California's attempt to cap ticket resale at 10% above face value is dead for this session. AB 1720, the California Fans First Act, was held in the Senate Appropriations Committee on 13 August and will not advance. StubHub's state lobbying spend in California reached $3.4m this year while the bill was moving. Neither number is a footnote.
What the bill would have done, and what was left of it
Assemblymember Matt Haney introduced AB 1720 earlier this year to limit resale prices to 10% above face value on concerts, theatre, comedy and other live entertainment. Sports tickets were excluded from the start. The aim was narrow: leave room for someone who genuinely cannot attend to recover their money, while removing the margin that makes industrial-scale scalping worth the effort.
It did not reach the committee in that shape. A May amendment cut the bill's reach down to venues with capacities of 3,000 or fewer plus certain nonprofit venues, which quietly exempted almost every show where resale mark-ups actually get ugly. By the time it was held, the bill covered the rooms with the smallest resale problem and left the arenas alone.
Support was unusually broad. The National Independent Venue Association, the Music Artists Coalition, the National Independent Talent Organisation and, notably, Live Nation all backed it. TheTicketingBusiness and Music Business Worldwide both reported the outcome, alongside Rolling Stone. Haney said afterwards that the result does not change the underlying reality, which is that fans, artists and venues lose while intermediaries take more.
The $3.4m line item
The lobbying figure is the part worth sitting with. Reporting on California disclosure records put StubHub among the top corporate spenders in Sacramento this legislative season, ahead of Chevron, Verizon, AT&T and OpenAI. Reporting on the Appropriations hearing earlier in August also noted opposition from the state's Department of Finance, which raised the cost of enforcement and the burden on California courts.
Read that as a market signal rather than a political story. When a resale marketplace spends eight figures across a session to protect a pricing mechanism, it is telling you precisely how much that mechanism is worth. The spread between face value and resale price is not a rounding error in somebody else's business. It is the business.
If a company spends more defending a price gap than most organisers spend running an entire event season, the gap is not an accident. It is the product.
Where resale caps actually stand
The patchwork is getting harder to track, which is itself the point: nobody selling tickets across borders can rely on a single rule.
| Jurisdiction | Status | Headline rule |
|---|---|---|
| California | Bill held in committee, August 2026 | Proposed 10% cap, narrowed to venues of 3,000 or fewer |
| Vermont | In force since 1 July 2026 | 10% cap at independent venues, speculative listings banned |
| Ontario | In force, being amended | Cap above face value, complicated by defining face value |
Vermont's version, which took effect on 1 July, is the more instructive comparison. It caps resale at 10% over face value at independent venues, bans speculative listings for tickets the seller does not hold, prohibits deceptive URLs, and requires buyers to be told whether they are purchasing from the venue or a reseller. That last clause costs nothing to enforce and does most of the practical work.
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Pricing models and revenue transparency: what organisers still control
Here is the uncomfortable conclusion for anyone waiting on legislation. Regulation is slow, geographically inconsistent, and expensively contested. If your pricing integrity depends on a bill passing, you do not have pricing integrity, you have a hope.
What you do control sits inside your own ticketing setup, and most of it is switch-level rather than strategic:
Named tickets and controlled transfer. If a ticket can only move through your platform, the secondary market has nowhere to stand.
An official face-value exchange. Give buyers a legitimate way to offload a ticket and most of them will use it rather than a resale site.
Purchase limits that survive contact with bots. Limits enforced per verified identity rather than per checkout.
All-in pricing on your own pages. If your displayed price is the price paid, resale listings look worse by comparison rather than better.
Transparent platform economics. Know exactly what your provider takes, and whether it grows as your event grows. Our own flat-fee pricing exists precisely because percentage models make success expensive.
The bit that rarely gets said out loud
Resale caps are usually framed as consumer protection, but for organisers they are really a question of who owns the customer relationship. Every ticket sold at four times face value on a third-party site is a buyer who now associates your event with a bad experience and a company you have never met. You absorb the reputational cost and see none of the revenue.
That is why the distribution and transfer settings in your platform matter more than the legislative calendar. B2B organisers running conferences and trade shows tend to assume this is a concert problem, and for the most part it is. But delegate transfer, no-show substitution and secondary listings for sold-out industry events are the same mechanic in a quieter suit, and the answer is the same: keep the transfer inside a system you control.
What happens next
AB 1720 can return in a future session, and its supporters have said they intend to keep pushing. Whether the next version survives with its teeth intact is a fair question, given what happened to this one between introduction and committee. In the meantime the practical advice has not changed since Vermont's law came into force: assume the rules where you sell will differ from the rules next door, and design your ticketing so it does not depend on either.
If you are weighing how much of this your current platform actually handles, our platform comparisons lay out where the fee models and transfer controls differ. It is duller than a lobbying scandal, but it is the part you can act on this week.
