Short answer: almost certainly not. If your company is the buyer under an auto-renewing B2B contract, the odds are that no state automatic renewal law protects you at all.
Most auto-renewal statutes — including California's, the one everybody writes about — apply only to individuals buying for personal, family, or household purposes. Some, such as Florida's and Illinois's, go further and expressly exclude business-to-business contracts. As of July 2026, exactly three states reach commercial buyers, and each carries conditions narrow enough to matter.
The whole picture in four lines
- Reaches B2B: New York (GOL § 5-903), Wisconsin (§ 134.49), Colorado (§ 6-1-732, since 16 Feb 2026)
- Consumer-only: California, Florida, Illinois, New York's other ARL, and most others
- Federal: the FTC click-to-cancel rule was vacated 8 July 2025 and is not in force
- Practical upshot: your contract, not a statute, is doing the work. Find your notice deadline →
This is a reference for contract owners, not legal advice. Every entry below has conditions and exceptions this page does not exhaust, and at least one is new enough that no court has interpreted it. If money is at stake, this page tells you what to ask your lawyer — not what the answer is.
The three states that reach business contracts
New York — General Obligations Law § 5-903
The oldest and most cited. It covers contracts for service, maintenance, or repair to or for any real or personal property, and it is not limited to individuals: the statute's "person" expressly includes a firm, company, partnership, or corporation.
The mechanism: an auto-renewal clause is unenforceable against the recipient of the service unless the vendor gave written notice calling attention to it. Automatic renewal periods of one month or less are excluded.
The notice window is widely misstated — including by law firms. The statute measures 15 to 30 days back from the deadline for the customer to serve its non-renewal notice, not from the renewal or expiry date. If your contract requires 60 days' notice of non-renewal, the vendor's § 5-903 notice window runs 15–30 days before that 60-day mark — not before the term ends. Sources that say "before expiration of the term" are wrong.
Does it cover SaaS? Genuinely unresolved, and this is the most load-bearing uncertainty on this page. The statute dates from 1961 and speaks of services "to or for any real or personal property" — language written before software. In Healthcare I.Q., LLC v. Chao, 118 A.D.3d 98 (1st Dep't 2014), a New York court applied it to a software-plus-practice-management agreement, reasoning that personal property can include intellectual property and that the statute is construed broadly. But that vendor took physical control of customer data, and the agreement bundled non-software services. A later case is reported to have gone the other way. Do not assume § 5-903 covers your SaaS agreement; ask counsel.
Wisconsin — Stat. § 134.49
The most conditional of the three, and the one most often summarised misleadingly.
It applies to business contracts, defined as either a lease of business equipment (where some of it is used primarily in Wisconsin) or the provision of business services for the direct benefit of the end user. The exclusions are extensive: real property, vehicles, medical equipment, personal or household purposes, certain telecommunications, government contracts, and anything terminable on a month's notice or less.
It imposes two distinct duties, and conflating them is the common error:
- Disclosure at signing — for any renewal longer than one month, the auto-renewal must be disclosed and separately signed or initialled by the customer.
- Reminder notice, 15–60 days before the deadline to decline — but only where the initial term exceeds 12 months and the renewal term exceeds 12 months.
That second condition matters more than it looks. A standard one-year contract renewing for one year does not trigger the reminder requirement — it fails both limbs. Any summary that says "Wisconsin requires 15–60 days' notice" without stating this condition is describing a rule that applies to almost no typical SaaS deal.
Where it does apply and is breached, the renewal provision is void, the contract terminates at the end of the current term, and the seller cannot collect for the renewal term. The statute also provides for damages and attorney fees, and a good-faith exception exists.
Colorado — Rev. Stat. § 6-1-732, as amended by SB25-145 NEW
The newest, the least tested, and the one nobody else in this topic has yet noticed.
Colorado's SB25-145 amended the definition of "consumer" in § 6-1-732(1)(d), striking the words that had limited it to purchases "for personal, family, or household purposes" and replacing "an individual who" with "a person that". Under the Colorado Consumer Protection Act, "person" expressly includes corporations and other commercial entities. The effect is to extend the auto-renewal provisions to business buyers. Per the bill, that change took effect 16 February 2026 and applies to automatic renewal contracts offered or renewed on or after that date.
Where it applies, the vendor must give notice 25–40 days before each automatic renewal, and provide one-step online cancellation. Utilities, banks and credit unions, insurers, FCC/FERC/PUC-regulated services, and air carriers are exempt. Non-compliance is a deceptive trade practice under the CCPA, enforceable by the Attorney General.
Treat this as new law, not settled law. The bill's title speaks of a "consumer's" right to cancel, while the operative definition removes the consumer limitation — commentators hedge accordingly ("arguably", "likely"). There is no case law and no AG guidance. The statutory chain is clean, but it is a textual inference. Also note: aggregator sites including FindLaw were still serving the pre-amendment Colorado text at the time of writing, so verify against the enacted bill rather than a secondary source.
The states that do not protect you
These have automatic renewal laws. They will not help your company as a buyer.
| State | Citation | Why it doesn't reach B2B |
|---|---|---|
| California | Bus. & Prof. Code § 17601 et seq. (amended by AB 2863, eff. 1 Jul 2025) | "Consumer" = an individual acquiring goods or services for personal, family, or household purposes. Business purchases fall outside. |
| Florida | Fla. Stat. § 501.165 | Consumer-only, and affirmatively excludes individuals contracting as part of a business activity or on behalf of a business or government entity. |
| Illinois | 815 ILCS 601/, § 20(c) | Expressly excludes business-to-business contracts. |
| New York (the other one) | Gen. Bus. Law §§ 527, 527-a (amended eff. 5 Nov 2025) | Consumer-only — "personal, family, or household purposes". Distinct from GOL § 5-903, and it carves out contracts covered by that statute. |
New York has two auto-renewal laws and they are constantly conflated. GOL § 5-903 is the 1961 statute that reaches B2B service contracts. GBL §§ 527/527-a is the modern consumer subscription law. At least one page currently ranking for "auto-renewal laws by state" cites the consumer statute in answer to a B2B question. If a source doesn't distinguish them, it hasn't read them.
The federal picture: click-to-cancel is not law
If you have read that federal rules now constrain B2B auto-renewals, that information is out of date — and it is still being published.
The FTC's Rule Concerning Subscriptions and Other Negative Option Plans, known as "click-to-cancel", was vacated in its entirety, nationwide, by the Eighth Circuit in Custom Communications, Inc. v. FTC on 8 July 2025 — days before its 14 July compliance date. The grounds were procedural: the court held the FTC failed to issue a required preliminary regulatory analysis once the rule's economic impact crossed the statutory threshold, and that a later analysis could not cure the defect.
The FTC has restarted the process, submitting an advance notice of proposed rulemaking in January 2026 with a comment period that closed in April 2026. That is the advance stage. No replacement rule is in force. The FTC continues to enforce ROSCA (which covers online consumer transactions) and Section 5 of the FTC Act.
The irony worth knowing: the vacated rule did cover B2B. The FTC explicitly rejected requests to limit it to business-to-consumer transactions, citing its longstanding position that Section 5 protects business customers too. So the Eighth Circuit didn't decide that businesses shouldn't be covered — it struck down, on procedural grounds, what would have been the only broad federal auto-renewal protection B2B buyers had.
What this means in practice
For almost every B2B contract, in almost every state: the statute isn't going to save you. The contract governs.
Which puts the whole weight on the boring operational thing — knowing your notice deadline and acting before it. That is entirely within your control, requires no lawyer, and is the only part of this topic that reliably works.
- Find the notice deadline for every material contract. Count it here, correctly, with business days and receipt time.
- Put the deadline in a calendar, not a spreadsheet, with a 90-day warning.
- If you're in New York, Wisconsin, or Colorado and a material renewal is disputed, it is worth asking counsel whether the vendor met a statutory duty. Sometimes they didn't.
- Don't rely on any of that. Treat statutory relief as a lottery ticket, not a plan.
Last checked against primary sources: 16 July 2026. This page is operational reference for contract owners — it is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for counsel. Auto-renewal law is jurisdiction- and contract-specific, changes frequently, and the FTC rulemaking above is active: a proposed rule could restore federal B2B coverage at any time. Every citation is given so you can check it yourself, and you should — prefer the statute and the enacted bill text over aggregator sites, several of which were still serving outdated Colorado text when this was written. For a specific agreement, talk to a lawyer.