States aren't waiting on Washington: all-in pricing laws spread state by state

The federal Junk Fees Rule is narrow by design — it only covers short-term lodging and live-event ticketing, after the FTC scaled back a much broader initial proposal that would have reached restaurants and delivery apps. States have been filling that gap on their own timeline, and the resulting patchwork is now a genuine compliance consideration for any business selling across state lines.

California's Honest Pricing Law took effect July 1, 2024, generally requiring that any advertised price include all mandatory fees except government taxes, across a broad range of consumer transactions, not just lodging and tickets. New York, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Colorado, Tennessee and Connecticut have each passed some version of an all-in pricing or hidden-fee disclosure requirement in recent years, and California separately enacted its own state-level dealer junk-fee law in 2025 aimed specifically at the auto sector.

The state approach matters for a specific legal reason: the FTC's federal rule sets a floor, not a ceiling, and states remain free to regulate more broadly under their own unfair-and-deceptive-practices statutes. A pricing display that's fully compliant with the federal rule (because it's outside lodging or ticketing) can still be a violation in California, Minnesota or New York if it hides a mandatory fee at checkout.

For multi-state retailers and marketplaces, the practical response has been to default to the strictest applicable standard nationwide rather than maintain 50 different checkout flows — which is part of why "all-in" pricing display, once mostly a European norm, has become more common in U.S. checkout experiences generally over the past two years, independent of what any single jurisdiction technically requires.