Section I.A of AT&T’s Mobility Fee Schedule is a four-row table of monthly recurring charges, and the first row is the largest flat one on it. The entry is called the AT&T Administrative and Regulatory Cost Recovery Fee, and the amount column reads $4.99 per line per month. It is not a plan price, it is not usage, and by the company’s own description it is not something a government agency ordered AT&T to collect.
Where the $4.99 appears on AT&T’s own fee schedule
The figure sits in the section of the schedule that covers consumer post-paid service, which is the ordinary monthly wireless account most households have. The schedule is not marketing material. It is incorporated into the AT&T Consumer Services Agreement, which means the numbers in it are contract terms rather than estimates.
The description of the fee ends with a sentence the company chose to put in writing: it “is not a tax or charge which the government requires AT&T collect from its customers.” The schedule repeats that disclaimer under several other line items as well. Notably, the consumer post-paid row carries no effective date at all, while the prepaid version of the same fee is stamped “Beginning 06/22/2026,” so the schedule shows the company does date these entries when it wants to.
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What AT&T says the $4.99 actually recovers
The schedule gives the fee two jobs. The first is recovering what AT&T or its agents pay to interconnect with other providers so that calls and messages pass between networks, plus charges tied to cell site rents and maintenance. The second is recovering certain government fees imposed on AT&T and the cost of complying with government-imposed regulatory requirements.
On that second job the company names four categories: Wireless Tower Mandates Costs, State Consumer Privacy Laws, Public Rights-of-Way Acquisition Costs, and Federal Privacy-Related Mandate Costs. The schedule adds a clause worth reading twice, stating the fee “may include aggregate costs incurred in prior years that are not yet fully recovered.” A charge on this month’s bill, in other words, is not necessarily paying for anything that happened this month. AT&T’s separate additional charges page uses similar language for its cost-recovery line items and lists them apart from the mandatory taxes and fees imposed by federal, state, and local governments.
Per line, not per account: the four-line arithmetic
The unit matters more than the number. The schedule prices this fee per line per month, not per account, so it scales with every phone, watch, and tablet attached to a family plan rather than being split across them.
A single line pays $59.88 a year. A household with four lines pays $19.96 a month, or $239.52 over twelve months, which is roughly $240 a year for something no one on the plan selected, can decline, or can reduce by using less data. For a retired couple keeping two phones and a connected tablet, the same math produces just under $180 a year. None of that appears in the advertised plan price, because the schedule treats it as separate from the monthly recurring charges for service.
The other cost-recovery lines stacked on the same bill
The $4.99 is the biggest fixed entry in that table, but it is not alone. The same section lists a Federal Universal Service Fee described as a monthly cost recovery fee of up to 38.8 percent, tied to the contribution factor the Federal Communications Commission sets each quarter. Below it is a State Universal Service Fee running from 0.34 percent to 14.10 percent, or $0.72 to $1.63 per line, applicable in twenty states plus Puerto Rico. Below that, State and Local Cost Recovery Fees run from 0.02 percent to 11.00 percent, or $0.01 to $4.00 per line.
Each of those carries the same disclaimer as the administrative fee: not a tax, not a charge the government requires AT&T to collect. The genuine government items are quarantined in a separate section of the schedule, where 911 and 988 taxes are listed at up to $5.00 and state sales and communications taxes at up to 15 percent of taxable charges. Those are collected by AT&T and remitted to the government. The cost-recovery fees are not.
Different numbers for prepaid and business accounts
The $4.99 figure applies to consumer post-paid service and should not be read across to other account types, because the schedule prices them differently. Prepaid customers face a version of the same fee at $2.63 per service payment, excluding payments made at non-AT&T branded national retail locations, with that “Beginning 06/22/2026” date attached.
Business, government and other non-consumer customers are covered by a separate part of the schedule that splits the charge in two: an Administrative Fee of up to $3.49 per line per month, plus a Regulatory Cost Recovery Fee of up to $1.50 per line per month, along with a Property Tax Allotment Fee of $0.20 to $0.45 per line, currently $0.26. Whichever column applies, the schedule reserves AT&T’s right to increase its fees or impose additional fees as permitted by the customer’s agreement, and it states outright that the list is not exhaustive.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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