Paying off the balance on your phone ahead of schedule to get it unlocked can leave the phone in a 35-day penalty box under a new Verizon policy. However, the carrier now says it will ease one of the most objectionable parts of this new rule.
As Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin reported after getting a tip from a reader, Verizon will impose the waiting period before unlocking many phones purchased from the carrier on installment plans and then paid off early.
Verizon’s unlocking policy covers part of these restrictions: “If you pay off a device payment agreement balance online or in the My Verizon App, or if a Verizon Gift Card is used to purchase a smartphone or pay off a remaining balance, the unlocking process will be delayed by 35 days.”
That policy statement justifies this delay as needed to verify that a gift card was “not obtained through fraudulent or illegal means.” That doesn’t explain why a payment online or through Verizon’s own app—possibly with the credit card Verizon itself issues, and the only credit card that qualifies for its full autopay discount—would be subject to the same rule.
A separate “Device Locking FAQs” page provides a more detailed breakdown: “Payments made through your account online, in the My Verizon app, a Verizon Authorized Retailer, or by phone delay the unlock by 35 days.”
The one way to get an instant unlock when paying off a device balance early is in person at one of Verizon’s own stores—identified on its store-finder page as a “Verizon Company Store”—via “a secure payment type.” That means cash, a credit card’s EMV chip, or NFC tap to pay. Its FAQ specifies Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay as contactless options, but NFC readers can’t discriminate between those apps and other tap-to-pay options, such as the NFC chips embedded in new credit cards.
On Tuesday afternoon, however, a Verizon spokesperson who declined to be quoted by name said that several weeks from now, the company would add an extra layer of authentication to its site for credit-card payments that would exempt device payoffs from the 35-day hold.
Many customers, having signed up with Verizon specifically for its network, may never run into this problem. But even otherwise satisfied customers might want to augment Verizon’s service with an eSIM, such as to use T-Mobile’s Starlink satellite roaming or to get cheap data on an overseas trip. And people with unlocked phones on Verizon could get a prepaid SIM or eSIM to ride out last month’s nationwide outage instead of waiting for the carrier to come back online.
Customer Service vs. Fighting Fraud
An analyst who has followed Verizon for years agreed that this new policy—enabled by the FCC in January when it let the company out of previous commitments to unlock phones 60 days after purchase—is not a customer-friendly move.
“If the phone is being paid off, it should be yours and not in 35 days,” said Roger Entner, lead analyst with Recon Analytics. “I think they’re overshooting the target here.”
Get Our Best Stories!
A Smart, Bold Take on the Wireless World
By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy
Policy.
Thanks for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
By “target” he meant people trying to commit fraud by paying off a phone with a credit card and then disputing the charge. A 35-day hold would put a phone’s unlocking on the other side of a billing cycle, too late for a chargeback from a credit-card issuer, while an in-person transaction via EMV or NFC shifts the liability for an allegedly fraudulent transaction away from the merchant.
“People trying to actively game the system” like this are a problem for all of the major carriers, Enter said, but the unlocking policies at AT&T and T-Mobile don’t document any comparable waiting periods.
Searches of the Reddit forums for each carrier didn’t reveal complaints of a similar policy but did surface reports from some AT&T subscribers of being told to wait 30 days after allegedly submitting too many unlock requests for paid-off phones. (At T-Mobile and Verizon, paying off a phone early that you got at a discount by trading in an older phone brings an added complication: losing any remaining monthly service credits offered for that trade-in.)
Recommended by Our Editors
For now, Verizon subscribers should be forgiven for wondering how this move is supposed to square with the company’s avowed new focus on customer service, a weakness for the firm in surveys such as PCMag’s Readers’ Choice rankings, which new CEO Dan Schulman also cited as a priority when he took over in October.
“I completely get why customers are upset,” said Entner. “It looks really customer unfriendly.”
The easiest way to avoid problems like this, from Verizon or from any other carrier, is not to buy a phone from them at all—not even by paying the device’s full price upfront, which can still leave you subject to shorter waiting periods—and instead to buy an unlocked phone from an electronics retailer or its manufacturer.
That need not even cost you more upfront: Vendors of such high-end phones as Apple’s iPhone 17 series or Google’s Pixel 10 lineup offer installment-payment options like the carriers’ payment plans but ship those devices already unlocked.
“When I buy unlocked devices, I don’t buy them from the carrier, I buy them directly from Apple, Google, or Amazon,” said Entner. “I get them unlocked, and everything is free and clear.”
About Our Expert
Experience
Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
Read Full Bio
