As of August 1, 2026, the bulk of Bill 4, the Business Practices and Consumer Protection Amendment Act, 2025, is law. If your organization sells to consumers in BC and nobody has touched your contract templates recently, it is time for a review.
Does this impact you?
The amendments bite hardest on business models rather than industries: anything sold on a recurring basis, anything sold online, anything sold in someone’s living room.
The changes impact SaaS and digital subscriptions, DTC e-commerce, streaming and content services, food and meal kit delivery subscriptions, gym memberships, fitness classes and ski passes, and door-to-door sales of HVAC and home services, security monitoring, and home inspection services, and more.
Even national companies may need to do a pulse check. If you maintain a single template across provinces, BC’s requirements may effectively become your requirements everywhere.
Identifying key changes
Pre-purchase transparency.
Key terms (renewal, cancellation, refund and exchange policies) must now be disclosed before the consumer commits, not buried in terms they accept at checkout. Expect scrutiny of any gap between what your marketing page or purchase flow says and what the final contract says.
A mandatory contract checklist.
Most consumer contracts must now contain a prescribed set of information: supplier name, a detailed description of the goods or services, itemized pricing for goods, total contract price, payment terms, and your return, exchange, cancellation and refund policies. This is the least glamorous change and the easiest to let slip through the cracks. The requirements are mechanical, and a template that omits one item omits it across every transaction.
A new regulated category: subscription contracts.
These are future performance contracts supplying goods or services on a continuing basis with a total price of $50 or more. Two rules deserve immediate attention: for terms of 60 days or less, automatic renewal is not permitted unless the customer can cancel at any time, before or after the renewal date, without charge or penalty and with a refund on cancellation. For renewal terms longer than 60 days, you must send written renewal notice meeting prescribed content and timing requirements, and an automatic renewal that fails those requirements is void.
Then there’s unilateral amendment. A clause letting you change the contract is void unless the contract clearly explains, from the start, exactly which terms could change. You generally cannot change, without the consumer’s agreement, cancellation, return, exchange or refund terms in a way that increases the customer’s obligations or reduces yours.
Direct sales.
High-pressure door-to-door sales of certain household products and services (furnaces, air conditioners, home security systems) are banned outright, and sellers cannot offer or arrange credit as part of a direct sale.
New rules for fitness contracts.
Separately, contracts for services such as gym memberships, ski passes, sports camps, fitness classes and personal training are now their own regulated category referred to as fitness or personal services contracts. Fitness contracts are still considered future performance contacts and must follow those requirements under the law. These contracts cannot extend past 24 months, with renewal consent required in writing within 30 days of renewal.
What to watch for
Your renewal notices are an operations problem, not a legal one. Redrafting the clause is the easy part. Generating compliant notices at the right time, for every cohort, requires billing-system work. Legal sign-off on language that engineering can’t yet send is not compliance.
Void means void. A non-compliant automatic renewal isn’t a technical defect that gets cured on the next cycle, it doesn’t take effect. That’s a revenue recognition question as much as a legal one, and it’s worth knowing which of your renewal streams sit on shaky ground before someone else asks.
Check whether you addressed the 2025 changes. An earlier set of amendments took effect March 31, 2025, prohibiting unfair contract terms (class action bars, restrictions on customer reviews, and mandatory private arbitration).
Your “everything may change” clause is now the risk. Broad unilateral amendment language was standard drafting for years. The fix, enumerating which specific terms can change, requires a real commercial decision about what flexibility you actually need.
Where to start
Pull your consumer-facing templates and check them against the mandatory content list. Audit every automatic renewal clause and unilateral amendment provision. Confirm your renewal notice process exists in the systems that send it, not just the policy that describes it. If you sell in-home, verify whether your products fall inside the prohibition and whether an exception genuinely applies before assuming it does.
If you sell to consumers in BC and haven’t worked through what August 1 changed, let’s talk.