Cancelling Proximus, VOO or Orange without paying fees

Once you pass six months of contract, cancelling a TV subscription in Belgium is free. No reason to give, with all six operators, whatever the package. Three things do cost you money, and nobody mentions them on the phone: the calendar, the form your request takes, and the box of kit sitting in your garage.

Does cancelling after six months cost anything in Belgium?

No. Nothing.

The FPS Economy, the Belgian federal consumer authority, puts it in one sentence: you may cancel your contract, fixed-term or open-ended, without giving a reason and free of charge after six months. This is not goodwill granted by a call centre, it is the Belgian legal regime. It applies to Proximus as much as to VOO, to Telenet as much as to Orange, to Scarlet as much as to BASE.

I spell it out because half the pages that surface on this question talk about twelve or twenty-four month commitments. Those durations exist in France. In Belgium they cannot be held against you.

Two reservations remain, and both are real. The contractual notice period has to be respected, and the law caps it at two months. And if you received a device as a welcome gift when you signed, usually a smartphone, the operator may claim its residual value: it must then attach a month-by-month depreciation table, over twenty-four months at most.

What does cancelling before six months cost?

The price of the instalments still running until the end of month six. Not one cent more, and no flat exit penalty.

Call centre agents phrase this badly, and the distinction changes everything: Belgium has no departure fine, it has a subscription balance. Here is the calculation in euros, on the rates excluding promotion that I recorded in August 2026.

Rates excluding promotion recorded on 18 August 2026 for the Flex+ Internet Go + TV, on 16 August 2026 for the entry-level Proximus trio and on 24 August 2026 for the Scarlet Sneller Internet + Mobile 20 GB trio.

Two lessons sit in that table. The first is obvious: between month five and month six, the gap is 75.99 EUR on a Proximus package. Waiting three more weeks, when you can, is the best hourly rate of your year.

The second is nastier. If your launch promotion ended before month six, the instalments you owe are at the full rate, not at the headline price that made you sign. The Proximus promotion opened on 17 August 2026 runs for three months: a customer leaving in month four therefore settles two instalments at 75.99 EUR, an amount they never actually paid.

Is a call to customer service enough to cancel?

No, and this is the most expensive mistake in the whole process.

The FPS Economy is explicit: cancellation must go through a written channel, a letter, an e-mail, or an SMS sent to the number the operator has configured to receive cancellations. Cancelling by telephone is not sufficient. Several Belgian pages claim the opposite, and I regularly see households discover two invoices later that their February phone call never triggered anything.

Back when I installed set-top boxes around Namur, this scenario came up every month. A customer cancelled by phone, switched operator, and ended up with two live subscriptions and two direct debits. By the time it was untangled, they had paid three months too many. Nobody had cheated them: nobody had told them the call did not count.

Your written request needs five elements, and not one more:

• your first and last name, and the installation address;
• your customer number, the one at the top of the invoice;
• the services concerned, named one by one;
• the date on which you want the contract to end;
• the date you are sending it.

Send it through a channel that leaves a trace. An e-mail is legally sufficient, but registered post costs under ten euros and is worth a thousand the day the operator disputes the date. Keep the acknowledgement.

Does Easy Switch cancel on your behalf?

Yes, if you are changing operator and taking the whole package with you.

Easy Switch is supervised by the BIPT, the Belgian telecoms regulator, and governed by the royal decree of 6 September 2016. The principle is simple: you give your new operator a mandate, it installs its services at your address, then it cancels the old contract itself. No double billing, no gap between the two, and the procedure is free.

To trigger it you need four pieces of information: the name of the old operator, your customer number, the cancellation date you want, and the Easy Switch ID, printed at the top of your invoice.

One limit deserves to be known, because it is almost never mentioned. Easy Switch handles no partial migration. If you want to drop the television and keep the internet with the same operator, or move only the TV to a competitor, the procedure does not apply and you fall back on the classic written route. The second limit is that mobile alone falls under number portability, a separate procedure, which the new operator also takes care of.

What do you do with the set-top box and modem?

Send them back, and quickly. They are rented, not sold.

This is where fees reappear after an otherwise free cancellation, and the only one you control entirely. VOO publishes the most precise rule on the Belgian market: fifteen days from receiving the return labels, after which the equipment is billed at the price shown on the return document, plus a flat indemnity. And above all this sentence, worth reading twice: the cancellation is only finalised once every open invoice, closing invoice included, is paid and the equipment has been received.

Three details that cost money when you miss them.

Accessories count. Power cable, HDMI cable, remote control, external hard drive: the return document lists them, and a missing cable gets billed. Empty the TV cabinet before you seal the box.

Some modems must not be returned. VOO states that the Netgear CG3100 and CG3700, along with the Technicolor TC7210, are obsolete and belong at a container park. Sending them back achieves nothing; keeping them costs nothing.

The drop-off receipt earns its keep. Photograph the contents of the box on the day you send it and keep the bpost ticket. Return parcels go missing, and without proof it is your word against a tracking system.

At Proximus the deadline is not published in a uniform way: it sits on the slip attached to the cancellation confirmation, with the prepaid label. The kit can also be handed in at a store, which I recommend whenever one is under twenty minutes away, because the receipt is immediate.

What happens if you move house or the price goes up?

Two situations reopen the door, even mid-commitment.

Moving house is not in itself a legal ground for free cancellation in Belgium. But if your operator does not serve the new address, the question changes: it can no longer perform the contract. That is a common case in the south of the country, where cable coverage sometimes changes from one street to the next. Have the operator check the new address before you give notice, and keep the answer in writing.

A price increase is the best window of the year, and the most ignored. When an operator changes its terms to your disadvantage, it must inform you and let you leave without indemnity, including during the first six months. In January 2026, Proximus, Orange, VOO, Telenet and edpnet raised their fixed packages by 1 to 4 EUR a month; Telenet applied an adjustment of roughly 2 percent on average on 16 March 2026. Each of those notifications opened a window of a few weeks. The letter arrives in the middle of an ordinary invoice, and nine times out of ten it ends up in the bin.

If the operator refuses to apply these rules, the Telecommunications Ombudsman Service handles disputes free of charge, and the BIPT receives complaints about breaches of telecom law.

Cancel with whom, and move to what?

A cancellation on its own is rare. Most of the time it serves a move elsewhere, and the arithmetic runs on the second year, not on the headline price of the new contract.

Two things to watch before signing. VOO has been an Orange Belgium brand since the takeover: moving from one to the other changes the contract and the rate card, not the group billing you. And Telenet no longer sells the combined ONE package: the internet acts as the base, each brick is added separately, and the fixed telephony once included has become a paid line.

For the overview of all six Belgian operators, with rates excluding promotion set against promotional rates, see the TV subscription ranking or the comparison tool. If your decision comes down to two specific operators, the head-to-heads exist: Proximus or VOO and Telenet or Proximus. And to know what you will really pay elsewhere, how much a TV subscription costs in Belgium puts both rate cards side by side.

Sources. FPS Economy, ConsumerConnect, page on cancelling a telecom contract, consulted on 30 August 2026 (six-month rule, notice capped at two months, written form requirement, residual value and 24-month depreciation table); BIPT, Easy Switch FAQ and Easy Switch operators page, consulted on 30 August 2026 (royal decree of 6 September 2016, mandate to the new operator, partial migrations excluded); VOO, support page on returning VOO equipment, consulted on 30 August 2026 (15-day deadline, equipment billing and flat indemnity, obsolete modems not to be returned); public rate cards recorded on 16, 18 and 24 August 2026 at Proximus and Scarlet; January 2026 increases at Proximus, Orange, VOO, Telenet and edpnet; Telenet rate adjustment of 16 March 2026.