloudfleet runs CNCF-conformant Kubernetes, so workloads can move to other standard Kubernetes environments without code refactoring, as described in What is Cloudfleet. Before you delete a cluster, you can export its resources through the Kubernetes API with standard tools such as kubectl, and your volumes and application data already sit on infrastructure you choose.