What is a Regulatory Cost Recovery Fee? It's a charge the phone companies add to your bill to recover a cost they pay to do things the government forces them to. It's composed of several things1. Fees paid to the FCC. The FCC rakes in money for the things it regulates and cellular phone services is one of those things.2. Federal TRS service. Cingular must pay a fee to this fund that's used to pay for someone to sit on the other end of a TTY service and "talk" to you when the person who's calling you or that you called is deaf.3. Wireless Local Number Portability and Number Pooling. It use to be in the old days that the local exchange portion of the telephone number (the 555 part of a number such as 1-813-555-1212) routed your phone call to a specific piece of equipment in your neighborhood or to a particular cellular phone company. When we started to have choice is home phone service and more choice in wireless phone service people wanted to be able to keep their number. This service allows them to do that but to implement it the phone companies needed to talk nice to each other and all upgrade their equipment. This is a fee you pay to make sure all the phone companies talk nice to each other.4. E911. This pays to make sure there's someone who picks up when you dial 911. It is now also supposed to ensure that when you call 911 from a cellular phone the operator can figure out where you are since you're likely not at your home address.Why isn't this just called a "Tax"? Well, most of it is just money paid to the government to make things happen, but unlike most taxes the money isn't taken from random places and used to pay for random things. It's money taken from a service to pay for things related directly to that service. Additionally some of the money is not paid directly to the government but to quasi governmental groups (they aren't the government, but the government runs them and forces you to pay them). If politicians called these things "Taxes" then they wouldn't get elected again. If the phone company simply added the fees to their expenses and increased the costs of your plans then some day one phone company would realize that they could offer a lower priced plan but then just tack on the fees after you've signed up and in essence charge you the same amount. This may also be the phone companies way of saying "see what you made me do?"How can they make me? Well, they are the government, they are here to help us. Seriously folks, they are the government. They have the police, the FBI and the IRS on their side. They also have the military if it gets to that point, but really, I don't think they'll go that far over Regulatory Cost Recovery Fees. On our side we have the vote. People said they wanted to have 911 work and to know where they were no matter where they were using their phone and we have it. It costs money one way or another and we either pay the cost recovery fee or alll the phone companies rates go up a little bit.There is a little known secret about these fees though. You don't have to pay the fees. The downside is that the phone company will shut off your service at some point in time for not paying the extra couple of bucks a month, but with number portability you can switch to a new provider for as long as they will let you slide and with the FCC allowing more than two providers in each area you can run that game for some time. Eventually though you'll run out, probably within a year and likely saving no more than a single months . That's why I pay my Regulatory Cost Recovery Fee in full, on time, every month and you should too!