Can You Charge for Data Under the EU Data Act?

One of the first questions founders ask when the EU Data Act comes up is refreshingly commercial: fine, we have to share data, but can we at least charge for it? The honest answer is: sometimes yes, sometimes no, and the difference depends entirely on who is asking and under which article. Getting this wrong in either direction is expensive. Charge where the law says free and you have a compliance problem; give everything away where the law allows compensation and you have left money on the table.

Here is the map, in plain English.

Free: the user asking for their own data

When the user of a connected product or related service asks for the data it generated for them, the core access right, applicable since 12 September 2025, is expected to be free of charge for the user. You cannot bill your customer for handing over their own usage data, and you should be cautious about routing the request into a paid API tier as the only practical option. For products placed on the EU market from 12 September 2026, the access-by-design obligation goes further: where technically feasible, the user should be able to get the data directly, without asking you at all, which leaves little room for a toll booth.

Sometimes paid: sharing with third parties and other businesses

It changes when data flows to a business rather than to the user. Where a data holder is obliged to make data available to a data recipient, the Data Act allows compensation, provided it is agreed on terms that are fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory. Reasonable compensation can generally reflect the costs of making the data available and, for most recipients, may include a margin.

There is an important carve-out: where the recipient is a small or medium-sized enterprise, or a not-for-profit research organisation, the compensation is expected to be capped at the costs directly related to making the data available, with no profit margin on top. If your data sharing counterparties are mostly SMEs, your pricing model for shared data needs to reflect that.

Two more constraints are worth engraving somewhere visible. First, compensation terms imposed unilaterally on a smaller partner can run into the unfair-terms rules of Article 13, and a clause found unfair there is not merely voidable but void. Second, transparency is part of the deal: the basis for calculating your compensation should be explainable, not a number pulled from the air.

Shrinking to zero: switching charges

The third category is charges for leaving your service, and here the direction of travel is one-way. Since September 2025, charges for switching cloud and data processing services have been capped at the direct costs incurred. From 12 January 2027 they are expected to be banned entirely. If data egress fees or exit charges are a line in your revenue plan, that line has an expiry date, and contracts renewing now will mostly outlive it. From 12 September 2027 the Data Act's fairness rules also reach legacy contracts signed long before the Act, so old paperwork is not a permanent shelter either.

What about the Digital Omnibus?

You may have read that Brussels is considering softening parts of the Data Act, including relief for SMEs, adjustments around early termination penalties and exemptions for legacy contracts. Those Digital Omnibus proposals are real, but they are proposals: none of it is law yet, and the dates above stand until an amending act is actually adopted. Pricing decisions made today should follow the law as it applies today.

Why this is worth getting right

Enforcement is national, and it has started to take shape. Germany's implementing law, the DADG, has been in force since 30 May 2026, with the Bundesnetzagentur enforcing through tiered fines of up to EUR 500,000; where personal data is involved, GDPR-level fines of up to 4% of turnover can also come into play. A pricing page that quietly charges users for their own data, or an exit fee that survives past January 2027, is exactly the kind of visible, documentable gap a complaint can hang on.

Find out where your pricing stands

If you are not sure which of your data-related charges are safe, capped or on borrowed time, the free readiness assessment at [dataactready.org](https://www.dataactready.org) takes about three minutes, requires no signup, and shows you which Data Act articles apply to your product, including the ones that decide what you can and cannot charge for.