Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey has filed a bill that would stop a ticket marketplace charging more than 10 per cent of a ticket's listed price for the service of listing it for resale. Resale itself would be capped at 110 per cent of the original ticket price. The bill does not say what the original price is.
That second sentence is the interesting one, and the third sentence is the problem. The fee cap is the part worth reading twice, because almost every ticketing law of the last two years has aimed at the resale price and left the platform's cut alone. This one goes straight at the cut.
What does the bill actually say?
The ticket provisions sit at Section 27 of H.5679, the Governor's closeout supplemental budget for the 2026 fiscal year, and would add a new Section 207 to Chapter 140 of the General Laws under the name the Great Divide Act. The bill was read and referred to House Ways and Means on 24 September.
Two numbers do the work. Subsection (d) bars a ticket business from reselling a ticket for more than 110 per cent of the price of the original ticket. Subsection (e) bars a ticket business from charging more than 10 per cent of the listed price of the ticket for the service of listing it for resale or providing a resale marketplace.
The rest is familiar from the 2026 wave: a ban on listing tickets you do not hold, with a carve-out for genuinely contingent inventory such as a playoff game that has not been scheduled yet; a ban on implying an official affiliation you do not have; a duty to tell the buyer the resale price is capped; and enforcement by the Attorney General under the state's consumer protection statute. Sporting event tickets are exempt from the 110 per cent cap, and so is any resale covered by a written contract with the ticket issuer that permits a higher price.
This is Healey's second run at it. The same policy went in as a standalone filing in July, and a Senate version is still sitting in a House and Senate conference committee on a separate economic development bill. Putting it in a closeout budget is a way of giving it a second set of legs while the first set argues.
Why is a cap on the fee different from a cap on the price?
A resale cap tells a reseller what they may charge a buyer. A fee cap tells the platform what it may charge for standing between them. Those are different arguments, and only one of them has ever been aimed at the business model itself.
Vermont's Act 109, Quebec's Bill 10, Ontario's rewritten Ticket Sales Act and the failed California AB 1720 all regulate the resale price. Massachusetts is proposing to regulate both, and the 10 per cent figure lands in the same neighbourhood as the one a Vanderbilt working paper floated in August. Two separate exercises arriving at roughly the same number is not proof that the number is right, but it does tell you what a legislature thinks a listing service is worth.
Regulating a percentage is an admission that the percentage is the product. Nobody writes a law capping what a fixed monthly subscription may charge, because a fixed monthly subscription does not get bigger when your event does.
What is the price of the original ticket?
Here is the bit that should worry anyone who sells tickets in Massachusetts. Section 207 defines four terms: entertainer, live event, speculative ticket and ticket business. It does not define price. It does not use the phrase total price, all in, or face value anywhere in relation to a ticket.
So a ticket sold at 100 dollars with a 15 dollar booking fee has a lawful resale ceiling of either 110 dollars or 126.50 dollars, depending on a reading nobody has supplied yet. Subsection (h) hands the question to the state's Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation to sort out by regulation.
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Vermont, drafting in the same legislative wave, defined price in its second paragraph as the total amount paid including all taxes, fees and charges, with only shipping left out. Ontario went the other way and repealed its old definition of face value entirely, then started fining marketplaces before writing the regulation that says how anyone is supposed to prove what the original price was. Massachusetts is currently drafted closer to Ontario than to Vermont.
| Measure | What it caps | What the cap is measured against |
|---|---|---|
| H.5679 subsection (d) | The resale price | 110 per cent of the price of the original ticket, which is undefined |
| H.5679 subsection (e) | The marketplace's listing charge | 10 per cent of the resale listing price, not the original price |
| Vermont Act 109 | The resale price at independent venues | 110 per cent of the total amount paid, fees and taxes included |
| Quebec Bill 10 | The resale price | The price announced by the vendor the producer authorised |
What does this mean for event organisers?
Three practical things, none of which require the bill to pass.
First, the number your checkout publishes is increasingly the number somebody else's compliance department has to work from. If your advertised price and your final price are different numbers, you have created the ambiguity that the Massachusetts drafting exposes. Publishing one all in figure removes the argument, and we wrote up which number your checkout should publish in more detail last week.
Second, note where the 10 per cent bites. It applies to the listing charge on the resale price, not to anything a primary seller charges. If you sell your own tickets, this bill does not cap what you or your platform may take. That asymmetry runs through every resale law passed so far: the secondary market gets a ceiling and the primary market does not.
Third, and this is the part that affects your budget rather than your legal file, a percentage is a moving target by design. Whether a legislature sets it at 10 per cent or a marketplace sets it at 20, the amount you or your buyers pay still rises every time the event does better. That is the pricing model question sitting underneath the whole debate, and it is the reason a bill has to exist at all.
Where does eventcloud sit in this?
Plainly: eventcloud is not a resale marketplace, so a cap on listing charges would not apply to it. What is relevant is the shape underneath. eventcloud charges a flat 125 dollars per user per month with no per ticket fee, and payments run through the organiser's own Stripe account, so the platform cost is identical whether an event sells 500 tickets or 50,000. There is no percentage to cap because there is no percentage. Unlimited events, tickets and registrations are the product, and the absence of a per ticket cut is the proof rather than the pitch. You can see the arithmetic on the pricing page.
The honest edges, because a claim is only worth quoting if the limits come with it. eventcloud bills per user, from one, so growth in your team costs money even though growth in your audience does not. White label is an Enterprise capability rather than something on the Team plan, and there is no white label add on to buy at any price. eventcloud does not do virtual or hybrid events. If most of your programme runs on a screen, another platform will serve you better.
H.5679 may not survive its committee, and the conference version may land somewhere else entirely. But the direction is set, and it is worth noticing what legislatures are now arguing about. Not whether tickets cost too much. Whether the slice taken in the middle should have a number written on it.
