The Federal Trade Commission published a proposed enforcement policy statement on personalized pricing on 19 August 2026 and opened it for public comment for 30 days after it appears in the Federal Register. The statement describes personalized pricing as the use of a consumer's personal data to set a price for that consumer, from inferences such as how much they might be willing to pay or whether they are likely to shop around. It would create no new rule. It sets out how the Commission reads the law it already has, under which individualising a price from personal data without clear and conspicuous disclosure can be deceptive, unfair, or both under Section 5 of the FTC Act. Pricing that moves with supply, demand, time of day, inventory or season is treated as a separate practice, and surge pricing, risk-based credit and insurance, and regional variation sit outside what the statement addresses. It arrives fifteen months after the Commission's fee rule started requiring live-event ticket sellers to show a total price up front, and four months after StubHub agreed to refund $10 million over prices advertised without the mandatory fees included.
Dynamic pricing is not the thing being described
Almost everything people call price gouging in live music sets the same number for everybody. A tiered release moves the price when a tier sells out, and it moves it for the whole queue. A fee added at checkout is added to every buyer's basket. Resale markups are set by sellers who cannot see who is looking. Those practices can be exploitative and two of them are already regulated, but none of them is what the FTC has just described.
Personalized pricing means the number on your screen was calculated partly from what is known about you. The proposed statement is careful about the boundary, and the trade-press summaries collapsing it into a crackdown on dynamic pricing have the story backwards. Surge pricing is named as out of scope. What the Commission is signalling is that if a seller quietly prices a repeat customer differently from a first-time visitor, existing consumer protection law already reaches it, and the disclosure is the part that decides whether it is lawful.
Both instruments wait for a price to exist
The fee rule that took effect on 12 May 2025 governs how a total is presented when a business offers, displays or advertises a price for a live-event ticket. It requires the maximum total a buyer must pay, mandatory fees included, to be shown clearly and prominently before checkout. StubHub's $10 million settlement in April 2026 is the enforcement example, and the alleged conduct was advertising a price that was not the price.
Neither the fee rule nor the personalized pricing statement requires anybody to publish a price in the first place. That is not an oversight, because a rule about deceptive disclosure has nothing to work on until something is disclosed. It does mean both instruments are shaped around a market where a price is on the page, which is the market of arena tours and ticketing platforms where the coverage of this subject is written. The calendar most people actually pick from does not work that way.
Three fifths of the calendar carries no price
We index event listings, and price completeness is one of the things we count. Across the 46 days from 17 August 2026 to 1 October, our capture covered 11,935 scheduled events in eight cities. A published price appeared on 2,966 of them. Another 1,387 were listed as free. The remaining 7,582, which is 63.5 percent of everything counted, reached the listing with no price attached at all.
| City | Events counted | Published price | Free | No price (share) | Median price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Los Angeles | 1,954 | 177 | 84 | 86.6% | $20 |
| Berlin | 1,916 | 456 | 162 | 67.7% | €15 |
| New York | 2,835 | 700 | 287 | 65.2% | $22 |
| Tokyo | 1,397 | 506 | 30 | 61.6% | ¥1,500 |
| London | 1,990 | 621 | 281 | 54.7% | £10 |
| Paris | 479 | 29 | 201 | 52.0% | €12 |
| Lisbon | 556 | 237 | 81 | 42.8% | €7 |
| São Paulo | 808 | 240 | 261 | 38.0% | R$20 |
Los Angeles is the extreme case in our data, with a price on 177 of 1,954 listings. The two American cities together account for 3,541 events that arrived without one. We have reported the London half of this before, when we found that a free party boom cannot be measured in a market where more than half of listings are silent about money. The same silence covers most of the calendar in most of the cities we count.
The honest reading of that column is narrower than it looks. A listing with no price is not a free event and it is not proof that anyone is hiding anything. In many cases a price exists one click away on a promoter's checkout page, and our figure records that the price did not travel with the listing. It is a measurement of Dizko's coverage of these cities rather than a census of them, and sources differ in how completely they fill the field.
Comparison is the thing being lost
What makes personalized pricing worth an enforcement statement is that it defeats comparison. If two people see different numbers for the same seat, neither can tell whether the price they were given is the price. That is the harm the Commission is describing, and disclosure is its proposed remedy because a disclosed practice can be compared against.
A listing that shows no number defeats comparison earlier and more thoroughly, and nothing in consumer protection law addresses it. Somebody choosing between six Friday nights cannot rank them by cost without opening six checkout flows, which almost nobody does. The cost of that has been rising for operators as much as for buyers: Berlin clubs now take 59 percent of revenue at the door against 21 percent in 2017, so the door price has become the business at the same time as it stays missing from the majority of listings.
What would actually close the gap
The fee rule proved that a display duty can be written, published and enforced against a large ticketing company inside a year. A duty to display a price at all would be a much larger intervention, and there is no sign of one being proposed anywhere. The practical fix sits with listing platforms rather than regulators, and that includes us, which is why we publish the completeness figure next to every count instead of only reporting medians from the quarter of listings that carry a number.
Two things are worth watching once the comment period closes. The first is whether the final statement names ticketing among the markets where personal data is being used to set prices, since live events were the sector the Commission chose for its last pricing rule. The second is whether any of the ticketing platforms file comments, because their answer to the willingness-to-pay question is the one that decides whether this reaches the calendar at all.