You post a concert ticket for $80. By the time a buyer reaches checkout, it's $118 after a "service fee," a "processing fee," and an "order fee" that materialized one screen at a time. You've done nothing dishonest — that's just how the industry has priced tickets for twenty years. But since May 2025, that pricing pattern is a federal violation, and one platform has already paid $10 million to find out the hard way.
The Federal Trade Commission's Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees — universally shortened to the "Junk Fees Rule" — bans exactly this kind of drip pricing for two industries: live-event ticket sales and short-term lodging. If you sell tickets to a show, run a venue box office, or host guests on Airbnb, Vrbo, or your own booking site, this rule applies directly to you, and enforcement is no longer theoretical.
What the Junk Fees Rule Actually Requires
The rule is narrow in scope but strict in application. It covers exactly two "Covered Goods or Services": live-event tickets and short-term lodging. If you don't sell either of those, the federal rule doesn't reach you — but as we'll cover below, state and local versions are spreading fast into adjacent industries like general rental housing.
For businesses it does cover, the requirement is simple to state and surprisingly hard for legacy pricing systems to satisfy:
- Show the total price first, and make it the most prominent number. Every mandatory charge — the ones a buyer cannot avoid paying to complete the purchase — must be baked into the headline price shown in any advertisement, listing, or search result. The all-in total must be displayed more prominently than any other pricing information, not buried in fine print below a bigger, smaller-looking number.
- Disclose it before payment information is collected. If you break certain charges out separately (see the narrow exceptions below), you must clearly disclose them, and disclose them before the buyer starts entering their card number — not on a receipt after the sale is done.
- Label optional add-ons honestly. If a fee is for something optional — travel insurance, an upgraded seat view, early check-in — it can be presented separately, but only if it's genuinely optional and clearly marked as such.
The Only Three Exceptions
The rule allows exactly three categories of charges to sit outside the advertised total price, and nothing else:
- Government charges — sales tax, occupancy tax, and similar charges imposed by a federal, state, local, or tribal government. These must still be clearly disclosed before checkout, just not folded into the headline number.
- Shipping charges — for physical goods only, and the amount must reasonably reflect actual shipping cost (flat-rate or national-average shipping is fine). Note the FTC's specific carve-out here: handling charges are not shipping charges and must be included in the total price. Calling a padded fee "shipping and handling" doesn't exempt it.
- Genuinely optional add-ons — extra goods or services the buyer affirmatively chooses to add, clearly presented as optional.
Everything else — service fees, "convenience" fees, cleaning fees, resort fees, processing fees, facility fees — has to be in the number the buyer sees first.
What This Means If You Sell Live-Event Tickets
If you're a venue, promoter, box office, or resale platform, the rule targets the exact mechanic that built the modern ticketing business model: advertise a low face-value price, then add unavoidable fees only after the buyer is committed to the purchase flow. That's "drip pricing," and it's now the FTC's primary enforcement target in this space.
The consequences are already real, not hypothetical. In April 2026, the FTC announced a $10 million settlement with StubHub, ordering restitution to U.S. customers who bought tickets in the days right after the rule took effect, on allegations that StubHub advertised prices without the mandatory fees baked in. Separately, in September 2025 the FTC joined seven state attorneys general in suing Live Nation Entertainment and Ticketmaster over historic drip-pricing practices. If your ticketing checkout still shows a "starting at" price with fees appearing screen-by-screen, you're running the exact playbook regulators are actively litigating.
One workaround some sellers have tried: raising the visible base price to quietly absorb the old hidden fees, so the final total looks the same but there's no separate "fee" line item anymore. This is legal under the rule as written — the rule governs disclosure, not the price level itself, so a seller can charge whatever it wants as long as the number shown upfront is the number the buyer actually pays. But it's worth thinking through before you do it: buyers who compare your $118 all-in listing to a competitor's "$80 + fees" listing may still pick the ad that looks cheaper at a glance, even though yours is the honest number. Total-price competition changes the psychology of how tickets get shopped, not just how they get invoiced.
What This Means If You Host Short-Term Rentals
The same rule covers "short-term lodging," a category that reaches vacation rentals, Airbnb and Vrbo listings, boutique inns, and any hotel-style booking — whether the listing runs through a marketplace platform or your own direct-booking site. The specific fee that gets hosts in trouble is the cleaning fee, along with resort fees, damage-waiver fees, and "guest service" fees.
The practical fix is straightforward: whatever your nightly rate plus mandatory cleaning fee plus mandatory service fee adds up to for a stay, that all-in total is the number that has to appear first and most prominently — in the search results, on the listing page, and throughout checkout — not a bare nightly rate that triples once fees are added on the final screen. If you clearly break out a fee (say, showing "cleaning fee: $85" as a separate line for transparency), the FTC's guidance requires that label to accurately describe what the fee is actually for. A "cleaning fee" that functions as pure additional profit rather than covering cleaning costs invites exactly the kind of "unfair or deceptive" scrutiny the rule exists to catch.
Regulatory attention here isn't standing still, either. In March 2026, the FTC opened a rulemaking proceeding specifically targeting fee practices in the broader rental housing industry — not just short-term stays, but standard leasing — with a public comment period that closed in April 2026. If you operate any kind of rental business, this is worth watching; the short-term lodging rule may be the leading edge of a wider disclosure requirement for long-term rental listings, too.
The Cost of Getting This Wrong
The rule carries real teeth: civil penalties of up to $51,744 per violation, a figure adjusted annually for inflation, plus the FTC's authority to order refunds to affected customers and force a business to overhaul its pricing displays. "Per violation" matters here — a single ticketing platform running an out-of-compliance checkout flow across thousands of transactions accumulates exposure fast, which is exactly the shape of the StubHub settlement.
State attorneys general are also actively enforcing parallel state-level junk fee laws, so a compliance approach built only around the federal FTC rule can still leave you exposed to a state action. If you operate in multiple states, it's worth a quick pass to confirm your checkout flow meets whichever state's rule is strictest — that number tends to become your practical floor everywhere.
A Compliance Checklist
Before your next ticket goes on sale or your next listing goes live, run through this:
- Does the first price a buyer sees include every mandatory fee? Not "starting at," not "plus fees" — the actual total they'll pay if they don't add anything optional.
- Is that total price the most visually prominent number on the page? A big base price next to small-print fees fails the rule even if the fees are technically disclosed somewhere.
- Are you only excluding government charges, real shipping costs, and genuinely optional add-ons from that total? Anything else — including handling charges — belongs in the number.
- If you break out a fee for transparency, does the label match what the fee is actually for? A "cleaning fee" needs to correspond to cleaning; a "service fee" needs to correspond to an actual service.
- Does full disclosure happen before the payment page, not after? A buyer should never discover the real total for the first time after they've entered a card number.
Why This Belongs in Your Books, Not Just Your Checkout Page
Getting the display right is a legal requirement, but it exposes a bookkeeping question worth solving at the same time: are your cleaning fees, service fees, and processing fees actually tracked as distinct line items in your revenue records, or are they lumped into one undifferentiated "sales" account? If a regulator or a buyer ever asks what a specific fee covers, you want your books to answer that question as cleanly as your checkout page now has to.
Keep Your Pricing and Your Records in Sync
Compliance with disclosure rules like this one is easier when your financial records already separate fees by type and purpose — it's the same discipline, applied to your ledger instead of your checkout page. Beancount.io offers plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your financial data, with every fee, refund, and revenue line tracked in a format you can audit yourself, line by line. Get started for free and see why developers and finance-minded operators are switching to plain-text accounting.