How long does my account stay active past the payment due date?

[teng]

 Hi. Regretfully, I'm porting my number from PM to another service, and I'm still waiting for the porting to go through. In the meantime, my PM plan is supposed to renew TOMORROW. If I don't renew the plan, will my PM mobile account close automatically, preventing the porting from happening? Or does it stay active for a while longer – apparently, porting can take up to a week? The other option is to change the plan to a $10 one, and keep it open for another month. Any insight is very much appreciated.

[teng]

Thank you! These replies were incredibly helpful. I'm sorry to be leaving, but I had set up this account for my teenager, and I've ended up added her as a second line to my existing accout at one of the bigger companies, where I have a very good grandfathered plan. It's just easier this way to keep track of the account and payments. 

Btw, dealing with this other company has been somewhat nightmare-ish. I spent about 6 hours of my life dealing with the plan (several errors were made while setting it up. ie, I was offered a plan, but the SIM card they sent didn't work, so I had to go to the store to get a new one, and when I called back to activate the account, they said they couldn't offer me that plan, gave me a different one, but didn't actually sign me up properly, so I didn't get the promotion, and had to call back, and so on) and getting the number ported over. And in the end, a mistake was made on the request form, which is why the porting still hadn't gone through. It's done now, but wow. The speed and accuracy of the information I got from this community forum was so much better. Thanks again.

[SD08]

@teng

Due to the timing of this port and the renewal date, any plan change should be done before the plan actually expires, i.e. before midnight. You don't want to wait until midnight, because plan changes on any expired/suspended account require moderator assistance, and they might not get to your case until potentially after the port request reaches PM, in which case it will fail. If your port hasn't gone through by around 7pm or 8pm tonight, I would recommend you to go into your self-serve, top up your account to $10, switch to the $10 plan and choose "change plan now" instead of "change on next renewal date".

One more thing:
There are two different payment due dates listed in your self-serve account. There's the date on your "Overview" page, and another one listed as one day after that on your "Rewards" page. The date on your Overview page is the last fully paid day of service for your just expiring period, while the one on your Rewards page is the first day of the next cycle and is when the renewal payment is normally taken. If the date you mentioned in your OP as being "tomorrow" is the one on your Overview, your plan will not actually expire until tomorrow night and you have another day available to wait for the port. Otherwise, the preceding paragraph applies.

[brent_liza · Accepted solution]

if you do not pay your account, your account will go into a "suspended state" for 90 days. If you make no payment for another 90 days after your account is suspended, your account will be deleted, and you will lose your phone number. If you do not have any balance on the account and the renew doesn't take place then the number will be suspended for non-payment. You will not be able to port the number until the account is active again. I would do the $10.00 plan if you are looking to port your number if it doesn't completely port by midnight tonight so you can keep your phone number with the new carrier. 

[will13am]

@teng, if your port is going to take that long, you will have no choice but to renew to the $10 plan to keep the account active.  The condition for porting is that the account is active at the time of the port.  Not paying will put your account into suspended status which will block the port from taking place.  Sorry to hear that you are leaving BTW.