How to Cancel NOW TV: Every Membership, Step by Step

This is the single most useful thing to know about NOW, and almost nobody does it. The mental model most people carry over from other subscriptions — that cancelling ends your access — simply does not apply here.

The consequences are worth spelling out. Sign up for Sports on the 3rd, cancel on the 3rd, and you have thirty days of Sky Sports for one payment with no possibility of forgetting. If you want a second month you re-subscribe, which takes about a minute and frequently comes with a returning-customer discount.

It also removes the most common complaint about NOW entirely: being charged for a month you did not intend to have. There is no rollover to forget about if you have already cancelled.

The web route is the most reliable and takes about two minutes. Use a browser rather than the television app, which cannot cancel at all.

The mobile app supports cancellation. The television app does not — it has no account management of any kind, which surprises people who try there first.

If you subscribed through Apple, Google or Amazon

This is an important exception. If you signed up through an in-app purchase, NOW does not control the billing and cannot cancel it. You must cancel through the store instead.

If you cannot find the Membership in your NOW account at all, this is almost certainly why. Check the store you originally signed up through.

The cancellation flow will try to keep you, and unusually for this market the offers are often worth reading rather than clicking past. Some of these overlap with the entry offers covered in what replaced the NOW TV trial.

The genuinely useful tactic: if you are cancelling for the summer and expect to return in August, a half-price offer for the intervening months is often cheaper than paying full price on your return. Do the arithmetic rather than declining reflexively.

Equally, if you decline it and leave, expect a win-back email within a few weeks. Lapsed customers are targeted with returning-customer offers, and those are frequently better than what you were paying before. Cancelling costs you nothing and often improves your rate.

Access continues to the end of the period you have paid for — nothing switches off immediately, and no refund is issued because you keep that access. Your account stays open, with profiles and watch history preserved. Other Memberships are unaffected: cancelling Sports leaves Entertainment and Boost running.

• Access continues to the end of the period you have paid for. Nothing switches off immediately.
• Your account stays open. Profiles, watch history and continue-watching are preserved, so re-subscribing later picks up where you left off.
• Other Memberships are unaffected. Cancelling Sports leaves Entertainment and Boost running and billing.
• No refund is issued. Cancel two days into a monthly Membership and you still have the rest of that month to watch — so time it around the renewal date, not the day you decide.
• Boost cancels separately. People routinely cancel every content Membership and keep paying £6 a month for Boost on nothing.

One practical step worth taking: after the end date passes, check your bank or card statement the following month. Cancellations very rarely fail, but confirming takes ten seconds and catches the exception.

Two things recur. No Memberships listed in the account usually means you signed up through Apple, Google or Amazon — cancel in that store instead, because NOW cannot end a billing relationship it does not hold. Being charged after cancelling usually means the flow was abandoned before the confirmation screen.

Worth some context, because NOW’s cancellation process is unusually painless by British standards and it is easy to take that for granted. For the two most common alternatives, how to cancel Sky TV and cancelling a TV Licence both work quite differently.

The gap between the first row and the rest is the whole argument for NOW. Every other paid platform in Britain either requires a phone call, imposes a notice period, or ties the television to a broadband contract you cannot exit without penalty.

Why that flexibility is worth money

People tend to compare monthly prices and conclude NOW is expensive once Boost is added. That comparison misses the point. The value of no contract is not the monthly rate — it is that you can genuinely stop paying.

Take Sky Sports as the example. A season runs roughly nine months. On a fixed contract you pay for twelve, because there is no mechanism to pause. On NOW you pay for nine, and the three months you skip are worth around £120 a year. That is a larger saving than any price difference between the platforms.

Push it further and the gap widens. Someone who only cares about the run-in might take Sports for four months, at which point the annual cost is a third of a fixed contract for the fixtures they actually watch. Nobody on a 24-month agreement can do that.

The one thing to keep an eye on is that re-subscribing does not always restore the same price. Promotional rates fluctuate with the football calendar, and rejoining in August — when demand peaks — tends to cost more than rejoining in February. If you know you will return, the save offer presented during cancellation is sometimes the cheaper route.

Cancelling is one of several things people come to our IPTV troubleshooting hub for. If the reason you are leaving is that something stopped working rather than that you stopped watching, two guides are worth reading first.

• A picture that buffers or a stick that has become sluggish is almost never the service — see clearing the cache on a Firestick, which covers the difference between a bandwidth problem and a storage one.
• A remote that has stopped responding is a lost Bluetooth pairing rather than a fault, and our remote guide fixes it in about ten seconds.
• Starting again from scratch on a different service? Setting up IPTV from scratch walks through choosing, buying and connecting in the right order.

Often, depending on why you are going. If it is the price, removing Boost alone saves about £72 a year and costs little on a laptop or tablet. If the football has finished, cancelling is the right call anyway — NOW is built to be dropped in May and picked up again in August.

Depending on why you are leaving, one of these may suit better than cancelling outright.

• Leaving because of cost? Drop Boost rather than the Membership if you mostly watch on a laptop or tablet — that is £72 a year and 720p is acceptable on a small screen.
• Leaving because the season ended? That is exactly the intended use. Cancel now, return in August, and expect a returning-customer offer.
• Leaving because of picture quality? If it is softness rather than buffering, you are on 720p without Boost. Adding Boost fixes it; see our NOW review.
• Leaving for something with more channels? Sky Stream carries the full Sky line-up with real 4K, though it wants a 24-month term.
• Leaving to spend nothing? Freely and Freeview Play cover the main British channels for free.

And if you are cancelling because you were hoping for a free trial that never materialised, our page on the NOW free trial explains what happened to it and what the realistic alternatives are.