You have had this happen. The ticket is $38 until checkout, where it is $54. The hotel room is $129 a night until a "resort fee" appears on a property with no resort. The sandwich is $10 on the board and $10.50 on the receipt because of a fee with a wellness-sounding name. You did not misread anything. You were shown a number that was never the number.
Since January 1, 2025, that has been illegal in Minnesota in most — not all — of the places it happens. I read consumer statutes for a living, and this one is worth reading closely, because the prohibition is a single sentence and the qualifications around it run nine more paragraphs. The carve-outs are not fine print. They are the story.
One sentence, and what it actually reaches
Minnesota Statutes section 325D.44, subdivision 1a, paragraph (a), says a person engages in a deceptive trade practice when, in the course of business, vocation, or occupation, that person "advertises, displays, or offers a price for goods or services that does not include all mandatory fees or surcharges."
That is the whole rule. Everything else is definition and exception.
"Mandatory fee" is defined in paragraph (b), and the definition is broad in two ways people miss. It "includes but is not limited to" — so the list is a floor, not a boundary. And the three tests are joined by or, not and: a fee counts if it "must be paid in order to purchase the goods or services being advertised," or it "is not reasonably avoidable by the consumer," or "a reasonable person would expect to be included in the purchase of the goods or services being advertised." Any one prong does it. (The Attorney General's own compliance FAQ renders those three prongs with an "and" between the second and third. The statute says "or." The statute controls.)
Government taxes on the sale are carved out by name. Sales tax stays outside the advertised price. Import duties and corporate income tax do not — the office's guidance says so directly, which is why a retailer cannot advertise $20 and then add a "tariff fee" at the register.
The law was House File 3438, chief-authored by Rep. Greenman in the House and by Sen. Port in the Senate, introduced February 12, 2024. It went to a conference committee, came back, and passed 76–57 in the House on May 13, 2024 and 36–31 in the Senate on May 17. The governor signed it May 20. Fifty-seven representatives and thirty-one senators voted no. This was not a consensus bill, and anyone telling you it was is not counting.
The exceptions are the real statute
Paragraph (a) is the rule. Paragraphs (c) through (k) are the qualifications, and six of them are express safe harbors that begin with the same phrase: "is compliant with this subdivision if."
An auction complies by disclosing mandatory fees clearly and conspicuously and stating that total cost may vary — because the total is genuinely indeterminate until the bidding stops. Services priced by consumer selection, distance, or time comply by disclosing the factors that determine the total price, the mandatory fees, and that the cost may vary. Both of those make sense to me. A tow operator cannot post one number for a job whose length he does not yet know.
A delivery platform complies by a two-step disclosure: the flat fee or percentage shown when you pick the vendor or item, and an itemized subtotal page before checkout. Note what that is not. It is not an all-in price at the top of the screen.
And then there is paragraph (h) — the one carve-out the Attorney General's office worked through with a sample menu. A food or beverage service establishment, including a hotel, complies if every priced offer or advertisement includes "a clear and conspicuous disclosure of the percentage of any automatic and mandatory gratuities charged." A mandatory 20 percent gratuity for parties of eight does not have to be baked into the menu price. It has to be stated as a percentage. A restaurant's mandatory "health and wellness fee," by contrast, is not a gratuity, and the AG's guidance says it must be inside the menu price.
Then subdivision 1b removes three categories outright: fees authorized by law on the purchase or lease of a motor vehicle charged by a dealer; any business or affiliate regulated by the Public Utilities Commission; and fees associated with settlement services under RESPA, though not real estate broker commissions. Broadband and cable providers get compliance by satisfying their federal disclosure rules instead. Prices regulated by the Metropolitan Airports Commission did not come under the law until June 1, 2025.
One more, and this one is not in the statute at all: the office's guidance states that a credit card surcharge a consumer could reasonably avoid by paying cash is not a "mandatory fee," so it need not be in the advertised price. That is a defensible reading of "reasonably avoidable." It also means card surcharges sit outside the advertised-price rule entirely — credit cards, and debit cards too, which the office reaches by the same reasoning in the very next answer.
Who can actually make someone stop
Two different answers live here, and the difference between them is most of what matters.
The Attorney General's published position is that if a business refuses to comply, the office can investigate and file a civil law enforcement action in district court seeking injunctive relief, restitution, disgorgement, civil penalties of up to $25,000 per violation, costs of investigation, and attorney fees. That $25,000 figure tracks Minn. Stat. § 8.31, subd. 3, which caps the civil penalty the Attorney General may recover at that amount.
A private consumer is in a different position. The Deceptive Trade Practices Act's remedy section, § 325D.45, subd. 1, authorizes an injunction — "under the principles of equity" — for a person likely to be damaged. It says nothing about money. The Minnesota Court of Appeals has read it exactly that way: in Alsides v. Brown Institute, Ltd., 592 N.W.2d 468, 476 (Minn. App. 1999), the court held "the sole statutory remedy for deceptive trade practices is injunctive relief," and in Dennis Simmons D.D.S., P.A. v. Modern Aero, Inc., 603 N.W.2d 336, 339 (Minn. App. 1999), the court affirmed that "the DTPA provides only injunctive relief." Simmons also addressed the obvious workaround — the private attorney general statute, § 8.31, subd. 3a — and closed it a page later, 603 N.W.2d at 340: subdivision 3a "specifically limits its relief to those statutes referred to in subdivision 1, and the DTPA is not included in that list."
So a Minnesota consumer who paid a hidden fee can, under this statute, get a court order telling the seller to stop. Not a refund. The damages road runs through a different law — the Consumer Fraud Act, §§ 325F.68 to .70, which is on the § 8.31 list — and the Supreme Court narrowed that road in Ly v. Nystrom, 615 N.W.2d 302 (Minn. 2000), holding the private attorney general statute "applies only to those claimants who demonstrate that their cause of action benefits the public." Two justices dissented on that point. It was a close call and it has consequences: a one-off deception aimed at one person may not qualify.
That is the honest shape of it. Enforcement here is overwhelmingly a public function.
The office has used the theory — before the law existed
On October 23, 2025, the Attorney General's office announced a settlement with TFG Holding, Inc. — the retailer behind JustFab, ShoeDazzle, and FabKids. The office alleged the company advertised one price in Minnesota stores and then added a point-of-sale surcharge of between 3.75 and 5.25 percent labeled a "tariff" fee, which the company used to recover import and customs duties. TFG is paying $331,933.72, to be deposited into the Consumer Protection Restitution Account created under § 8.37 unless that account is already full from other pending payments, plus $15,000 to Minnesota out of a $1 million multistate payment. The announcement includes a detail worth sitting with: "This law went into effect after TFG's unlawful conduct took place." The junk-fee charges were brought under the older consumer-fraud statutes.
That cuts against a story I could have written and did not: it is not true that nobody is enforcing hidden-fee cases in Minnesota.
Tickets are governed twice, by two different agencies
Minnesota also passed a separate ticket law the same month. Section 325F.676, enacted by 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 94, signed May 7, 2024 and effective for tickets sold on or after January 1, 2025, requires operators, ticket resellers, and online ticket marketplaces to disclose, at all times during listing and purchase, "the total cost of the ticket, inclusive of all fees and surcharges that must be paid in order to purchase the ticket," plus the service-charge portion and any other fee. It bars the price from increasing for a particular person after it is first displayed. Those obligations only attach to sellers with at least $5,000 in annual aggregate transactions.
But § 325F.676, subd. 5, assigns enforcement to the commissioner of commerce under § 45.027, where the civil penalty ceiling is $10,000 per violation. So one Minnesota ticket transaction can implicate two statutes, two enforcers, and two penalty schedules. Layered on top is the FTC's Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, 90 Fed. Reg. 2066 (Jan. 10, 2025), effective May 12, 2025, which covers only live-event tickets and short-term lodging and expressly sets a floor rather than a ceiling: 16 C.F.R. § 464.4(b) provides that a state law is not inconsistent with the rule if the protection it affords "is greater than the protection provided under this part." Minnesota is free to go further. On tickets it already has, in one respect — § 325F.676, subd. 2(b) forbids displaying any component of the price more prominently than the total. Subdivision 1a says nothing of the kind.
What this law cannot do
The carve-outs are wide, and they are not edge cases. Between the six safe harbors, the three exemptions, and the guidance on avoidable card surcharges, a great deal of everyday commerce satisfies this law through disclosure rather than through an all-in number. Contracts signed before January 1, 2025 are untouched; the law is not retroactive.
The central limit is one the Attorney General's office states in its own guidance: "the law is not a pricing regulation and does not dictate how much someone can charge for goods or services." This statute governs how a price is displayed. It does not govern how high it is. A seller who was charging $38 plus a $16 fee and now advertises $54 has fully complied and taken exactly the same amount out of your pocket. A fee folded into the headline price is still a fee you pay.
What you get is comparability. That is worth something real — the FTC's own final regulatory analysis for its parallel federal rule estimated that up-front pricing in live-event ticketing alone would save consumers between 1.02 million and 13.6 million hours a year of wasted search time, worth roughly $26.3 million to $350.6 million annually, valuing non-work time at $25.81 an hour off a 2023 BLS mean wage of $31.48. But comparability is not relief. Do not let anyone sell it to you as relief.
The other side of this has a case too, and it is on the record. In the FTC's rulemaking, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argued that firms might limit or eliminate price advertising altogether to avoid the risk of quoting an inaccurate total, which would raise consumer search costs. The Commission rejected that argument as unsupported. And the federal rule itself issued over a dissent — the final rule closes with the line "By direction of the Commission, Commissioner Ferguson dissenting." Reasonable people at the top of the agency that wrote the rule disagreed about it.
What we can do
Give subdivision 1a a remedy an individual can use. One line — adding sections 325D.43 to 325D.48 to the list in § 8.31, subd. 1 — would put the private damages remedy of subdivision 3a behind this law and answer the problem Simmons identified. Right now a consumer's only statutory remedy is an injunction, and nobody hires a lawyer to win an order telling a company to stop charging a fee they already paid.
Add a prominence rule. The federal rule requires that total price be displayed "more prominently than any other pricing information." Subdivision 1a has no prominence requirement at all, which permits a compliant all-in price in small type beside a large, cheerful, incomplete one. Copy the federal sentence.
Settle the card-surcharge question in statute, not in an FAQ. Whether an avoidable credit card surcharge belongs in the advertised price is currently answered by agency guidance rather than by statute. That is a large question to leave to an FAQ. The legislature should decide it in text, either way, and stop leaving businesses to guess.
Publish the enforcement numbers. I could not find any public count of complaints received or actions filed under subdivision 1a. An annual line — complaints in, matters opened, actions filed, money recovered — costs almost nothing and is the only way voters can tell whether a law is working or decorating the statute book.
A law that tells you the truth about a price is worth having. Just do not confuse being told the truth with being charged less.
First the facts. Then the fix.
Sources
Every statutory quotation here was taken from the raw text of the section at revisor.mn.gov, not from a summary. Minn. Stat. § 325D.44, subd. 1a and subd. 1b supplied the prohibition in paragraph (a), the three-prong disjunctive definition of "mandatory fee" and the government-tax exclusion in paragraph (b), the six "is compliant with this subdivision if" safe harbors at (c), (f), (g), (h), (i), and (j), the shipping allowance at (d), the discount savings clause at (e), the federal-preemption clause at (k), and the three exemptions — motor vehicle dealer fees, PUC-regulated businesses, and RESPA settlement services — in subdivision 1b; the section's History line reads "1973 c 216 s 2; 1986 c 444; 1988 c 592 s 11; 2023 c 57 art 4 s 6,7; 2024 c 111 s 1,2; 2025 c 20 s 247," and I pulled both session laws. The enacting law, 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 111 (H.F. 3438), carries the effective dates in its own EFFECTIVE DATE sections — January 1, 2025 generally, June 1, 2025 for industries whose prices are regulated by the Metropolitan Airports Commission — and shows it was presented to the governor May 17, 2024 and signed May 20, 2024 at 1:47 p.m. The 2025 amendment, 2025 Minn. Laws ch. 20, § 247, is a Revisor's technical bill and changed only paragraph (j), inserting the reference to FCC Report and Order 24-29. The vote counts (House repassage as amended by conference, 76–57, May 13, 2024; Senate adoption and repassage, 36–31, May 17, 2024; earlier House passage 70–61 and Senate third reading 41–24) and the authors, Rep. Greenman in the House and Sen. Port in the Senate, come from the bill's official action history on the Revisor's site. Remedies come from § 325D.45 (injunction under subd. 1; costs and the two narrow attorney-fee triggers under subd. 2), § 325D.48 (the act's short title, the Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act), § 8.31 (the attorney general's investigative duty and enumerated statutes in subd. 1, the $25,000 civil penalty in subd. 3, and the private remedy in subd. 3a), § 8.37 (the Consumer Protection Restitution Account), § 325F.676 (ticket disclosures in subd. 2, the $5,000 aggregate-transactions threshold in subd. 2(f), and enforcement by the commissioner of commerce in subd. 5), and § 45.027, subd. 6 (the commissioner's $10,000-per-violation penalty).
Case law was read in full from the opinions themselves, not from snippets — Alsides, Simmons and Ly on CourtListener, and each of them re-checked page by page, along with Philip Morris, against the Caselaw Access Project's star-paginated archive: Alsides v. Brown Institute, Ltd., 592 N.W.2d 468, 476 (Minn. App. 1999) ("the sole statutory remedy for deceptive trade practices is injunctive relief"); Dennis Simmons D.D.S., P.A. v. Modern Aero, Inc., 603 N.W.2d 336, 339–40 (Minn. App. 1999) (the DTPA "provides only injunctive relief," at 339, and § 8.31, subd. 3a "specifically limits its relief to those statutes referred to in subdivision 1, and the DTPA is not included in that list," at 340, a point Simmons attributes to State ex rel. Humphrey v. Philip Morris Inc., 551 N.W.2d 490, 496 (Minn. 1996), where the supreme court wrote that "[t]he only statute not listed in subdivision 1 but still pled by plaintiffs is the Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices statute"); and Ly v. Nystrom, 615 N.W.2d 302, 314 (Minn. 2000) (the private attorney general statute "applies only to those claimants who demonstrate that their cause of action benefits the public," over a dissent by Justice Page joined by Justice Gilbert).
The Attorney General's positions are quoted from that office's own documents: its "Frequently Asked Questions About Minnesota's New Price Transparency Law" (revised 4/2025), for the statement that "the law is not a pricing regulation and does not dictate how much someone can charge for goods or services," for the treatment of sales tax versus import duties, for the credit-card-surcharge guidance and the debit-card answer that immediately follows it, for the restaurant-fee guidance and the pair of compliant menus and one non-compliant menu the office prints under its "Restaurants" heading, for the non-retroactivity of the law, and for the enumerated enforcement remedies including civil penalties of up to $25,000 per violation; and its October 23, 2025 announcement of the TFG Holding, Inc. settlement, for the 3.75-to-5.25-percent "tariff" surcharge allegation, the $331,933.72 restitution-account payment, the $15,000 Minnesota share of a $1 million multistate payment, and the statement that "This law went into effect after TFG's unlawful conduct took place." Federal material comes from the Federal Register text of the Trade Regulation Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, 90 Fed. Reg. 2066 (Jan. 10, 2025), effective May 12, 2025: the codified rule at 16 C.F.R. §§ 464.1 through 464.5, including the "covered good or service" definition limiting it to live-event tickets and short-term lodging, the prominence requirement at § 464.2(b), and the state-law floor at § 464.4; the Commission's final regulatory analysis for the 1.02-million-to-13.6-million-hour and $26.3-million-to-$350.6-million annual search-time estimates, the $25.81 value of non-work time derived from the $31.48 BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics 2023 mean hourly wage, and the Commission's summary and rejection of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's search-cost comment (FTC-2023-0064-3127); and the rule's closing line, "By direction of the Commission, Commissioner Ferguson dissenting."
Three things I could not establish. First, no published Minnesota appellate decision construing section 325D.44, subdivision 1a, turned up in a CourtListener search — but CourtListener does not index Minnesota district court filings and its coverage of unpublished state decisions is incomplete, so that is an absence of evidence, not proof that no case exists. Second, I found no published count of complaints or enforcement actions under subdivision 1a, which is why asking for that number is one of the fixes above; the TFG matter was charged under the older consumer-fraud statutes, not under this one. Whether the Attorney General's civil-penalty authority under section 8.31 reaches a subdivision 1a violation has not, so far as I could find, been decided by a Minnesota appellate court — the office asserts it, and section 8.31, subdivision 1 is written to reach unlawful business practices "specifically, but not exclusively" through its enumerated list. This piece describes public law for a general audience. It is not legal advice, it is about no client or case of mine, and reading it creates no attorney-client relationship. It runs longer than the series' usual length because the exceptions could not be summarized honestly in fewer words. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.