The UK ticket resale price cap: where the law stands

What the government has announced

On 19 November 2025 the government announced plans to make it illegal to resell tickets for concerts, theatre, comedy, sport and other live events for more than their original cost. The original cost would be defined in law as the ticket price plus unavoidable fees, such as service charges.

The package has four main parts. Reselling above face value would be banned. The service fees that resale platforms charge would be capped, so that the price limit could not be got round through fees. Resale platforms would have a legal duty to monitor and enforce the cap. And individuals would be banned from reselling more tickets than they were allowed to buy in the original sale.

The rules would apply to any platform reselling tickets to UK fans, including specialist resale sites and social media. The Competition and Markets Authority, the CMA, would enforce them, and businesses that break the rules could face fines of up to 10% of their global turnover, using powers the CMA gained under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024.

The plans would not stop resale altogether. Under the proposals, a fan who can no longer go to an event could still resell a ticket through a resale platform, as long as the price was no more than they paid, including unavoidable fees, and the platform's own fee stayed within the cap. The government's music plan says it wants to protect fans while making sure people still have a safe and secure way to resell tickets they cannot use.

None of this is law yet. The cap does not apply until Parliament passes legislation and it comes into force, and no start date has been announced.

GOV.UK reported this first. Checked against GOV.UK: Government bans ticket touting to protect fans from rip-off prices.

The numbers behind it

The government said the measures could save fans about £112 million a year, and that the average price paid for a resale ticket, including all fees, could fall by £37. It also estimated that about 900,000 more tickets a year would be bought directly from the original sellers rather than on the resale market.

Those figures come from a cost-benefit model the government published in an analytical note in December 2025. It starts from CMA estimates that about 37.1 million live event tickets were sold in the primary market in 2019, and that about 1.9 million tickets worth around £350 million were resold on secondary platforms, roughly 5% to 6% of primary sales. The note says the modelling will be refined, and that a full impact assessment will be published when the legislation is introduced to Parliament.

The government also cited CMA analysis that typical mark-ups on secondary market tickets are more than 50%, and Trading Standards investigations that found tickets being resold for up to six times their original cost.

How the plan took shape

The proposals began with a public consultation, Putting fans first, launched on 10 January 2025 by the Department for Business and Trade and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It asked for views on a price cap anywhere from the original price up to a 30% uplift, on limiting how many tickets a reseller could list, on new legal duties for resale websites and apps, and on stronger enforcement, including a possible licensing regime for resale platforms and higher fines. Trading Standards can currently fine up to £5,000 for breaches of ticketing rules.

The consultation ran until 4 April 2025 and received more than 400 responses from fans, people working in live events, ticketing platforms, trade bodies, enforcement agencies, academics and parliamentarians. The government said respondents were broadly supportive of new laws, including a cap that stops anyone reselling a ticket for profit. In the end it chose the tightest option on the table: no uplift above the original price at all.

The CMA set out its own view in March 2025, offering advice on how a resale price cap could be designed and a model for targeted enforcement so that the cap would meet the government's aims. A separate call for evidence looked at pricing practices across the live events sector, including dynamic pricing.

What people said

Launching the plans, the Business Secretary at the time, Peter Kyle, said the measures were designed to break the touts' business model so that more fans could see their favourite stars at a fair price. The Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said touts had used bots to buy up batches of tickets and resell them at sky-high prices, and that the government was putting fans first.

The music industry had pushed for the change for years. The FanFair Alliance, set up in 2016 by the Music Managers Forum and artist managers to campaign against large-scale touting, called the announcement fantastic news for music fans but urged the government to bring in the law quickly. Dan Smith of Bastille, who campaigned alongside O2 and FanFair, welcomed it, and Stuart Camp, Ed Sheeran's manager, said price caps had worked elsewhere in the world. The band Alt-J said it was now imperative that the measures were put in place as quickly as possible.

David Martin of the Featured Artists Coalition said in the government's announcement that a price cap was "the only way to curb the excesses and exploitation of the secondary ticketing market".

Where it has got to

The most recent government statement is in Turn It Up, its plan for music, published on 13 July 2026. It says a draft bill to bring in the secondary ticketing reforms is part of the government's legislative agenda for the current session of Parliament.

The plan says the draft bill will go through pre-legislative scrutiny by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, with support from the Business and Trade Committee, to make sure the result is effective, enforceable and future-proof. Pre-legislative scrutiny means MPs examine a draft before the formal bill is introduced, which can lead to changes but adds time before a law can pass.

The plan also says the government has asked the ticketing industry, led by the trade body STAR, the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers, to help tackle touting and to improve transparency in pricing.

The rules that already apply

Resale is not unregulated today. Since 6 April 2018, anyone reselling a ticket in the UK has had to tell the buyer which seat or standing area it is for, any restrictions on who can use it, its original price, and any connection the seller has with the resale website or the event organiser. Where the event organiser uses a unique ticket number, the reseller has to give that number to the buyer too.

Also in 2018, the government brought in a criminal offence, under a provision in the Digital Economy Act 2017, for using automated software, known as bots, to get round limits on how many tickets one person can buy. Offenders face an unlimited fine. Those changes followed a review of secondary ticketing by Professor Michael Waterson, whose recommendations ministers accepted.

What the current law does not do is cap the price. A seller can still list a ticket for more than face value, as long as the required information is given. The proposed law would change that.

Dynamic pricing and the Oasis sale

Resale is not the only pricing issue fans have raised. Dynamic pricing, where the original seller raises prices with demand, caused anger during the sale of tickets for the Oasis reunion tour in 2024. In September 2025 the CMA secured commitments from Ticketmaster to give fans 24 hours' notice of tiered pricing, to provide clearer price information during online queues and to stop using misleading ticket labels, the government said.

The price cap would not stop dynamic pricing in the original sale. It deals only with resale, and the government has instead welcomed work by STAR to set best practice for the industry, including on price transparency.

In the news this autumn

Ticketing has stayed in the headlines. On 28 October the ticket seller Gigantic halted the presale for Sam Fender's 2027 homecoming shows at St James' Park in Newcastle after its system detected what it called an unusually high volume of suspicious activity, as Samantha Jagger reported for BBC News. Fender told fans there had been a sophisticated bot attack and moved the Newcastle presale back 24 hours, to 9.30am the next day. Gigantic apologised and said fans should be able to buy tickets fairly.

The BBC reported that a source had no problems buying tickets for Fender's London show, and neither Fender nor Gigantic said who was behind the activity. Using bots to get round purchase limits has been a criminal offence since 2018, but the price cap is aimed at a different part of the problem: removing the profit that makes buying tickets in bulk worth doing in the first place.

Days earlier, Fender had removed a ticket category from sale because he was unhappy with the cost to fans, which he said was out of his control, BBC News reported.

Where NeedATicket fits

NeedATicket does not sell, resell or hold tickets. We check the prices StubHub lists for each show every hour, keep a record of how they move, and email you an alert when a price falls to your budget. Every price we show is the listing price, plus StubHub booking fees at checkout.

If the law changes, the prices we show will change with it, and we will update this page when a draft bill is published, when it is introduced to Parliament and when any cap comes into force.