100 Ticket Bills, 13 Failed Price Caps: What Actually Passed in the US States in 2026

While Europe waits for bills that commence in 2028, the United States has spent 2026 legislating ticket resale at speed — not in Congress, where the TICKET Act has been stuck for two sessions, but in the statehouses. More than 100 ticket-related bills were introduced this year. Three jurisdictions have now enacted rules that bind sellers within months rather than years.

The headline number, though, is the other one: roughly 13 resale price-control proposals failed to advance. That ratio is the actual story of the 2026 session, and it is the part the press releases on both sides leave out.

Here is what passed, what stalled, who pushed it, and what any of it means if you list tickets in the US market. Status as of August 2026.

Vermont: a cap that is much narrower than the headline

Act 109 took effect on 1 July 2026 and is routinely described as a 110% resale cap — a maximum markup of ten percent. That description is right about the number and wrong about the scope.

The cap applies only where an event is held at an independent venue and one of three further conditions is met: the venue seats 3,000 or fewer; it is a nonprofit venue that hosts agricultural fairs, exhibitions or multiday community events alongside live performances; or it is primarily used for collegiate or amateur sports.

“Independent venue” is statutorily defined, and the definition does the heavy lifting. The venue must derive a majority of its revenue, excluding charitable donations, from ticketed events; must not be majority-owned by a publicly traded company; and must not operate venues in more than ten states. Arena and amphitheatre inventory — the tickets that actually carry markups — falls outside all of it.

The rest of the act is broader than the cap and matters more. Selling a ticket you do not own at the time of sale is prohibited outright. So are deceptive resale sites designed to look like an official box office.

Enforcement runs through the Attorney General’s Consumer Assistance Program as an unfair trade practice, with penalties up to $10,000 per violation. It is complaint-driven: an investigation starts when someone files, not when an algorithm flags a listing.

And it expires. Section 2 repeals the entire ticket-resale subchapter on 1 July 2028. Unless the legislature extends or replaces it, every provision above disappears two years and one day after taking effect. Vermont wrote itself a pilot, not a settlement.

Washington D.C.: the strictest number in the country, on a slow clock

The RESALE Act — Restricting Egregious Scalping Against Live Entertainment — passed the D.C. Council unanimously in July. Its arithmetic is the tightest in the country:

• resale is capped at 10% above the ticket price;
• platform fees on that resale are capped at a further 10%;
• so the most a buyer can pay, all in, is 120% of face value.

Alongside the cap: a ban on speculative listings, and a licensing and bonding requirement for anyone advertising more than 50 tickets a year. That threshold is the provision most likely to catch people who do not think of themselves as brokers.

Two qualifications matter. The act covers concerts and live entertainment, not sporting events. And in a last-minute amendment from Ward 2 councilmember Brooke Pinto, the Council stripped out language that would have let the mayor regulate fees charged by primary sellers such as Ticketmaster. A bill sold as a fee-fairness measure now regulates one side of the fee problem.

It is also not law yet. It goes to Mayor Muriel Bowser, then through the 30-day congressional review that every permanent D.C. statute has to clear. If it survives both, it takes effect on 1 January 2027.

North Carolina: no cap, and the most likely template

North Carolina did the opposite of a headline. Section 5.8 of SB 257, the 2026 Appropriations Act signed by Governor Josh Stein on 7 July, creates a new Article 9 of Chapter 75 of the General Statutes without touching price at all.

What it requires instead: all-in pricing shown upfront, a ban on speculative sales, tighter restrictions on ticket-buying bots, clear disclosure on resale marketplaces that a listing is a resale — and a link to the original seller so a buyer can check the primary price for themselves.

It applies to tickets sold or resold on or after 1 October 2026.

No cap, no licence, no bond. Just an obligation to show the buyer what they are actually looking at. Of the three, it is the one most likely to be copied, because it is the one nobody has to defend on economic grounds.

Side by side

	Vermont	Washington D.C.	North Carolina
Instrument	Act 109	RESALE Act	SB 257, § 5.8
Price rule	110% of face, independent venues only	110% of face + 10% fee cap = 120% all-in	None
Speculative listings	Banned	Banned	Banned
Reseller licence	No	Yes, above 50 tickets a year	No
Scope	Live events at qualifying venues	Concerts, not sport	Live entertainment
In force	1 July 2026	1 January 2027, if it clears review	1 October 2026
Enforcement	AG, complaint-driven, $10k per violation	D.C. licensing and consumer protection	Chapter 75 unfair trade practice
Expiry	Sunsets 1 July 2028	—	—

What did not pass, and where the fight moves next

Thirteen price-cap proposals failed this cycle. The two live ones are worth watching because they will decide whether 2026 reads as a wave or a blip.

California. AB 1720, the Fans First Act, would cap resale at 110% of face with a 10% fee limit. It has cleared committees but now carries a formal Department of Finance objection and a growing legislative record of doubt about whether the cap helps buyers at all. Its companion, AB 1349 — speculative tickets, bots, deceptive practices — has passed each Senate policy committee unanimously. That split is instructive: the disclosure half moves without friction, the price half does not.

Massachusetts. The standalone cap bill stalled; the governor is now weighing whether to push it through the budget instead, the same route Ontario and North Carolina used. Budget vehicles skip the hearings, which is precisely why they are attractive and precisely why the resulting text tends to need fixing later — as Ontario is discovering.

Maine is already live and rarely mentioned: a 10% cap plus bans on bots, speculative tickets and hidden fees, in force since September 2025.

Who is actually driving this

The campaign is coordinated, and it is not grassroots. Fix the Tix — the coalition whose members include NIVA, Eventbrite, the Recording Academy and the Music Artists Coalition — has pushed the same package into Congress and into state legislatures: cap resale at the original total cost, cap resale fees at 10%, ban speculative listings without exception, itemise fees from the first click. Irving Azoff was closely involved in its formation, and the coalition’s asks have consistently run parallel to Live Nation’s lobbying. In June it launched a Fan Action Center, citing reports of more than 6,000 deceptive ticketing sites and URLs.

The counter-argument is not that fans are wrong to be angry. It is structural, and it comes from competition economists and from the Progressive Policy Institute: rules that make independent marketplaces liable for pricing, while leaving the primary system’s own fees untouched, push inventory and buyers toward the platform that already dominates distribution — the same platform under federal and state antitrust scrutiny. The D.C. amendment stripping primary-fee oversight is that argument in a single vote.

It is worth being precise about what this does and does not prove. Advocacy on both sides is loud. But a legislative programme that regulates one half of a two-sided market, and is authored by parties with a commercial interest in the other half, deserves the scrutiny it is getting.

And the resale industry’s central problem is not really in any of these bills. Thirteen caps failed. The provisions that keep passing — speculative-listing bans, all-in pricing, links to the primary seller, disclosure that a listing is a resale — are the ones nobody can argue against without arguing for opacity. That is not a legislative problem. It is a reputation problem, and no amount of committee testimony fixes it.

What changes for sellers

The patchwork is now real, and it is per state. A listing legal in one state is a licensing violation in another. Every serious marketplace is building state-level compliance logic; expect listing forms to start asking where the event is and what you paid.

Speculative listing is finished in the US, in practice. Every law that passed this year bans it, including the one with no price cap. If any part of your approach depends on listing tickets you do not yet hold, it has a known end date.

Disclosure duties reach you before caps do. Upfront all-in pricing and mandatory links to the primary seller mean your listing sits next to the original price, visibly. The margin that survives is the one you can justify to a buyer looking at both numbers.

Volume thresholds create obligations you may not notice. D.C.’s 50-ticket line is low enough that a moderately active seller crosses it without ever feeling like a business.

Caps are still the exception. Three jurisdictions enacted rules; only two of them touch price, one of those narrowly and with a 2028 expiry. Anyone telling you US resale was capped in 2026 has read the headlines and not the statutes.

What to watch

• 1 October 2026 — North Carolina’s rules bind, including the link-to-primary requirement.
• Autumn 2026 — whether California’s AB 1720 survives the Department of Finance objection, and whether AB 1349 passes without it.
• 1 January 2027 — the D.C. RESALE Act, if Bowser signs and Congress does not intervene.
• 1 July 2028 — Vermont’s sunset, and the first real evidence of whether a narrow cap did anything measurable.

For how a cap behaves when it is genuinely enforced, Ontario is the live experiment. For the European picture, what the UK, EU and Germany are planning, and for the German bill specifically, Hubig’s price cap and “protected ticket”.

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