Germany's Price Cap Plan: What Hubig's "Protected Ticket" Would Actually Change

Germany has been talking about regulating ticket resale for a decade and has never written a bill. That changed at the end of June, when Federal Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig announced legislation and named the two instruments it will contain.

The announcement is worth reading closely, because one of the two instruments is a familiar number and the other is a structural change that almost nobody is discussing.

The two instruments

A price cap. A limit on the markup permitted when a ticket is resold. Note what this is not: the UK settled on face value with no uplift at all. The German model is a capped uplift — a percentage above the original price, with the percentage still undecided. Industry submissions have proposed 25% for commercial resale as a reference point.

A new “protected ticket.” A statutory ticket category giving organisers a firmer legal basis to control what happens to a ticket for their own event after it is sold.

Hubig was explicit on the point that decides whether any of this matters: it will be binding, not voluntary. Germany has tried the voluntary route before, through platform undertakings and organiser terms, and the result is the market the ministry is now describing as a problem.

The framing, and the limit of it

The minister’s case rests on a specific example: €14 concert tickets resold for €250. She called it “profiteering at the expense of fans.”

But the announcement also contains a boundary that constrains the whole design. Resale is to remain possible. The target is abuse, not the fan who cannot attend and wants to pass a ticket on at a fair price. That distinction — the same one written into the CDU/CSU–SPD coalition agreement — is why Germany is heading for a capped markup rather than a UK-style zero-uplift rule. A face-value cap with no allowance would catch every private seller who paid a booking fee.

On platforms, Hubig went further than German ministers usually do: internationally operating marketplaces are to be held accountable too, including those based outside the EU. Her own assessment of enforcing against non-EU providers was that it is difficult, “but it is not impossible.” That sentence is the honest one in the announcement, and it is also the unsolved part.

The evidence base

The bill did not appear from nowhere. On 9 April 2026, the Federal Consumer Association (vzbv), the Bavarian consumer centre and the concert and event industry association BDKV published a joint demand for clear rules on the secondary market, under the heading “Sold out — and suddenly expensive.”

Their headline figures:

• the global ticket resale market is estimated at roughly €13 billion a year;
• markups of 250% and more are documented;
• around one third of fans report having encountered ticket fraud.

Their asks: mandatory disclosure of the original price and the markup, clear information about who the seller actually is, working notice-and-action procedures for illegal listings, and an effective ceiling on excessive markups. Consumer advocates and the live industry asking for the same four things is not a common alignment, and it is a large part of why this bill exists.

The BDKV’s own market survey adds the numbers that complicate the story:

Fans for whom resale availability matters when buying	81%
Gen Z who now buy resale tickets	every second person
Buyers deliberately waiting until shortly before the show	43%
Average resale price above original	250%, extremes at 16×
Fans who describe today’s secondary market as a rip-off	80%
Resellers selling for profit rather than because they cannot attend	70%

Read those two rows together — 81% value resale, 80% resent it — and the political problem becomes clear. Fans are not asking for the secondary market to be abolished. They are asking for it to stop being the only way to get a ticket at four times the price. A bill that removes resale entirely would break something 81% of buyers rely on; a bill that leaves prices where they are addresses nothing. The capped markup is an attempt to sit between those, and it will be judged on where the percentage lands.

Why the “protected ticket” is the bigger half

The price cap will get the headlines. The second instrument will do more.

German case law has long limited how far an organiser can restrict private resale through general terms and conditions. Clauses banning transfer outright have repeatedly failed the fairness test under §307 BGB, because a ticket is, in the ordinary case, a claim that can be assigned. That case law is the reason personalisation in Germany has been patchy and contested rather than universal.

A statutory ticket category changes the baseline. If the legislature creates a ticket type whose transfer restrictions are grounded in law rather than in a clause a court can strike down, organisers get something their terms could never reliably give them: enforceable control over the resale of their own events.

The practical consequence is straightforward. A price cap is a number you can plan around — margins compress, the market continues in a thinner form. A ticket that cannot be transferred at all removes the event from the tradeable universe entirely. If the protected ticket becomes the default for high-demand tours, the German market shrinks by supply, not by margin, and it does so faster than any cap would shrink it.

Which events get protected tickets, and on what conditions, is the single most consequential open question in the German bill. It has not been answered.

What is still undecided

• The level of the cap. 25% has been floated by industry. Nothing has been fixed. The difference between 10% and 50% is the difference between a market and a rounding error.
• The definition of the protected ticket. Which events qualify, whether organisers opt in freely, what happens to a genuine private seller holding one.
• The reference price. Every cap needs a verifiable original price. Ontario enforced one without solving that and is now writing regulations to fix it. Germany will meet the same problem the day the bill binds a platform that did not sell the original ticket.
• Foreign platforms. “Difficult but not impossible” is a policy intention, not a mechanism.
• The timeline. A ministerial draft, then cabinet, then Bundestag and Bundesrat. In force in 2028 would be a normal outcome for a bill of this kind. Nothing binds anyone in 2026.

What sellers should do now

Treat transferability as a pre-purchase check, not an afterthought. The protected ticket is the provision most likely to affect what you can actually trade, and it will apply to events announced long before the law commences — organisers do not need a statute to start personalising. We work through the current position in reselling personalised tickets.

Assume documentation duties arrive before the cap does. Disclosure of the original price and the markup is the demand every party agrees on, which makes it the provision most likely to survive drafting intact. Keep purchase records in a form you could show.

Do not plan a German strategy around speculative listings. Selling what you do not hold is in every proposal on the table, in Germany and everywhere else.

Watch the percentage, not the announcement. Whether the German secondary market remains a business is a question with a numerical answer, and the number does not exist yet.

For the wider European picture, see what the UK, EU and Germany are planning. For the two markets already living with enforced rules, Ontario’s capped market and the US state wave.

General information, not legal advice, and a snapshot of a moving picture as of August 2026. Verify the current status before making decisions that depend on it.