A UDEMY ONLINE COURSES charge on your card: a course, or a plan that does not refund

A line that reads UDEMY ONLINE COURSES is Udemy, the online course marketplace: either a single course you bought, or a Personal Plan subscription that renews by itself.⁵ The two are billed differently, and only one of them can be refunded. A course bought on the website can be refunded within 30 days if it meets the conditions in Udemy’s policy; a subscription bought on Udemy.com is not refunded at all, unless the law where the account is registered requires it.¹³

What the state’s card data shows

The State of Delaware publishes every purchase its employees make on state cards, with the merchant name as the bank received it. Counted on 29 October 2026, the file has 79 lines with UDEMY in the name, from 20 October 2014 to 24 June 2026, paid by 12 state offices, schools and departments: 79 charges totalling 13,516.19 and not one credit line. The smallest charge is 9.99 and the largest 4,760.00.⁵ Six spellings appear, and the oldest one is not the one in use today:

These are agency cards, so the amounts are not the prices a household pays. What the lines show about the way Udemy bills can still be counted.⁵

• No refund ever appears in the file. The Delaware data carries credit lines for plenty of other merchants — the Docusign lines in the same file include 14 of them⁸ — but among the 79 Udemy lines there is not a single negative amount, across twelve years. The data does not say why; it only shows that a state card that paid Udemy never got a credit back on the same statement feed.
• One office, one day, nine lines. On 9 December 2022 the Department of Finance was charged nine times in one day: 34.99, 59.99, 84.99 three times, 89.99 and 109.99 three times. That pattern repeats at smaller scale — eight lines on 28 June 2021 at Delaware Technical Community College, six on 21 February 2018 at the same college, six on 7 June 2023 at the Department of State, and five lines of 9.99 on 23 June 2026 at Services for Children, Youth and Their Families, with two more of 9.99 the next day. A course catalogue bills one line per course, so several courses bought in one sitting arrive as several charges, not as one.
• Five small repeats at 9.99 are the closest thing to a subscription in the file. The seven lines of 9.99 on 23–24 June 2026 are the only run of identical small amounts in consecutive days. Everything else is a one-off amount per purchase. A Personal Plan bought on a personal card would look like the repeats, not like the course prices.
• The name survived the merger. Coursera and Udemy completed their combination on 11 May 2026, and the announcement of the deal said the combined company would operate under the Coursera name.⁶⁷ The last seven Udemy lines in the file, dated 23 and 24 June 2026, still read UDEMY ONLINE COURSES. So the name on a statement is not a reliable way to tell whether a charge is from before or after the merger, and it did not change when the ownership did.
• The same office’s two odd categories. Both lines filed outside the schools category — 4,760.00 as UDEMY INVOICE in 2020 and 695.36 as UDEMY ONLINE COURSES in 2023 — belong to the Department of Safety and Homeland Security, nearly three years apart. The merchant category is assigned by the processor, not by Udemy, so an expense system that files Udemy under “Photographic Studios” will not find it under education.

What Udemy publishes about refunds

The policy is not one rule but a stack of them, and the order matters.¹

• A course bought on the website: 30 days. “All eligible courses purchased on Udemy can be refunded within 30 days, provided the request meets the guidelines in our refund policy.” The policy explains why the window is 30 days: instructors are paid 30 days after a sale, so “we will not process refund requests received after the refund window”.¹
• Inside those 30 days, “a notable amount” of the course can still sink it. Udemy reserves the right to refuse a refund where “a notable amount of the course has been consumed or downloaded by a student before the refund was requested”, and it does not define what notable means. Reviewers who say they watched an hour of an 18-hour course, or 10% of it, report being refused on exactly that ground.¹¹⁵
• A subscription bought on Udemy.com: no refund. “We do not grant refunds for any subscriptions unless otherwise required by applicable law.” The separate article on those exceptions repeats it: “Udemy is unable to provide refunds for Subscription Plans purchased through Udemy.com, unless otherwise required by applicable law.”¹³
• Where the law does require one, the clock starts on day one of the trial. The country table gives 14 days for the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Israel, Egypt, Malaysia, Serbia and New Zealand; 7 for Australia, Brazil and South Africa; 10 for Argentina and Chile; 5 for Colombia and Mexico; and “at any time” for Quebec. And the period “begins on the first day that you complete checkout and start your subscription, regardless of whether you signed up for a free trial” — so a 7-day trial in a country with a 7-day refund period leaves nothing to claim once the trial ends.³
• Some refunds come back as Udemy credits, not money. Where a transaction is not eligible for a refund to the original payment method, the refund is issued as Udemy credits, which the policy says are “issued by and are solely an obligation of Udemy LEARN Services, LLC”. Apple App Store purchases, some bank transfers, Boleto, Pix, Oxxo, Alfamart and Indomaret are listed as credit-only.¹
• Bought in the app, Udemy cannot refund it at all. Payments through the iOS or Android apps are processed by Apple and Google Play, and Udemy says it is “unable to process refund requests for these in-app purchases” — those go to Apple or Google. A charge that shows up as APPLE.COM/BILL rather than Udemy is one of these.¹³
• When a refund is granted, it is not instant. Udemy says requests go to the processor immediately and “it may take 5 to 10 business days or longer” to post, and up to 30 days at some banks; a refund requested within 24 hours of the purchase may instead be handled as a reversal, in which case the original charge is removed rather than a credit added.²

What cardholders say they found

Udemy’s Trustpilot page carried 1,974 reviews and a score of 1.6 when we read it on 29 October 2026. Four of the one-star reviews, quoted briefly and attributed to the people who wrote them, describe the same sequence: a subscription renewed, a refund asked for within hours or days, and a refusal that cites the no-refund rule.¹⁴

• A reviewer who says their annual plan was charged before the old one expired: “My annual subscription was automatically renewed and charged before my existing subscription had even expired… I reached out to cancel and request a refund immediately after noticing the charge.” Posted 20 October 2026.⁹
• A reviewer charged 156 for an annual plan, who says the reply came back automatically: “annual subscriptions are not eligible for refund… Even cancelling on the day of renewal is not enough for them to refund.” Posted 17 May 2026.¹⁰
• A reviewer who says the renewal arrived without a notice: “Udemy charged me for another year, without notifying me of upcoming renewal… They said no refunds on subscriptions.” Posted 10 June 2026.¹¹
• A reviewer who describes the refund screen itself: they say it preselects Udemy credits and that the option to return the money to the original card sits behind a drop-down arrow. That is their description of the interface, not something Udemy documents. Posted 9 February 2026.¹²

A second complaint recurs in the same reviews: a course shown as “included with subscription” is not included once the plan is paid for. We read four separate reviews making that claim between March and June 2026.¹⁵ Neither claim is something we can check from outside an account, so both are recorded here as the reviewers’ account.

How to find the account and stop the charge

1. Find the account. Search every inbox for “Udemy”, “course” and “receipt”. A purchase made in the app leaves an Apple or Google receipt instead of a Udemy one, and a gift or a bundled course can be tied to an address you no longer use. If nobody you know has an account, treat the card as stolen and read step 5.
2. See which kind of charge it is. At udemy.com, the Subscriptions page shows the plan, the next payment date, the amount and the card, and Purchase history lists one line per course bought. A subscription and a course purchase appear in different places, which is also why a single statement can carry both.⁴
3. Stop the next one. On the Subscriptions page, choose Cancel subscription. A monthly plan may offer Pause subscription instead — one pause per billing period, no billing while paused, access resumes at the end — and you can still cancel during a pause, which ends it at once.⁴ On a free trial, the same page has Cancel trial, which stops the first charge.⁴
4. Ask for the money, with the date in hand. If the account is registered in one of the countries in Udemy’s table, the request has to land inside that country’s window, counted from the day you checked out — and the trial days count against it. If the account is in the United States, Udemy’s published position is that a subscription is not refunded; the route left is the card issuer in step 5. For a course, the request goes through the refund option in Purchase history, which checks eligibility and issues a refund or credits.³¹²
5. Then the card company. If the charge was not authorised, or a cancellation you can prove was ignored, write to the card issuer — name, address, account number and what the mistake is — so the letter reaches it within 60 days after the first bill with the error was sent. The issuer must acknowledge in writing within 30 days and resolve within 90, and you may withhold the disputed amount while it does.¹³ If the account is not yours, ask for a new card number: a stored card number keeps being charged.

Is this a scam?

The name is real and the charges are ordinary: a state’s agencies paid it on 79 lines over twelve years, and every rule described above is published by the company itself.⁵¹³ What the record shows is a billing model with a gap in the middle: a course can be refunded for 30 days, a subscription cannot be refunded at all where the law is silent, and the two are charged by the same company and often appear on the same statement under the same name. A UDEMY line you cannot match to any account is a different matter — someone else may have used the card — and belongs with your bank the same day.

Why this page is on a site about held money

This site records payment companies that hold back money that belongs to someone else. Udemy is not in the incident record. This page is here because the refund rules differ by how the charge was made and by which country the account is in, and because a subscription that renews without a notice you saw is where a dispute starts. Another study subscription with a regulator’s finding against its cancellation flow is under CHEGG ORDER; other software that renews by itself is under GRAMMARLY CO* and ADOBE *ADOBE. Other lines are in the table of statement names.

Sources

1. Udemy Support, “Udemy’s refund policy”: the 30-day window for courses, instructors paid after 30 days, the “notable amount consumed” restriction, the sentence “We do not grant refunds for any subscriptions unless otherwise required by applicable law”, credit refunds issued by Udemy LEARN Services, LLC, the credit-only payment methods, and the iOS and Android exclusions. support.udemy.com. Read on 29 October 2026. The web archive returned 520 for this address on that date, so there is no archived copy.
2. Udemy Support, “Refund status: common questions”: refunds submitted to the processor immediately, 5–10 business days or longer to post and up to 30 days at some banks, the 24-hour purchase reversal, and what a credit refund is. support.udemy.com. Read on 29 October 2026. No archived copy existed on that date.
3. Udemy Support, “Subscription plan refund exceptions due to applicable law”: the sentence that Udemy is unable to refund Subscription Plans bought on Udemy.com unless the law requires it, the country-by-country refund periods, and the rule that the period starts on the first day of checkout or of a free trial. support.udemy.com. Read on 29 October 2026. The web archive returned 520 for this address on that date, so there is no archived copy.
4. Udemy Support, “How to manage your Udemy subscriptions”: the Subscriptions page, the next payment date and total charge, updating the payment method, Cancel subscription, the one-pause-per-period rule, cancelling during a pause, Cancel trial, and the repeat of the no-refund position for subscriptions. success.udemy.com. Read on 29 October 2026. The web archive did not return a copy of this address on that date.
5. State of Delaware Open Data, State Employee Credit Card Transactions, fields “merchant”, “cat_descr”, “trans_dt”, “merchandise_amt” and “dept_name”. Lines whose name contains UDEMY. Queried and counted on 29 October 2026: 79 lines, six forms of the name, 12 paying units, 79 charges totalling 13,516.19 and no credits.
6. Coursera, Inc., “Coursera Completes Combination with Udemy to Build the World’s Most Comprehensive Skills Platform”, 11 May 2026: the completion of the combination and the scale of the combined company. investor.coursera.com. Read on 29 October 2026.
7. Coursera, Inc., “Coursera to Combine with Udemy…”, 17 December 2025: the all-stock merger agreement, the expected closing in the second half of 2026, and the plan to operate under the Coursera name. investor.coursera.com. Read on 29 October 2026.
8. State of Delaware Open Data, same file: the Docusign lines used for comparison, which include 14 negative amounts (credits). Lines whose name contains DOCUSIGN. Queried on 29 October 2026.
9. Trustpilot, review of Udemy published 20 October 2026, experienced 17 October 2026, one star: the annual renewal charged before the previous term expired and the refund request made the same day. trustpilot.com/reviews/6ad73b2c316b37f26f991b70. Read on 29 October 2026 in a browser. The archive returned nothing for Trustpilot review pages on that date.
10. Trustpilot, review of Udemy published 17 May 2026, experienced 16 May 2026, one star: the 156 annual charge and the automated answer that annual subscriptions are not eligible for a refund. trustpilot.com/reviews/6a0941b9a5f1291784053286. Read on 29 October 2026 in a browser.
11. Trustpilot, review of Udemy published 10 June 2026, one star: the renewal charged without a notice the reviewer saw, the cancellation the next day, and the refusal. trustpilot.com/reviews/6a290ea157d7986a0df2f043. Read on 29 October 2026 in a browser.
12. Trustpilot, review of Udemy published 9 February 2026, one star: the reviewer’s description of the refund screen preselecting Udemy credits and of the drop-down needed to choose the original payment method. trustpilot.com/reviews/698930bab0aca3f16ec336f4. Read on 29 October 2026 in a browser.
13. Federal Trade Commission, “Using Credit Cards and Disputing Charges”: how to write to the card issuer, and the 60-day, 30-day and 90-day periods. consumer.ftc.gov. Read on 29 October 2026.
14. Trustpilot, Udemy merchant page: 1,974 reviews and a TrustScore of 1.6 as displayed when the one-star pages were read on 29 October 2026. trustpilot.com/review/udemy.com.
15. Trustpilot, four one-star reviews of Udemy on the “included with subscription” complaint, read on 29 October 2026: published 24 June 2026 (6a3bc5e492ff3ad090ec16de, the 108 charge and the course that was not included), 10 May 2026 (6a0071bb07e9d14dbabf8de7), 23 April 2026 (69e95d1937b61e0cb2e61c81) and 27 March 2026 (69c6b40576ddc71b4bb4d2cd); and the 17 September 2026 review of a course refund refused after the reviewer says they consumed about 10% (6aabecb1ee84a5c8198bcc1c).

What this page does not claim. We found no Udemy page that publishes the billing descriptor it sends to card networks; the six spellings above are the ones in one state’s published card data, which may not be the only ones. The Delaware data does not say what any office bought, so the amounts here are not a price list, and its silence on refunds is silence in that one feed, not proof that no cardholder ever got money back. Whether Udemy sends a renewal reminder before a subscription charge is not described in the help pages we read; the Subscriptions page states the next payment date instead. The verification date for every fact here is 29 October 2026.