A Spotify Community thread is titled, flatly, "I cancelled my subscription AND the paypal transaction" — subscription cancelled, PayPal payment cancelled, charged anyway. PayPal's own community board carries the mirror version, "Spotify Premium payments even though it was cancelled in advance" — cancelled in PayPal, and Spotify never got the memo. Same failure, pointed in opposite directions. That's not a glitch. PayPal treats "cancel with the merchant" and "cancel inside PayPal" as two separate switches, and flipping one does nothing to the other.
PayPal's own definition explains why. An "automatic payment" is "a subscription, billing agreement, or recurring payment" that "allows you to save PayPal as your preferred way to pay with a merchant, including for any transactions scheduled in advance." In PayPal's legal language the same mechanism goes by several names — billing agreement, subscription, recurring payment, reference transaction, preauthorized transfer, preapproved payment — which is part of why the cancellation screen is so easy to miss: you're not looking for "PayPal," you're looking for a specific merchant buried under one of those labels.
Quick answer
Cancelling a recurring PayPal payment takes two separate actions, not one: stop the billing agreement inside PayPal, and separately cancel the account or plan with the merchant. On the web, go to Settings → Payments → "Automatic payments" (sometimes labeled "Subscriptions and saved businesses"), pick the merchant, and use the Cancel or Unlink option. In the app, it's Menu → Subscriptions or Linked Businesses → the merchant → Account → Unlink. Do both, or you'll either keep getting charged or keep getting cancellation notices from a merchant you never actually stopped.
Where PayPal actually hides the automatic-payments screen
On paypal.com, the path is Settings → Payments, then a section called "Subscriptions and saved businesses" or "Automatic Payments" depending on your account version. Tap into the specific merchant and you'll find an option to manage or cancel that payment method. In the mobile app, it lives under the menu as "Subscriptions or Linked Businesses" — select the merchant, go to Account, and use an Unlink or Cancel button, confirming when prompted. Neither path is labeled "recurring charges" or anything you'd naturally search for, which is most of why people give up after checking their bank statement and their PayPal balance but never open Settings.
Cancelling with PayPal isn't cancelling with the merchant
PayPal's own Money Hub guidance lists four separate ways to stop a recurring charge: cancel with the merchant, cancel the automatic payment inside PayPal, contact your card issuer to block the charge, or request a stop-payment order from your bank. Most people try exactly one and assume it covers the other three. It doesn't. PayPal states it plainly: "canceling a payment method through PayPal stops future charges to your PayPal account, but this action typically does not cancel the underlying subscription or contract with the service provider" — and recommends contacting the merchant directly to formally close the account.
The reverse failure mode is just as common. Cancel on the merchant's site and the billing agreement can sit alive inside PayPal, doing nothing on its own but still technically authorized. Per PayPal's User Agreement, once you do cancel the automatic payment authorization, "all future automatic payments under your agreement with that seller will be stopped" — but you "may still owe the seller money for purchases that have been authorized but not completed," or have obligations for goods and services already delivered but not yet paid for. Cancelling the switch on your end doesn't erase a balance that was already run up on the other end.
What actually stays active — and your legal backstop
If you instruct PayPal to stop a specific automatic payment at least 3 business days before the next scheduled charge and they fail to do it, PayPal's User Agreement says they're liable for the resulting losses. That window matters because it's not a PayPal-only courtesy — it mirrors a federal consumer protection. Under Regulation E, 12 CFR § 1005.10(c), you can stop a preauthorized electronic transfer from a bank account by notifying the financial institution, orally or in writing, at least three business days before the scheduled transfer date — though an oral stop-payment order stops binding after 14 days unless you confirm it in writing. That right sits underneath PayPal's own process, and it's the backstop when a merchant or PayPal itself doesn't cooperate.
A billing agreement and a merchant subscription are two independent records, and checking only one of them tells you nothing about the other. I don't think most people are careless here — the automatic-payments screen is genuinely a few taps deeper than it should be, and neither PayPal nor the merchant has much incentive to make the other party's cancellation visible to you. Subnesio logs the actual next billing date next to each recurring payment, which at least gives you something to check against instead of an assumption. If you're auditing everything on PayPal, it's worth pairing that with a broader pass on subscriptions you've genuinely forgotten, since the same "cancelled in one place, still billed in another" problem shows up with card issuers too, not just PayPal.
Check the automatic-payments screen even for merchants you're sure you already cancelled — the confirmation email from the merchant and an active billing agreement in PayPal are not the same thing.
