London, September 25, 2025 – The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has published the final rules governing the new Strategic Market Status (SMS) levy, a mandatory charge that will apply to designated digital firms from April 2025. The levy is designed to recoup the regulator’s costs for overseeing powerful tech companies under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCC Act) .
Under the rules, firms designated with SMS – meaning they hold entrenched power in critical digital markets – will be required to cover the CMA’s qualifying costs linked to its digital markets functions. These include investigations into SMS designations, enforcement of conduct requirements, pro-competition interventions, and monitoring merger activity .
The CMA stressed that the levy ensures taxpayers do not bear the costs of regulating global digital platforms. Instead, the largest firms will fund the regulator’s expanded oversight regime.
The levy will be calculated annually based on the CMA’s qualifying costs, which cover staff time, non-staff expenses, and overheads. Importantly, the levy will be divided equally between all SMS firms, regardless of how many activities or designations each holds. Payments will be invoiced in two stages: an initial bill in November covering April to September, and a final adjustment the following May .
For the inaugural year (2025–26), only one invoice will be issued by May 2026, covering the full year’s costs. If firms are de-designated partway through, their levy will be adjusted and redistributed among the remaining SMS firms.
Firms must settle invoices within 30 days. Late payments will accrue statutory interest, and the CMA has the power to take enforcement action to recover unpaid amounts. Overpayments or underpayments will be corrected in subsequent years, ensuring that the levy does not exceed the regulator’s actual costs.
Separately, earlier this month, the EU General Court annulled European Commission (EC) decisions that set supervisory fees for Meta and TikTok under the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA), finding that the methodology used for the fee-setting process was adopted incorrectly through implementing decisions rather than a delegated act.
Source: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68d4ee12c908572e81248ca3/SMS_levy_rules.pdf
