How to Cancel Xbox Live Subscription and Unsubscribe from Xbox Live?

Subscription services for gaming consoles have been around for quite a while now, with both Microsoft and Sony having their own versions of this for years now, and Nintendo also introducing their own subscription a few years ago. Microsoft’s Xbox Live Gold is a paid subscription that offers multiple features, some of which are online multiplayer (for non-multiplayer games), media sharing, live streaming, cloud saving feature, and more.

However, there might come a time when you would want to cancel your Xbox Live subscription, for one reason or another. Maybe you are not playing as much as before anymore, or looking into optimizing your monthly subscription services list, or pretty much anything else – you would need information about Xbox Live subscription cancellation to do that.

Luckily enough, there are not that many different ways to cancel Xbox Live membership of yours – it can be done online using any web browser, your own console, or even a single phone call. Now we are going to give a more detailed explanation on how to use each of these methods.

How to cancel Xbox subscription online

Microsoft’s integration of the Xbox as a whole into its ecosystem makes it so that you would have to perform any subscription management operations in one place – Microsoft’s “Account” page. Technically speaking, you can go to Xbox’s “Support” page and log in to your account there, but clicking “My Microsoft Account” on that page would bring you to Microsoft’s unified Account page anyway.

To be able to see the “My Microsoft Account” button, the first thing you have to do is to log in using your Microsoft account credentials. After that, clicking on your profile picture at the top of the page should give you a small drop-down menu with a “My Microsoft Account” hyperlink. Clicking said link would transfer you to Microsoft’s Account Management page.

After that, there are just a few steps left to perform. The page you’re currently seeing should have a separate section named “Services & subscriptions”. This page is supposed to provide an overview of all your Microsoft-related subscriptions on that account. 

Your Xbox Live information would also be located on this page. In the “Xbox Live” category, you should see a “Manage” button. Clicking this button should give you multiple options on how to manage your Xbox Live subscription, including the one we are looking for – “Cancel subscription” button.

Microsoft’s capability to offer refunds in some cases creates two possible outcomes here. If you are eligible for a refund, clicking on “Cancel subscription” should give you two options to choose from: “Don’t charge me on *your next billing date*” and “Cancel immediately and get a refund”.

If you are not eligible for a refund, your only option would be to click “Turn off recurring billing”, without an option to get a refund. The difference between these two possibilities is that getting a partial refund during the subscription cancellation process eliminates all of your Xbox Live benefits immediately, while turning off recurring billing without a refund would still provide you with all of the services you paid for beforehand (until the next billing date).

This does not cancel Xbox Live account of yours in its entirety, it is barely a process of turning off one of your active subscriptions without performing any actions with the rest of the account.

How to cancel Xbox subscription using an Xbox console

It is also possible to use your own Xbox console to cancel subscription to Xbox Live Gold. This works for all of the consoles that can take advantage of the service in the first place – namely, Xbox 360 and all of the consoles after that (Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X).

The process of canceling a subscription for different console generations might be slightly different for the first few stages, but all of them mostly revolve around getting to the “Settings” menu of your Xbox account/console. In most cases, including our Xbox One subscription cancellation use case, pressing the “Xbox” button on your gamepad would bring up the dashboard with multiple settings, one of which is the “Profile & system” menu.

Choosing this menu should present you with multiple account-related options, one of which is the “Settings” menu that we were looking for. In the “Settings” menu, all you have to do is to find the “Account” option, and the “Subscription” menu directly after that. 

The “Subscription” menu should provide you with the list of all your active subscriptions, including Xbox Live – choosing it would give you an option to cancel Xbox One subscription (applies to other consoles, as well). You should follow all of the steps on the screen to successfully finish the process of Xbox membership cancellation.

How to cancel Xbox subscription with a phone call

Canceling a subscription with a phone call might seem somewhat old-fashioned, and yet it is also an option for Xbox Live subscription. The number you’re looking for is (800) 469-9269, and you should be ready to prove your identity before the person in the call center would be able to cancel your Xbox Live subscription for you.

Please keep in mind that the phone cancellation is treated as the immediate termination of the service in question, and thus would not give you the ability to keep using the Xbox Live services until the next billing date. You can check if you were billed for the service in question via your statement, which presents Xbox Live Gold service as one of many different forms – with all of them having some form of “XBOX” included in the payment name.

It should be noted that Microsoft also has another subscription service called Xbox Game Pass – a service that provides access to a wide range of games for your Xbox console for a monthly fee. The reason we are bringing it up here is because the “premium” version of this service (Xbox Game Pass Ultimate) also includes an Xbox Live Gold subscription with all of the benefits that it brings. 

Canceling Xbox Live Gold subscription obtained via purchasing Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is only possible if you are canceling your subscription to the entire Game Pass service – and the process is the same as with Xbox Live Gold, with the only difference being that you have to look for the “Xbox Game Pass” category on your Subscriptions & services page instead of “Xbox Live Gold”.