A federal rule that took effect in 2025 now bans hidden junk fees on live-event tickets and short-term lodging, forcing sellers to show the full price, including mandatory add-ons, before a shopper ever reaches checkout. The Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees followed years of complaints about resort fees, service charges and processing costs that only appeared once a buyer was deep into a purchase, often after picking seats or reserving a room. For anyone booking a concert, a ballgame or a vacation rental, the practical change is that the number shown up front is now supposed to be the number actually owed.
What the Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees Requires
Under the rule, any business that offers, displays or advertises live-event tickets or short-term lodging must disclose the total price upfront, including every mandatory fee or charge it knows about and can calculate in advance, and that total price must be displayed more prominently than any other pricing information on the page. A resort that advertises a nightly rate of $199 but automatically tacks on a $39 daily resort fee, for example, has to fold that fee into the advertised price rather than revealing it only at checkout, and the same standard applies to online ticket sellers that add a fee no buyer can avoid.
The requirement reaches beyond hotels and traditional ticket brokers. Coverage extends to short-term rentals and home-share listings, resale and secondary ticket marketplaces, and any online platform or intermediary that displays pricing on a seller’s behalf, meaning the seller has to supply accurate fee information so the marketplace can calculate and show the true total. A vacation-rental host that adds a mandatory cleaning fee, or a ticket reseller that folds a service charge into every sale, falls under the same total-price requirement as a national hotel chain.
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Which Charges Can Still Be Added Later
The rule allows a business to exclude only three categories from the advertised total price: government taxes and charges, shipping costs, and fees for optional add-ons a shopper affirmatively chooses to buy, such as trip insurance or a VIP concert package. Even for those exceptions, the business must disclose the amount and purpose of the charge and fold it into the final total before asking for payment, so the last screen before checkout has to show the real amount owed, displayed at least as prominently as the original total price.
The rule is equally specific about what counts as deception. A hotel that charges an “environmental fee” without actually funding any sustainability effort, or a ticket seller that labels a charge a government-required “usage fee” when no such requirement exists, violates the rule regardless of how the fee is itemized elsewhere on the page. The agency has also flagged secondary ticket sellers that pad a “taxes and fees” line item with an amount the seller simply keeps as profit, since itemizing charges does not excuse misrepresenting what they are for.
Discount and promotional pricing are still allowed under the rule, but only within limits designed to stop a seller from advertising a price almost nobody actually qualifies for. If a lower price is available only to people who join a rewards program or meet some other condition, the total price shown to the general public has to be the price offered to everyone, and any discounted figure can be displayed only once a shopper actually meets the requirement for it. A “buy one, get one free” promotion works the same way: the seller must show the full, undiscounted total price most prominently unless and until the transaction actually qualifies for the promotion.
How the Rule Is Enforced and What a Violation Can Cost
The Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees took effect on May 12, 2025, following a bipartisan vote and a compliance guide the agency published for small businesses trying to meet the new standard. Enforcement runs through the agency’s ordinary rulemaking authority: a business found to violate the rule can be ordered to bring its pricing practices into compliance, refund money to affected consumers, and pay civil penalties on top of any refunds owed.
Because enforcement depends heavily on complaints, a shopper who spots a fee that was not disclosed upfront, or a charge mislabeled to look mandatory when it was optional, can report it directly to the agency’s fraud-reporting site, and that report becomes part of the evidence used to open new cases. The rule does not require a seller to keep fees low or eliminate them altogether; it only requires that whatever a seller charges be disclosed honestly and included in the price shown before a buyer commits to paying.
The gap between what the rule bans and what a shopper still has to watch for sits in the excluded categories. A hotel or ticket seller can still add taxes, shipping or an optional service a buyer chooses, and while those additions must appear before the final payment screen, a buyer who does not read that last screen carefully can still be surprised by a total higher than the number first advertised. The rule closes the bait-and-switch tactic of hiding a mandatory fee until checkout; it does not eliminate every fee a traveler or concertgoer will encounter.
What the rule changes most, in practice, is where the burden of comparison shopping falls. Before the requirement took effect, a buyer often could not know the real cost of a hotel room or a concert ticket until reaching the final page of checkout, making it difficult to compare prices across sellers at all. With the total price now required upfront on covered purchases, the comparison a shopper does at the start of a search is closer to the number that actually appears on a bank statement, shifting the check that used to happen too late in the process to a point where it can still change a buying decision.
This article was drafted with AI assistance and edited for accuracy.
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