Every event organiser knows the feeling. You spend weeks agonising over your ticket price, trying to find the sweet spot between covering costs and keeping the event accessible. Then, within an hour of going on sale, your carefully priced tickets appear on a resale site at four times face value, and somehow you are the one fielding angry emails about it. As of 1 July, Vermont has decided it has had enough of that particular plot line, and the state's new ticket resale law, Act 109, is now officially in force.
The law arrived with a celebrity endorsement worthy of its own headline. Strafford-born singer-songwriter Noah Kahan, a man who knows a thing or two about sold-out shows, gave video testimony in support of the bill, and Governor Phil Scott signed it into law on 26 May, according to TicketNews. It makes Vermont only the second US state, after Maine, to put a hard cap on resale prices, as IQ Magazine reported. You could say scalpers in the Green Mountain State have entered their stick season.
What Act 109 Actually Does
The headline provision is the price cap: third parties can no longer resell tickets at more than 110% of the original price. But before anyone panics, the cap is narrower than the headlines suggest. It only applies to events at independent venues that meet specific criteria, and Vermont Public notes the law also requires the original price to be printed on tickets and obliges resellers to make clear that buyers are purchasing from a third party rather than the venue.
Other provisions apply to every event in the state, regardless of venue. Here is the breakdown:
| Provision | Who it applies to |
|---|---|
| Ban on speculative tickets (selling tickets you do not yet possess) | All events in Vermont |
| Ban on deceptive URLs and implied venue or artist affiliation | All resale sites and resellers |
| Original price must be printed on tickets | All ticketed events |
| 110% resale price cap | Independent venues under 3,000 capacity, nonprofit fair and community venues, collegiate and amateur sports venues |
| Exemption from the cap for venue-authorised resale contracts | Resale run under written agreement with the ticket issuer |
An independent venue, for the purposes of the cap, is one that earns most of its revenue from ticketed events, is not majority-owned by a publicly traded company, and operates in no more than 10 states. Violations count as unfair and deceptive acts under Vermont consumer law. And in a very Vermont touch of legislative humility, the whole thing sunsets on 1 July 2028 unless lawmakers renew it.
What This Means for Event Organisers
If you run conferences, trade shows or community events rather than stadium tours, you might assume this is someone else's drama. Not quite. The speculative ticketing ban applies to every event in the state, which matters if your event has ever been listed on a resale marketplace by someone who had not actually bought a ticket yet. That practice, where brokers list phantom inventory and scramble to source tickets after the sale, has burned plenty of B2B events whose delegates paid a broker premium for a registration that arrived late or never.
The disclosure rules are the quieter win. Requiring resellers to state plainly that they are not the venue, and banning lookalike URLs, tackles the single biggest source of resale confusion: attendees who believe they bought from you, at your price, and blame you when things go wrong.
A price cap does not lower demand. It just decides where the demand does its shopping.
There is also a strategic wrinkle worth noting. The law exempts resale conducted under a written contract with the ticket issuer, meaning organisers who set up an official resale or waiting list channel keep full control of pricing above the cap. That is a genuine nudge towards organiser-run resale, and if you operate in multiple states, it is another reminder that transparent, predictable pricing is rapidly moving from nice-to-have to legal requirement.
The Pendulum Swings Back
Here is the context the coverage mostly skipped: America has been here before, in reverse. A generation ago, many states had strict anti-scalping laws on the books. Then online resale marketplaces boomed, lobbying followed, and states began dismantling their caps. New York scrapped its resale price ceiling in 2007, and others followed the deregulation wave through the 2010s on the theory that an open market would serve fans better.
Nearly two decades later, the pendulum is swinging back with some force. Maine capped resale first. Vermont has now followed. Lawmakers in California and New York are weighing similar measures, Ontario has pushed through its own cap, and the UK has been inching towards a ban on above-face-value resale. At the federal level, the TICKET Act continues to advance with all-in pricing and speculative ticketing rules. What changed is not the economics but the evidence: two decades of deregulated resale produced bots, phantom listings and fan fury, and legislators have concluded the open market did not, in fact, sort itself out.
Watch This Space
The interesting test is enforcement. Critics, including resale platforms that lobbied against the bill, argue capped tickets will simply migrate to unregulated corners like social media marketplaces, where buyers have no fraud protection at all. Supporters counter that most fans buy from mainstream platforms, and that is exactly where the cap will bite. Vermont's two-year sunset clause makes this a live experiment with a built-in review date. If resale prices at small venues actually fall and the sky does not, expect a queue of statehouses citing Vermont in 2027 legislative sessions.
For organisers, the direction of travel is unambiguous: more transparency, more disclosure, and more responsibility for what happens to your tickets after the first sale. The platforms that make face-value pricing and official resale simple will be the ones that keep their organisers out of the compliance weeds. We may be biased, but we think that is a future worth applauding from the front row.
