Drip Pricing Is Now Illegal — But Only in Two Industries
The FTC banned hidden fees on tickets and hotels last year. Everywhere else, from restaurants to airlines, the same trick is still perfectly legal.
If a $340-a-night hotel room turns into $412 the moment resort fees and a "facility charge" show up at checkout, is that illegal now? As of last year, sometimes. The Federal Trade Commission's rule against "drip pricing" took effect May 12, 2025, and it bans exactly two things: deceptive hidden fees on live-event tickets, and deceptive hidden fees on short-term lodging. Almost everything else that feels like the same trick is still completely legal.
What the FTC's Rule Actually Bans
The Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees requires that any business advertising, displaying, or offering a price for live-event tickets or short-term lodging show the full total price — including all mandatory fees — more prominently than any other price on the page. Taxes, government charges, shipping costs, and genuinely optional add-ons a customer chooses to include are excluded from that total. The FTC says the rule furthers a March 2025 executive order on the live-entertainment market, and the agency estimates it will save consumers up to 53 million hours a year they'd otherwise spend hunting for a real price — worth more than $11 billion over the next decade, by its own math.
Where Drip Pricing Is Still Completely Legal
The rule's scope is narrow by design: live-event ticketing and short-term lodging, full stop. Restaurants adding a service charge at the bottom of the check, airlines charging separately for a seat assignment or a checked bag, subscription services that reveal a "processing fee" at the final screen, and car rental companies stacking on "facility" or "concession recovery" charges are all outside the rule's reach. The FTC has said it retains broader authority under Section 5 of the FTC Act to pursue deceptive pricing anywhere — but that authority requires a separate enforcement action, case by case, not an automatic rule-based ban.
Is Drip Pricing the Same as a Surcharge?
No, and the difference matters legally. Drip pricing is what happens when a business advertises only part of a price and reveals the rest — mandatory fees, mandatory add-ons — as a shopper moves through checkout. A credit card surcharge is a separate, older category: a percentage-based fee added to offset a merchant's card-processing cost, and it's illegal on debit card transactions under federal law regardless of state, plus banned outright on any card in a number of states. A convenience fee is different again — a flat charge, never a percentage, for using a non-standard payment channel, like paying by phone — and it's legal in every state as long as it's disclosed before checkout. None of those three categories is regulated the same way, which is how a hotel "resort fee" survives while an equivalent-feeling airline "seat selection fee" does too, just under a different legal theory entirely.
Why Does the Rule Only Cover Two Industries?
The FTC's original 2023 proposal was broader, floating rules for rental housing and other categories before the final version narrowed to tickets and short-term lodging — the two areas where the agency's research found the clearest evidence of harm and the most direct fix. A broader Junk Fees Prevention Act that would have extended similar disclosure rules across more industries never passed Congress, so the gap between "banned" and "still legal but annoying" mostly comes down to which sectors got a finished federal rule and which are still waiting on one.
Does This Connect to Restaurant Surcharges or Credit Card Late Fees?
Not directly, but the three fights are related pieces of the same broader push against hidden costs. Restaurant credit card surcharges are governed by a patchwork of state laws rather than this federal rule, and whether a diner even sees a surcharge line depends entirely on which state the restaurant sits in. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's separate push to cap credit card late fees at $8 — a rule that was struck down in court and reopened for a fresh fight this month — targets a penalty charge, not a drip-priced add-on, but it comes from the same regulatory instinct: consumers routinely can't see the real cost of something until they've already committed to it.
What Should I Actually Check Before I Book or Buy?
If you're buying a concert ticket or booking a hotel room directly, the total price you see now legally has to be the real price — if it isn't, that's a rule violation worth reporting to the FTC. Everywhere else — restaurants, airlines, rental cars, subscriptions — the old rule of thumb still applies: read past the first number, because drip pricing outside those two categories is a business choice, not a violation.
