Your T-Mobile bill is going up for the second time in a year

If you’re a T-Mobile customer in the US, your bill just went up overnight. That’s because the carrier is adding an auxiliary charge, separate from your monthly payment plan.

As of Wednesday, January 21, T-Mobile is increasing its “Regulatory Programs & Telco Recovery Fee” to $4.99 per voice line and $2.10 per mobile data line. That’s a $0.50 increase compared to before this date, when the fee per voice line was $3.99. If you have multiple lines in your plan, the total should reflect on your bill starting this month. T-Mobile updated its bill breakdown support page (via Droid-Life) to reflect the new prices.

Notably, this is the second price hike in a year. The earlier hike in the Regulatory Programs & Telco Recovery Fee came in April last year, when T-Mobile increased it by $0.50. So if you’re keeping a tally, your T-Mobile bills would have increased by $1 since last year.

However, the update applies only to consumers on newer T-Mobile plans that do not include federal taxes and telco fees. If you’re a longtime T-Mobile subscriber on one of the older plans that includes these taxes and fees, your bills should remain the same — until further notice.

Although T-Mobile still offers better value for postpaid plans than the other two legacy providers in the US, stealthy price hikes like these are slowly chewing away at the “Un-carrier” identity it established for itself nearly a decade ago. That said, if you aren’t bothered by the growing expenses and would prefer having more perks at a better (not lower, but more fitting) cost, T-Mobile also revealed the Better Value Plan earlier this month, with perks such as 250GB of high-speed data, additional high-speed roaming data for over 200 countries, and Netflix and Hulu subscriptions at no extra cost. However, there’s fine print in the new plan you should know about before switching.