What the television part of your bill actually costs
Cable providers advertise a package price and bill four other things beside it. Equipment rental runs per box and repeats on every television in the house. A broadcast TV fee recovers what the provider pays local stations to retransmit their signal. A regional sports fee recovers what it pays for sports networks, whether or not you watch them. Then state, local and franchise taxes are assessed on the whole TV charge.
Those additions are not small. A package advertised at $80 with two boxes at $10 each and $25 in broadcast and sports fees is $125 of television charges before tax, and $135 after an 8% rate. The advertised price is 59% of it.
Streaming is priced differently. Each service quotes a single figure that is normally tax-inclusive, there is no equipment rental, and the only capital cost is a streaming device for each television that is not already smart. What replaces the hidden fees is a different problem: subscription creep. Four services at $12 each is $48 a month; seven is $84, and a live-TV streaming service on its own can cost more than a basic cable package.
This calculator holds both sides on the same basis, prices home internet into both totals because you need it either way, and shows how many streaming services your current cable television spend would actually buy.
The formula, term by term
The cable side is one bracket and one multiplication. Package price P, plus box rental b·r, plus fees F, all multiplied by 1 + t for tax. The multiplication matters: a $30 promotional expiry does not add $30 to your bill, it adds $30 × 1.08 = $32.40 at an 8% rate, because the increase is taxed like the rest of the package.
Note what is inside the tax bracket and what is not. Broadcast and regional sports fees are provider charges, not government charges, and they are taxable — which is precisely why providers prefer to bill them separately rather than fold them into the advertised package price. Naming them separately keeps the headline number low without reducing what you pay.
The streaming side is n·s for subscriptions plus H/m for amortised hardware. Spreading a one-off cost over its expected life is the honest way to put it beside a monthly charge; putting the whole $100 in month one would make the first year look bad and every later year look artificially good.
Internet cancels. It appears in both all-in totals, so it has no effect on the difference. It is included because the all-in figures are what you compare against a real bill, and leaving broadband out makes the streaming column look like it costs nothing to deliver.
The break-even count is cable television cost divided by the average service price. It answers a more useful question than "do I save money": it tells you how much streaming you can buy before you are back where you started, which is the number that predicts whether cord-cutting actually sticks.
Worked example: an $80 package against four streaming services
A household pays $80 for a cable TV package, rents two boxes at $10 each, is charged $25 in combined broadcast and regional sports fees, and pays 8% tax on the TV charges. Broadband is $65 a month. They would replace it with four streaming services averaging $12, buying $100 of streaming devices that should last three years.
- Cable charges before tax. $80.00 + 2 × $10.00 + $25.00 = $125.00.
- Tax. $125.00 × 8% = $10.00.
- Cable television per month. $125.00 + $10.00 = $135.00.
- Streaming subscriptions. 4 × $12.00 = $48.00.
- Hardware spread over 36 months. $100.00 ÷ 36 = $2.78.
- Streaming television per month. $48.00 + $2.78 = $50.78.
- Monthly difference. $135.00 − $50.78 = $84.22 in favour of streaming.
- All-in with internet. Cable $135.00 + $65.00 = $200.00. Streaming $50.78 + $65.00 = $115.78.
- Annual difference. $84.22 × 12 = $1,010.64.
- Break-even service count. $135.00 ÷ $12.00 = 11.25 services.
- Hardware payback. Before hardware, the saving is $135.00 − $48.00 = $87.00 a month, so $100.00 ÷ $87.00 = 1.15 months.
The break-even figure is the one to sit with. This household could subscribe to eleven streaming services before matching what they currently pay for television. Four is well inside that, and even a live-TV streaming service at $80 plus three catalogue services at $12 comes to $116 — still under the $135 cable figure, though the margin has narrowed enough that the promotional pricing on either side would decide it.
Reading the result honestly
The monthly difference is the headline, but the break-even service count is the number that predicts whether cutting the cord lasts. Households that cancel cable and then subscribe past their break-even count end up paying more and feeling worse about it, because the spend is now spread across seven bills nobody reviews rather than one bill that arrives annoying and visible.
Check the promotional figure before you decide anything. Cable pricing is built around a promotional term, and the standard rate after it is typically the number you should be comparing against — you will live at that price far longer than at the promotional one. The calculator taxes the increase, which is why the post-promotional figure rises by more than the quoted increase.
If the difference comes out negative, the streaming stack you have described costs more than your cable television. That is a genuinely common outcome once a live-TV streaming service and premium tiers are involved, and it is the reason "streaming is cheaper" is a claim about a specific stack rather than about streaming.
Two things this calculator deliberately does not price. It does not value the content: if the only way to watch your team is a regional sports network carried on cable, no arithmetic here captures that. And it does not price the friction of managing multiple subscriptions, cancelling and resubscribing seasonally, which is a real cost in attention even when it saves money.
What the extras add to an advertised cable price
| Boxes at $10 each | Charges before tax | Tax at 8% | Television total | Advertised price as a share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | $105.00 | $8.40 | $113.40 | 70.5% |
| 1 | $115.00 | $9.20 | $124.20 | 64.4% |
| 2 | $125.00 | $10.00 | $135.00 | 59.3% |
| 3 | $135.00 | $10.80 | $145.80 | 54.9% |
| 4 | $145.00 | $11.60 | $156.60 | 51.1% |
| 5 | $155.00 | $12.40 | $167.40 | 47.8% |
The final column is $80 divided by the television total. Every additional box costs $10 in rental plus $0.80 in tax, so a household with five televisions on cable pays less than half its bill for the package it thinks it is buying.
Mistakes that make the comparison wrong
- Comparing the advertised package price with a streaming stack. The package price excludes equipment, broadcast fees, sports fees and tax, which together commonly exceed it.
- Leaving internet out of one side only. You need broadband either way. Put it in both columns, or in neither, but never in just one.
- Comparing at the promotional rate. You will spend most of the contract at the standard rate. Compare at that price and treat the promotional months as a rebate.
- Forgetting the services you would keep anyway. A streaming service you already pay for is not a cost of cutting the cord. Count only the ones you would add.
- Pricing a live-TV streaming service like a catalogue service. Live-TV streaming replaces the channel bundle and is priced accordingly — several times what a catalogue service costs.
- Ignoring free over-the-air television. An antenna gives you local network channels at no monthly cost, and for many households it removes the main reason to buy a live-TV streaming service at all.
- Assuming the boxes go back by themselves. Unreturned equipment is billed at replacement value. Get a receipt for every box, and check the final bill against it.
Broadcast TV and regional sports fees are provider charges, not taxes
Both appear near the tax block on a cable bill and are easily mistaken for government charges. They are neither. A broadcast TV fee recovers retransmission consent payments made to local stations; a regional sports fee recovers the cost of regional sports networks. Both are set by the provider, both rise on their own schedule independent of your promotional term, and both are taxable as part of the service. Because they are quoted outside the advertised package price, a package can hold its price for two years while your bill rises — which is why this calculator asks for them as a separate line.
Where this fits among the other household subscription decisions
Television is one of a set of recurring services where a promotional price hides a steady-state price, and the same method applies across all of them: separate the promotional period from the standard one, total both, and compare over a period long enough to include the step change. The cell phone plan comparison calculator does exactly this for wireless, where device installments and expiring bill credits play the role that promotional cable pricing plays here.
If your goal is a lower household bill overall rather than a specific cord-cutting decision, the largest reductions available without changing provider are usually equipment: returning unused boxes here, and on the utility side, the fixtures and appliances priced by the toilet flush water usage calculator and the laundry load cost calculator. Where the bill is shared between housemates, the roommate utility bill split calculator divides a flat-rate service like television equally, which is the correct treatment for a subscription nobody meters.
The comparison here assumes you keep the same broadband service either way. If cutting the cord would also change your internet price — because the TV package was bundled — enter the post-unbundling internet cost in the internet field and note that it no longer cancels out of the difference. Bundling discounts are the single most common reason a cord-cutting calculation that looked convincing on paper disappoints on the first bill.