A refund on Apple's monthly subscription with a 12-month commitment can end the whole year, or just one month of it

One approved refund on Apple's monthly subscription with a 12-month commitment can take back a single payment or cancel every payment left in the year. Which one happens depends on a detail most server code never checks: whether the refunded month is the current one. Apple's documentation spells it out. A refund for a past billing period leaves the commitment running. A refund for the current period ends it immediately. Treat both the same way and you'll either cut off a customer who's still paying or keep serving one who isn't.

How Apple's 12-month commitment plan bills

Apple launched the option in April 2026. It isn't a new product type. You add a monthly billing plan to an existing one-year auto-renewable subscription in App Store Connect, and the product ID stays the same. The customer pays every month, has committed to 12 payments, and the commitment renews into another 12 months when the last payment completes, unless they cancel first.

Each billing period produces its own transaction and grants one month of access. That detail is what makes refunds behave the way they do. Apple refunds transactions, and on a commitment plan every month is a separate transaction.

What a refund does to a 12-month commitment

Apple's guide to the commitment life cycle splits refunds into two cases. The difference is which billing period the refund applies to.

Does a refund in month two cancel the rest of the year?

No, as long as month two is in the past. Say a customer is in month five and Apple refunds their month-two payment. Apple revokes the month-two transaction, and the customer stays subscribed. Billing for months six through twelve continues. Apple's guidance is explicit here: check the revocationDate on the affected transaction, but don't interpret it as a commitment cancellation.

When a refund ends the commitment

If the refund applies to the current billing period, the commitment ends right away. The signal is a revocationDate on the latest transaction. Its presence means the current period has been revoked and there are no more payments coming, so access ends too.

Upgrades can refund money too

Apple notes that customers may receive a refund after changing their plan, not only after asking for one. An upgrade from a commitment plan to a higher-tier subscription is immediate. The commitment ends, the new plan starts, and the customer may get a prorated refund for the unused part of the commitment's current period. Downgrades work the other way. They wait until the 12-month commitment completes.

Cancelling isn't a refund

A customer who taps Cancel on a 12-month commitment plan hasn't stopped paying. Apple says they're cancelling the renewal of the commitment, not the remaining payments in the current term. Here's what reaches your server.

• Apple sends DID_CHANGE_RENEWAL_STATUS with subtype AUTO_RENEW_DISABLED.
• The commitment's auto-renew status drops to 0, so the commitment won't renew when the term ends.
• The subscription renewal info still shows willAutoRenew as 1, because monthly billing continues.
• DID_RENEW notifications keep arriving for each remaining month. EXPIRED comes after the 12th period, and that's when access ends.

Apple tells developers to check the billing plan type before running their usual cancellation logic. If it's MONTHLY, don't revoke anything. Honor every remaining billing period.

There's one regional exception. App Store Connect Help says a customer who cancels keeps paying until the commitment is complete, except in certain regions, and links to Apple's page on cancelling subscriptions in Germany, Israel, South Africa and Türkiye. In those four countries, customers have the right to cancel a subscription with immediate effect and get a prorated refund at any time.

Failed payments end access right away

Commitment plans drop a safety net you may rely on elsewhere. Billing Grace Period doesn't apply. When a monthly renewal fails, Apple tells you to revoke access while the subscription sits in billing retry and to restore it only if the payment recovers.

After a recovery, read commitmentExpiresDate from the latest transaction. It won't match the original end date, and every later renewal follows the shifted schedule.

What a commitment plan refund costs you

Here's the money, using example prices. Say your upfront annual plan costs €59.99 and the monthly commitment option costs €6.99, which totals €83.88 over 12 months. That sits inside Apple's limit of 1.5 times the upfront price.

Those are customer prices. What you actually lose is your share of each payment. Apple pays 70% of the subscription price, minus applicable taxes, during a subscriber's first year of paid service, and 85% after that or for members of the App Store Small Business Program.

The refund is only half the bill. A month of access isn't free to serve. If your app runs AI generations, calls paid third-party APIs, or stores customer files, you paid for that compute, those calls and that storage during the refunded month. A past-month refund hands the payment back and leaves those costs with you. A current-month refund does the same and also deletes the rest of the year from your forecast.

How to answer the CONSUMPTION_REQUEST for a commitment plan

This is the one point where you get a say. When a customer requests a refund on a commitment plan, Apple sends a CONSUMPTION_REQUEST to your App Store Server Notifications V2 endpoint. You answer with Send Consumption Information, and Apple asks you to respond within 12 hours. The response carries consumption data and your refund preference for that billing period, not for the whole commitment.

• Send data only if the customer consented. Apple's documentation says that without consent, you shouldn't respond to the request at all.
• Leave consumptionPercentage out. The API returns ConsumptionPercentageAutoRenewableSubscriptionError when you send it for an auto-renewable subscription.
• Base your refund preference on that month's usage. A customer who ran 300 paid generations in the disputed month left a record of real costs. One who never opened the app didn't.
• Look at which period the request covers. A request on the current period, if Apple approves it, ends the commitment. A request on a past period doesn't.

What your server needs to handle

• Read billingPlanType on every transaction and renewal notification. MONTHLY means commitment rules apply.
• Grant access from the transaction's expirationDate. Apple says commitmentInfo's expiration date is for showing progress, not for deciding access.
• On a refund, check whether the latest transaction carries a revocationDate before ending the subscription.
• On cancellation, keep access until EXPIRED arrives after the 12th period.
• On DID_FAIL_TO_RENEW, revoke at once. Don't wait for a grace period that won't come.
• Store commitmentExpiresDate again after every BILLING_RECOVERY.

Apple decides every App Store refund, so the CONSUMPTION_REQUEST is your only chance to put usage in front of it. RefundHalt answers those requests automatically inside the 12-hour window and records which billing period each refund hit, so a past-month refund never gets mistaken for a lost subscriber.