By Steven Greenhouse

Verizon Communications and its two major unions announced on Sunday that they had reached tentative three-year contracts with raises totaling nearly 11 percent and with the company continuing to pay 100 percent of current workers’ and retirees’ health premiums.

The settlements, announced seven days after the old contracts expired, averted a strike threatened by 65,000 Verizon workers from Maine to Virginia.

On Friday, with negotiations dragging past the contract deadline, Verizon’s two main unions — the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers — set a strike deadline for Monday. The two unions had originally threatened a strike for Aug. 3, but postponed any job action because the talks were making progress.

The tentative contracts, which must be ratified by union members, call for a 3.25 percent raise in the first year, 3.5 percent in the second year and 3.75 percent in the third, yielding raises of 10.9 percent compounded over the three years.

In what the two unions said was an important breakthrough, the settlements call for granting union recognition to 600 installation and maintenance technicians in Verizon Business, a largely nonunion division that focuses on corporate customers. Those workers, who union officials said had voiced strong support for unionizing, will be transferred to Verizon Telecom, the company’s traditional landline division, which is largely unionized.

And in what Verizon officials said was a breakthrough, the company will no longer pay all of the health insurance premiums for newly hired workers after they retire. Rather, it expects to achieve significant savings by having to pay only a fixed amount for each newly hired worker after retirement, based on a worker’s number of years with the company.

The contract dispute came as Verizon was preparing to provide television service in the five boroughs of New York City to compete with other cable providers. Verizon, which has almost 230,000 employees nationwide, recently obtained a 12-year franchise from New York State regulators in which it promised to make its television service, known as FiOS, available to all of the city’s 3.1 million households by 2014.

Union officials said they expected the agreements would increase union membership by 2,500 by limiting subcontracting, making about 1,000 temporary jobs permanent and promising to make any additional FiOS jobs union. During the negotiations, some union officials said their chief concern was that Verizon had transferred thousands of union jobs in its landline division to its nonunion divisions and to nonunion subcontractors.

“This is a breakthrough agreement in many ways,” said Larry Cohen, president of the communications workers. “It creates new union jobs, including major growth areas like FiOS; it takes a big step forward on health care; and it brings hundreds of Verizon Business employees the union rights they deserve.”

Mr. Cohen said Verizon’s $20 billion effort to install fiber optics for television and Internet service promised growth for both Verizon and its unions.

“Over all, we see this as an agreement where we can move forward together to work with Verizon, rather than just being a contract for three years,” he said.

The settlements will raise future pension payouts for union members and will require union members and retirees to pay higher medical co-payments.

“From the start, our goal has been to continue to provide our employees with a package of competitive wages and benefits,” said Marc C. Reed, Verizon’s executive vice president for human resources.

The agreements call for Verizon to contribute $2 million a year toward a jointly administered fund so the unions and company can work for health care reform, with the goals of controlling costs, improving quality and providing health coverage for all Americans.

The two sides agreed to three-year contracts, shorter than the previous five-year contracts. Mr. Reed said the shorter contracts would give Verizon more flexibility to adapt to the rapid changes in the communications industry.

Now, Mr. Reed added, “our Verizon Telecom business group can focus on the important business of competing and offering choice to customers in broadband and television services.”

Verizon will be competing for cable subscribers with Cablevision, Time Warner Cable, Comcast and others that have a cost advantage because they generally use lower-wage, nonunion labor.