Amateur Radio license application fees—part of a new fee schedule published in Report and Order FCC 20-184 on December 29, 2020—will take effect April 19, 2022, as announced in FCC Public Notice DA-22-307.
The $35 application fee … will apply to new, modification (upgrade and sequential call sign change), renewal, and vanity call sign applications. The fee will be per application.
Administrative updates, such as a change of name, mailing or email address, will be exempt from fees.
Applications processed and dismissed will not be entitled to a refund. This includes vanity requests where the applicant does not receive the requested call sign. 1
ARRL’s FCC Application Fee Instructions page states that “VECs and Volunteer Examiner (VE) teams will not have to collect the $35 fee at exam sessions.” Applicants will pay the $35 fee directly to the FCC through the CORES FRN Registration system; successful exam candidates will receive an e-mail message from the FCC containing payment instructions and will have 10 calendar days from the date of the e-mail to pay their application fee.
FCC’s new fee schedule was adopted pursuant to authority established by RAY BAUMS’s Act of 2018
Other Related Links
- ARRL News Story about the FCC Application Fees
- FCC Application Fees Unlikely to Go into Effect Until 2022
- FCC Registration Help
- https://apps.fcc.gov/cores/publicHome.do?help=true
- To access CORES with a (Payer) FRN
- https://apps.fcc.gov/cores/paymentFrnLogin.do
“FCC Application Fee Instructions”, ARRL The National Association for Amateur Radio, accessed March 23 2022, https://www.arrl.org/fcc-application-fee. ↩︎
