Hidden Fee Compliance for Businesses 2026: What General Counsel Should Fix Before Customers or Regulators Do
- Todd Nurick
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Hidden Fee Compliance for Businesses 2026 belongs squarely in the day-to-day work of Fractional General Counsel and Outside General Counsel.
It comes up every time a business adds a convenience fee, layers in a service charge, builds out a checkout flow, rolls out a subscription, charges for onboarding, or makes cancellation harder than the signup process. The Federal Trade Commission, (FTC), rule on unfair or deceptive fees has been in effect since May 12, 2025 for live-event tickets and short-term lodging, and the FTC says the rule targets bait-and-switch pricing and misleading presentation of mandatory fees. State attorneys general have kept pressing hidden-fee and drip-pricing enforcement across multiple industries, including hospitality, food delivery, and live events.
Sales wants flexibility. Marketing wants the headline number to look attractive. Finance wants to preserve margin. Operations wants to recover costs. Legal ends up sorting through whether the customer actually saw the real price soon enough, clearly enough, and in a way the business could defend later. The FTC’s FAQ says covered businesses must display the total price, including mandatory fees, clearly and conspicuously and more prominently than other pricing information.
Todd Nurick of Nurick Law Group, LLC is a Pennsylvania and New York business attorney with approximately 30 years of civilian business law and litigation experience and a former Army officer. He helps companies structure contracts, disclosures, pricing practices, compliance, and business risk management in a way that fits how the business actually operates.
Hidden Fee Compliance for Businesses 2026: where companies usually get themselves into trouble
Most businesses don’t get tripped up because they charged a fee. They get tripped up because of when the customer learned about it, how clearly the fee was described, and whether the earlier pricing presentation left the wrong impression.
That’s why this area deserves more than a quick glance from legal. A contract may mention the fee somewhere in the fine print, but if the website, app, proposal, or checkout process suggested a lower real-world price until the last minute, the company can still create exposure. The FTC says its rule prohibits tactics that obscure or misrepresent total prices and fees in covered industries. Reuters’ April analysis described “drip pricing” in the same practical way: the customer sees one number first and only discovers the real total later.
That’s why the first legal review shouldn’t start with, “Does the contract mention the fee?” It should start with, “What does the customer actually see, and when do they see it?”
Hidden Fee Compliance for Businesses 2026 in ordinary commercial practice
This shows up in regular business work all the time:
pricing pages
service agreements
subscription signups
implementation charges
platform fees
automatic renewals
cancellation flow
mandatory add-ons
“processing” or “administrative” charges
None of that sounds dramatic. But once a customer complains, a regulator starts asking questions, or a plaintiff’s lawyer lines up screenshots, the company usually wishes it had looked harder at how the pricing experience actually worked.
The FTC’s guidance focuses on total-price transparency in covered industries, but the broader enforcement trend doesn’t stop there. Reuters reported that states such as California, Connecticut, and New York have pushed their own transparency rules and enforcement positions on hidden fees. New York City’s consumer watchdog has also taken an aggressive posture on hidden fees and hard-to-cancel subscription practices.
Hidden Fee Compliance for Businesses 2026 and why state law still drives a lot of the real risk
Even when a business falls outside the FTC rule’s direct scope, the broader exposure doesn’t disappear. That’s where a lot of companies get too comfortable. They hear that the federal rule directly covers certain industries and assume the rest of the field is relatively open. It isn’t. State attorneys general and local regulators still have their own consumer-protection statutes, their own pricing-transparency rules, and their own appetite for enforcement. Reuters’ April coverage described exactly that kind of continued state-level pressure in 2026.
For companies that sell online across multiple states, this gets complicated fast. The business may use one pricing flow nationally, but the legal risk doesn’t always behave nationally. One disclosure structure, one cancellation design, or one fee description can land differently across jurisdictions that don’t read the same practices the same way.
That’s one reason this sits so naturally in the wheelhouse of Fractional General Counsel and Outside General Counsel. Someone has to look across the pricing page, the contract, the cancellation language, the renewal language, the customer-service script, and the state-law overlay and decide whether the whole thing hangs together.
What general counsel should be reviewing right now
A useful review usually starts with practical questions:
Is the fee mandatory or optional?
Does the customer see the real total price early enough?
Is the fee described in ordinary language, or buried in labels that sound technical but tell the customer very little?
Does the checkout flow line up with the contract language?
Does the renewal or cancellation process feel balanced, or does it look like the business made it easy to get in and harder to get out?
Would leadership be comfortable defending the full pricing experience, not just one clause in the contract?
That review doesn’t require a crisis. In fact, it works best before one. Businesses usually don’t need to eliminate every fee. They do need to remove avoidable surprise, avoidable ambiguity, and avoidable inconsistency. Regulators haven’t framed hidden-fee cases as technical drafting disputes. They’ve framed them as fairness and deception problems.
Conclusion
Hidden Fee Compliance for Businesses 2026 sits at the intersection of pricing, contracts, customer experience, and consumer protection. That’s exactly why it lands on the general-counsel desk so often.
It also shows up in ordinary operational decisions, not just in enforcement actions. Businesses run into these questions when they redesign checkout, revise service terms, add mandatory charges, roll out subscriptions, or try to recover costs in a tighter market.
If your business uses layered pricing, mandatory fees, service charges, subscription terms, or cancellation practices that haven’t had careful legal review in a while, Todd Nurick and Nurick Law Group, LLC can help assess the exposure, tighten the language, and bring the pricing structure closer to where it should’ve been from the start.
Sources
Federal Trade Commission, Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees to Take Effect May 12, 2025
Federal Trade Commission, Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees: Frequently Asked Questions
Reuters, State attorneys general and continued enforcement against junk fees in 2026
Reuters, State attorneys general increase antitrust and consumer protection enforcement
The Guardian, Mamdani’s consumer watchdog takes on hidden fees and difficult cancellations
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/05/mamdani-new-york-city-consumer-watchdog
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and isn't legal advice. Reading it doesn't create an attorney-client relationship. Todd Nurick and Nurick Law Group aren't your attorneys unless and until there is a fully executed written fee agreement with Todd Nurick or Nurick Law Group.
