Cancel a Continuous Payment Authority: One Day's Notice
Your bank must cancel a continuous payment authority when you ask, with no permission from the merchant. The deadline, the refund rule, and the myths.
If you want to cancel a continuous payment authority, the single most useful thing to know is that your bank has to do it, and it has to do it on your word alone. A continuous payment authority (CPA) is the recurring card payment you set up when you typed your card number into a subscription checkout, and unlike a Direct Debit it lives on the card rails rather than the bank’s own scheduled payments list. That makes it harder to see and, in the wrong bank app, harder to find. It does not make it harder to stop.
The rules are short, and most of the confusion online comes from people mixing up three separate things: withdrawing consent to the payment, ending the contract, and getting money back that has already gone. This page keeps them apart.
What a continuous payment authority actually is
You gave a merchant your long card number, expiry and CVV, and agreed they could charge it again. That permission is the CPA. It sits with the card scheme and the merchant, not with your bank’s payments diary.
Three practical consequences follow.
It survives a card being replaced. Visa and Mastercard both run account updater services that pass your new card number to merchants holding a recurring authority, so cancelling a lost card usually does not stop the charges. People discover this the hard way.
It is not covered by the Direct Debit Guarantee. That guarantee, with its promise of an immediate full refund, applies only to Direct Debits. A CPA has a different and in some ways weaker protection route, which is why the deadline below matters so much.
It often does not appear in your bank app’s Direct Debits screen. If you have been looking there and finding nothing, that is why. Our guide to finding forgotten subscriptions covers how to comb a year of statements for them properly.
The rule that decides everything: end of the previous business day
You can withdraw consent at any point up to the end of business on the day before the payment is due. That is the deadline, and it comes straight from the FCA’s own consumer guidance on recurring card payments.
Miss it by a few hours and the payment that goes out the next morning is authorised, so you are in refund-request territory rather than unauthorised-payment territory. Two different conversations, with very different outcomes. If a charge is due tomorrow, phone today.
Your bank cannot make you ask the merchant first
This is the point banks used to get wrong often enough that the FCA wrote to them about it. The FCA’s position is plain: your card issuer cannot insist that you contact the business before stopping the payment. You do not need the merchant’s agreement, you do not need proof that you tried, and you do not need to explain why.
A CPA cancellation request that works looks like this, whether you say it on the phone or type it in chat:
I am withdrawing my consent to the continuous payment authority on my card ending 1234, in favour of [merchant name]. Please cancel it with immediate effect. I understand you cannot require me to contact the merchant first.
Do it in the app’s chat where you can, because the transcript is your evidence. If you call, follow up in writing the same day. Citizens Advice recommends exactly this, and notes the issuer should act on your verbal instruction rather than waiting for the letter to arrive.
Where the app allows it, do both: cancel the authority and, if the bank offers a merchant block, apply that too. Monzo, Starling and Revolut all expose recurring card payments in some form. Our banking apps comparison goes through which of them surfaces card subscriptions cleanly rather than burying them.
If a payment is taken after you cancelled
Then it is an unauthorised payment transaction, and the law here is unusually specific. Under regulation 76 of the Payment Services Regulations 2017, your bank must refund it “as soon as practicable, and in any event no later than the end of the business day following the day on which it becomes aware of the unauthorised transaction”. It must also strip out any interest or charges the payment caused, such as an overdraft fee it pushed you into.
That is a next-business-day duty, not a fourteen-day investigation. If a bank tells you it needs two weeks to look into it, it is describing its internal process, not its legal obligation. Say the words “unauthorised payment transaction” and “regulation 76” and the conversation usually changes shape.
If the refund does not appear, raise a formal complaint. The bank has eight weeks, after which the Financial Ombudsman Service will take it for free, and it is the sort of complaint the ombudsman upholds routinely because the paper trail is so clean.
The two-attempts rule is real, and probably does not apply to you
You will read on plenty of sites that a company can only try twice to take a CPA payment, and that it cannot take part payments. Both statements come from CONC 7.6 of the FCA Handbook, and both are true, but they apply to high-cost short-term credit, which in practice means payday-style lending.
Your gym, your streaming service and your software vendor are not covered by that rule. They can retry as often as their payment processor allows, and many retry daily for a week. Do not rely on a limit that does not exist for your merchant. Withdraw consent instead.
Cancelling the payment does not cancel the contract
Worth saying twice, because it is the mistake that costs people money. The FCA is explicit that cancelling a recurring card payment “does not necessarily end your contract with a business”, and that you remain responsible for anything you owe under it.
Kill the payment on a contract with eight months left and the merchant will chase the balance by email, then by letter, then through a debt collection agency, and a default can land on your credit file for a subscription you believed had ended. The safe sequence is always: cancel with the merchant, get the confirmation in writing, then withdraw the CPA as a backstop in case they ignore it.
The exception is a merchant you cannot reach at all, or one running an obvious dark pattern where cancellation is deliberately impossible. There, stopping the payment first is the reasonable move, and you keep the evidence of your attempts to cancel properly.
Money already gone: chargeback or Section 75
Payments taken before you cancelled are a different claim.
Chargeback is the card scheme route and works on debit and credit cards. You are asking your issuer to reverse a payment where the service was not provided as agreed, and typical scheme windows run to 120 days from the transaction or from when you expected the service. It is a scheme rule rather than a statutory right, so it is not guaranteed, but it costs nothing to try.
Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 is stronger and applies only to credit cards, on purchases where the item or service cost more than £100 and no more than £30,000. It makes the card issuer jointly liable with the merchant, which is far better ground than a chargeback if a company has taken your money and vanished. Monthly subscriptions rarely clear the £100 floor on a single payment, so this usually bites on annual plans rather than monthly ones.
A cancellation that actually sticks
Cancel with the merchant and screenshot the confirmation. Withdraw the CPA with your bank in writing, before the end of business the day before the next charge. Check the account on the due date. If a payment lands anyway, report it as unauthorised the same day and quote the next-business-day refund duty. Nothing here needs a paid app; a subscription tracker is only useful for the earlier job of finding the charge in the first place.
Frequently asked questions
What is the deadline to cancel a continuous payment authority? The end of business on the day before the next payment is due. Cancel after that and the payment which goes out is authorised, so you are asking for a refund rather than reporting an unauthorised transaction. If a charge is due tomorrow, contact your bank today and get it in writing.
Can my bank refuse to cancel a CPA until I contact the company? No. The FCA says your card issuer cannot insist you contact the business before stopping the payment. You do not need the merchant’s agreement or any proof that you asked them. If a bank pushes back, ask for that refusal in writing and raise a complaint.
Does cancelling a card stop a continuous payment authority? Usually not. Visa and Mastercard run account updater services that pass your replacement card details to merchants holding a recurring authority, so the charges follow the new card. Withdraw consent to the authority itself rather than relying on a new plastic.
How quickly must a bank refund a payment taken after I cancelled? By the end of the business day following the day it becomes aware of the unauthorised transaction, under regulation 76 of the Payment Services Regulations 2017. It must also refund any interest or charges the payment caused. A two-week investigation is the bank’s process, not its legal duty.
Is a continuous payment authority the same as a Direct Debit? No, and the difference matters. A Direct Debit runs on the bank’s own rails and carries the Direct Debit Guarantee, with an immediate full refund for any error. A CPA runs on the card rails, is often invisible in the Direct Debits screen, and relies on the FCA rules and the Payment Services Regulations instead.
Can I get back payments taken before I cancelled? Sometimes. Chargeback lets you ask your issuer to reverse a payment where the service was not delivered as agreed, typically within 120 days. On a credit card, Section 75 makes the issuer jointly liable for purchases over £100 and up to £30,000, which mostly helps on annual plans rather than monthly ones.
