A Fee on Every Phone Bill Funds $1.48 Billion in Relay Calls

Every landline, wireless, and internet-calling bill in the country carries a line most customers never notice.▸ It funds the Telecommunications Relay Services (TRS) Fund, the mechanism that lets a deaf, hard-of-hearing, or speech-disabled person make a phone call — through a sign-language interpreter on video, a live captioner, or a text relay operator. For Fund Year 2025-26 (July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026), the FCC's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau set the fund's net revenue requirement at $1,479,568,862, collected by applying a contribution factor of 2.086% to carriers' internet-based phone revenue and 0.025% to non-internet TRS revenue. Almost no one votes on this fee, sets it in a bill they read, or knows the number exists — it is set annually, by formula, by a private contractor whose math the FCC approves nearly unchanged.

The fund's administrator, Rolka Loube Saltzer Associates, projects demand for each relay service a year out, and the Bureau prices each category before the fund year starts.▸ Captioning absorbs the largest share by far — IP Captioned Telephone Service (IP CTS), which lets a hard-of-hearing caller read real-time captions of what the other party is saying, drew a $787,473,731 disbursement, 44.8% of the fund's $1,757,568,862 gross requirement. Video Relay Service (VRS) — a sign-language interpreter joining the call by video — took $660,660,436, or 37.6%. The remaining $309,434,695 (17.6%) covers everything else at once: the older TTY-based and IP Relay services ($19.3M combined), a $10,000,000 equipment program for people who are both deaf and blind, $30,079,185 in fund administration, and the $250,025,352 payment reserve described below.

The gross requirement of $1,757,568,862 is covered two ways: $278,000,000 carried over as surplus from the prior fund year, and $1,479,568,862 in fresh contributions — a total that is itself $11 million lower than the year before, even as the per-minute prices paid for several relay categories rose sharply.▸ The fund also holds back $250,025,352 as a two-month payment reserve, so the administrator can cover May and June 2026 minutes before the following fund year's contributions arrive.

The FCC doesn't just decide how much money the fund needs — it sets, line by line, what each minute of relay labor is worth.▸ Traditional TTY-based relay jumped to $7.3512 per minute for FY2025-26, a 20.1% increase recalculated from what state relay programs actually paid interpreters the prior year; speech-to-speech relay rose 16.9% to $8.4822, and captioned telephone service rose 14.4% to $3.1893. VRS, IP Relay, and IP CTS, which run on multi-year compensation plans, got a smaller 3.38% inflation adjustment instead — tied to the U.S. Department of Labor's Employment Cost Index for professional and technical workers.

Buried in the IP CTS rate is a wage floor with real teeth.▸ A provider collects $1.40 a minute for CA-assisted captioning — but only earns the extra $0.22-a-minute supplement, pushing the effective rate to $1.62, if the captioner handling that call is paid at least $17.78 an hour, a threshold that started at $17.20 and rises each year by the same inflation factor as the rate itself. It's not a minimum-wage law — the FCC has no authority to set one — but it functions like one: pay a captioner below the floor, and the company's own revenue on that minute drops.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't track VRS interpreters or IP CTS captioners as their own occupation.▸ The closest match is "interpreters and translators" — a category BLS says counted 75,300 jobs nationally in 2024, with a median annual wage of $59,440 ($28.58/hour), covering everyone from courtroom interpreters to literary translators, not just relay workers. BLS's own outlook names this fund's core service by name: "demand for American Sign Language interpreters is expected to grow due to the increasing use of video relay services." Overall growth for the occupation is projected at just 2% through 2034 — slower than the average job — with about 6,900 openings a year, mostly to replace people who leave the field rather than to fill new positions. A $1.48 billion annual fund is being asked to draw workers into a niche of an occupation the government doesn't expect to grow much at all.

Fund figures reflect the FCC's Fund Year 2025-26 orders (July 1–7, 2025), covering the period July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026. Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational data is the most recently published figure (May 2024) and covers the full "interpreters and translators" occupation, not exclusively relay-service interpreters or captioners.