The FCC on Thursday took action to address “longstanding concerns” to better ensure that the agency’s assessment and collection of its annual regulatory fees “is more closely aligned with the burden of the work being performed by Commission employees for each regulatory fee category.”
What does that mean for radio and television broadcasters?
The biggest takeaway is that the Commission has adopted its proposal regarding the calculation of television and radio broadcaster regulatory fees, including the modification of the existing grid, by adding a new tier for AM and FM radio stations.
In its FY 2023 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, the Commission proposed the creation of an additional tier within the lowest population tier to ensure that broadcaster fees “fairly represent the regulatory oversight benefits distributed among all radio broadcasters” and that the regulatory fees assessed to the smaller broadcasters are “reasonably
related to the benefits provided to the payor of the fee by the Commission’s activities.”
The NAB and State Broadcasters Associations each said yes; there were no dissenters among those submitting comments.
Specifically, The FCC is separating the previous years’ tier of <= 25,000 population into two tiers: 1) <= 10,000, and 2) 10,001 – 25,000. The remaining population tier thresholds will stay the same as prior years. In addition, beginning in FY 2023, the radio population count that is the basis for assessing regulatory fees will include 2020 U.S. Census data.
For television stations, the Commission will continue to use its population-based methodology for full-service television broadcasters based on the population covered by a full-service broadcast television station’s contour. This has been in place since 2020.
In addition to that continuation, the FCC is adopting a factor of 0.7799 of one cent ($0.007799) per population served for FY 2023 full-power broadcast television station fees.
The FCC is seeking to collect a total $390,192,000 in Congressionally required regulatory fees for FY 2023 by the end of September.
To view the FY2023 regulatory fees by station, please click here.
