If you sell anything to Illinois customers — concert tickets, hotel nights, restaurant meals, subscription plans, or products in an online cart — the price you advertise is about to become a legal commitment. Starting January 1, 2027, Illinois House Bill 228, the Junk Fee Ban Act, makes it unlawful to advertise, display, or offer a price that leaves out mandatory fees and surcharges. The sticker price has to be the price, before taxes.
This is not a narrow ticketing rule. It amends the Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act, which means violations carry the enforcement machinery of the state's main consumer-protection law, with the Attorney General's office doing the enforcing. If your checkout flow adds a "service fee" or "processing fee" at the last step, you have a compliance project on your calendar. Here is what the law requires, who it covers, and how to get your pricing displays ready.
What the Law Requires: All-In Pricing Before Taxes
The core rule is simple to state and harder to implement: any price you advertise, display, or offer for a good or service must include all mandatory fees or charges, with only a few categories excluded.
The total price must be the headline number
Under the Act, a business violates the law when it offers, displays, or advertises an amount a consumer may pay without clearly and conspicuously disclosing the total price — and when it fails to display the total price more prominently than any other pricing information. In practice, that ends drip pricing: the pattern where a customer sees one number on a listing page and a bigger number at checkout after mandatory add-ons pile up.
The law also targets misrepresentation of the nature and purpose of any amount a consumer may pay. Relabeling a mandatory markup as something that sounds government-imposed or optional does not help; if the customer cannot avoid the charge, it belongs in the advertised price.
Taxes, government fees, and shipping are excluded
Not everything has to be folded into the headline price. Legal analysis of the Act notes three exclusions: taxes, government-imposed fees, and shipping charges. Those can still be added on top of the advertised price, which mirrors how most all-in pricing regimes work — the customer sees the full seller-controlled price upfront, and only genuinely variable or pass-through government amounts appear later.
That distinction matters for your checkout design. A "facility fee" you set yourself must be in the advertised price. State sales tax can still be computed at checkout. Delivery charges you pass through from a carrier can still be added. But a handling surcharge you invented lives in the headline number now.
Sponsors put the stakes at roughly $3,000 per family per year
Supporters of the bill cited estimates that hidden charges cost Illinois families on the order of $3,000 a year — the figure behind the political momentum. This was the second attempt: a junk-fee bill passed the Illinois House in 2024 but never got a Senate vote. Sponsors say the 2026 version tightened ambiguous language to make it easier for businesses to comply and for the Attorney General's office to enforce.
Who Has to Comply
The Act applies to any business advertising, displaying, or offering prices for goods or services to Illinois consumers. There is no small-business carve-out in the headline rule, so Main Street sellers are in scope alongside national chains. The industries most affected are the ones where mandatory add-on fees became standard practice:
- Live events and ticketing. Processing fees, service fees, and facility charges added after a base ticket price are the textbook violation. For ticketing, vendors and resellers will not be able to advertise a ticket price that grows through mandatory add-ons at checkout.
- Hotels and short-term rentals. Mandatory resort fees, cleaning fees a guest cannot decline, and similar per-stay surcharges must be part of the displayed rate.
- Restaurants and food service. Mandatory service charges and automatic gratuities added to every check sit squarely in the danger zone, while genuinely optional tips do not.
- Subscriptions and online retail. Monthly plans with required "platform" or "account" fees, and carts that add mandatory handling charges, need all-in displays.
- Auto dealers and repair shops. Mandatory dealer add-ons and required prep fees have to be in the advertised price rather than surfacing in the finance office.
If a fee is truly optional — the customer can complete the purchase without paying it — it can stay separate. The test is always whether the buyer can say no. Audit every fee in your price stack against that single question.
Enforcement: The Attorney General Holds the Pen
Because the Act operates through the Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act, enforcement runs through the Attorney General's office rather than a new regulator. Legal analysis of the law notes two features small-business owners should understand:
- Civil penalties can reach up to $50,000 per violation under the Consumer Fraud Act's remedies. For a pricing display shown to thousands of customers, per-violation math gets serious fast.
- There is no private right of action. Unlike California's pricing-transparency regime, which lets consumers sue directly, the Illinois Act reserves enforcement to the Attorney General. Customers cannot file their own junk-fee lawsuits under this law — but the AG's office can, and it publicly thanked the sponsors for shaping a bill it can enforce.
The law takes effect January 1, 2027, giving businesses roughly six months from signing to rework price displays, checkout flows, menus, and advertising. That sounds generous until you count how many places your prices appear: your website, your point-of-sale system, printed menus, third-party marketplaces, email promotions, and paid ads.
The Rest of the Package: Tickets and Buy Now, Pay Later
The junk-fee ban arrived as part of a consumer-protection slate signed June 25, 2026, and two companion measures affect sellers directly:
- HB 4984 — no speculative ticket resale, effective immediately. Ticket resellers cannot offer tickets they do not actually possess. If you resell event tickets, your listings must reflect real inventory now, not after January.
- SB 318 — anti-bot ticket purchasing, effective January 1, 2027. Automated bots that scoop up ticket inventory face new restrictions, on the same timeline as the junk-fee ban.
- SB 3561 — Buy Now, Pay Later lender oversight, effective immediately with compliance by January 1, 2028. BNPL lenders must register with the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. If you offer BNPL at checkout through a provider, confirm your provider is preparing to register — and note that BNPL accounting has its own gross-versus-net settlement traps at reconciliation time.
A Compliance Checklist for Small Businesses
Start with an inventory, then fix displays in order of customer visibility.
1. Map every mandatory fee in your price stack
List each fee a customer must pay to complete a purchase: service fees, processing fees, facility charges, mandatory gratuities, required account fees, non-optional cleaning or prep charges. For each one, decide: fold it into the advertised price, or convert it into something genuinely optional. There is no third option.
2. Rewrite the headline price everywhere it appears
Update your website listing pages, product pages, and checkout flow so the first price the customer sees equals the last price before tax and shipping. Then chase the long tail: point-of-sale displays, printed menus and price boards, third-party marketplace listings, quote templates, email promotions, and ad copy. Stale PDFs and old social posts advertising fee-excluded prices are easy to miss — search your own site for dollar amounts that no longer match.
3. Keep itemization on receipts, not in advertising
All-in pricing governs what you advertise, not how you account. Your receipts and invoices can — and should — still break out the components: base amount, service fee, tax, and total. Itemized records protect you in a dispute and keep your books meaningful. The rule is that the customer knew the total before deciding, not that you hide the breakdown afterward.
4. Fix the bookkeeping underneath
When a $40 ticket with a $6 service fee becomes a $46 ticket, your revenue accounts should reflect the change deliberately rather than by accident. Keep fee income in its own subaccount — for example, ticket revenue versus service-fee revenue — so you can see what the fee contributes to margin, reconcile marketplace payouts that still settle gross-versus-net, and answer questions if the Attorney General's office ever asks how your advertised prices were built. If you run promotions that waive fees, record the waiver as a discount against fee revenue, not as a missing transaction.
This is also the moment to reconcile what your payment processor reports against what your ledger shows. Processors report gross amounts; all-in pricing changes the gross. A mismatch between advertised totals and settled totals is exactly the kind of discrepancy that turns a routine records request into a painful one.
5. Train staff and document the change
Anyone who quotes prices — servers, salespeople, phone staff — needs the new script: quote the total first, then explain the breakdown. Save before-and-after screenshots of your price displays and checkout flow with dates. If a complaint ever arises about a transition-period transaction, contemporaneous evidence that you fixed displays promptly is your best defense.
6. Watch the calendar, not just Illinois
The January 1, 2027 effective date is the deadline for Illinois, but all-in pricing is now a multi-state patchwork, with California's regime already in force and other states moving. If you sell into more than one state, build one all-in pricing standard that satisfies the strictest jurisdiction you touch rather than maintaining per-state checkout logic that rots.
Keep Your Pricing Records Clean from Day One
Reworking your price displays is only half the job — the other half is keeping books that prove your advertised totals, fee breakdowns, and settled payouts all tie together. Beancount.io provides plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your financial data, so every fee subaccount and reconciliation is version-controlled and auditable. Get started for free and see why developers and finance professionals are switching to plain-text accounting.
