21 November 2025
The Government has announced plans to make it illegal for tickets to concerts, theatre, comedy, sport and other live events to be resold for more than their original cost.
Ticket touting has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years. Touts buy large volumes of tickets online, often using automated bots, before relisting them on resale platforms at hugely inflated prices. This has caused misery for millions of fans and damaged the live events industry.
The new proposals will stamp out this practice, improving access for genuine fans when tickets originally go on sale and ending rip-off pricing on the resale market. This is all part of the Government's plan for national renewal by creating fairer systems and giving hard-working people the respect they deserve.
The new rules announced today make clear that:
- ticket resale above face value will be illegal - this will be defined in legislation as the original ticket price plus unavoidable fees, including service charges
- service fees charged by resale platforms will be capped to prevent the price limit being undermined
- resale platforms will have a legal duty to monitor and enforce compliance with the price cap
- individuals will be banned from reselling more tickets than they were entitled to buy in the initial ticket sale
The new rules will apply to any platform reselling tickets to UK fans, including secondary ticketing platforms and social media websites. Businesses who break the regulations could be subject to financial penalties of up to 10% of global turnover from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), under new powers introduced in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCCA).
According to analysis by the CMA, typical mark-ups on secondary market tickets exceed 50%, whilst investigations by Trading Standards has uncovered evidence of tickets being resold for up to six times their original cost.
Government analysis suggests that these measures could save fans around £112 million annually, with 900,000 more tickets bought directly from primary sellers each year. Inclusive of all fees paid, the average ticket price paid by fans on the resale market could be reduced by £37.
Today's announcement comes ahead of the Autumn Budget, which will focus on cutting NHS waiting lists, cutting the national debt and cutting the cost of living, and driving more productive and efficient use of taxpayers' money by rooting out waste in public services.
The use of pricing strategies like dynamic pricing has been another major source of frustration for concert-goers, and the Government undertook a call for evidence to explore the issue earlier this year. Today the Government welcomes the commitment from the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers (STAR) who are convening the sector to establish best practice, including on price transparency
This will build on the recent announcement by the CMA, who in September secured commitments from Ticketmaster to improve pricing information, following the Oasis ticket sale. This includes giving fans 24 hours' notice of tiered pricing, providing clearer price information during online queues, and ending misleading ticket labels - addressing the key issues that aggrieved fans during the Oasis sale.
The CMA's enforcement action in this case, and the measures agreed with Ticketmaster, send a clear message to all ticketing websites that fans must have access to clear and timely pricing information with accurate ticket descriptions, especially where there are different pricing models and queues in play. In future, the CMA will be able to respond even more swiftly and robustly (including imposing fines of up to 10% of global turnover) to breaches of consumer law, following the introduction of its new enforcement powers under Part 3 of the DMCCA.
(Source: Department for Business and Trade / Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 19 November 2025)
Read the full story on the GOV.UK website.
For information on the current law relating to the secondary ticketing market, please 'Sale and resale of tickets'.