T-Mobile Switching to 3-Year Contracts Again

Time sure does fly when you’re raising prices. It has been a little over 2 years since T-Mobile launched its “Phone Freedom” program that was aimed at getting you to switch over from the absurd 3-year contracts that Verizon and AT&T had locked so many customers into. But hey, that was 2 years ago, which is a lifetime in wireless, so we shouldn’t be surprised at all to see that T-Mobile appears to be ready to re-join the 3-year contract squad.

T-Mobile’s Black Friday weekend has started this morning and they are offering up free iPhones if you trade-in certain devices. Those deals on phones, thankfully, are still a part of their 2-year or 24-month device payment contracts. However, additional deals listed by T-Mobile for iPads and Apple Watches are only available at an extended term of 36 months.

If you head to T-Mobile’s Tablets or Smartwatches pages, you’ll see plenty of devices now listed as being available with 36-month contracts. Almost every single iPad they offer is at 3 years now, while the newest Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE 5G is there as well. And for smartwatches, outside of a kid’s watch, everything is now 3 years – Apple Watch Series 11, Pixel Watch 4, Galaxy Watch 8, etc.

On these device pages, your options are now to pay in full or go monthly, but you don’t have a choice over 24-months or 36-months. The option is for 3 years or you pay in full – that’s it.

We know these 36-month terms are new because archive.org tells us so. These were all listed as 24-month contracts last month.

This isn’t the first time that T-Mobile has done 3-year contracts, by the way. They were the first to go this route back in 2018, only to quietly step away from them as the other two carriers made the switch. They then used that opportunity as a marketing tactic to get folks to move over to their network, pointing out that AT&T and Verizon were the ones “quietly” making moves by increasing contracts to 3 years. They also mentioned that many of their customers “don’t even know it.”

At the moment, T-Mobile is only moving to 3-year contracts with smartwatches and tablets. Will they do the same for phones? Should they, I hope they make sure their customers “know it.”