TL;DR. The government has confirmed it intends to cap ticket resale at face value, with no uplift, plus a cap on platform service fees, volume limits for sellers and liability for the platforms themselves. A draft Bill was announced in the King's Speech on 13 May 2026. It is not law yet, it has no commencement date, and reporting suggests the timetable may slip. Nothing about your summer changes, but the direction of travel is unambiguous.
What has actually been decided
In its consultation response published on 19 November 2025, the government confirmed the shape of the intended regime:
- A face-value cap with no permitted uplift. Earlier proposals had floated a percentage uplift of up to 30%. That is not what was confirmed.
- The cap is defined to include unavoidable fees paid during the original purchase, including service charges - so the reference price is what the original buyer actually handed over, not the headline ticket price.
- Resale platform service fees would themselves be capped, closing the obvious route around a ticket-price cap.
- Volume limits on how many tickets an individual can resell.
- Platform liability, with enforcement running through the DMCC Act route.
What is still only a draft
This is the part that gets flattened in most coverage. The Bill was announced in the King's Speech on 13 May 2026 for publication in draft. A draft Bill is not a law and not even a Bill before Parliament yet. It goes through pre-legislative scrutiny and further industry consultation first, and only then can it be formally introduced.
No commencement timeframe has been announced. Reporting during 2026 has suggested the timetable may slip by at least a year. Anyone telling you the cap applies to a ticket you are buying this August is wrong.
The practical read
For this summer, the rules are the rules you already have: capped face-value channels exist and are optional, open marketplaces exist and are legal. What has changed is the certainty about which of those the law is being written around.
What it would change if it lands
Two things worth thinking about now.
The gap between channels closes. Today the practical difference between a capped channel and an open marketplace is price, and plenty of people pay the difference for the certainty of finding a ticket at all. If resale is capped at face value across the board, that trade disappears, and the scarce resource stops being money and becomes purely knowing first. Everyone is buying at the same price; the only variable left is who saw the listing.
Supply on capped channels may rise. If reselling at a profit stops being possible, tickets bought to resell become tickets somebody has to actually offload at face value. Where those land is the sanctioned channels.
We have no stake in which way the legislation goes. We watch official face-value channels either way, because that is the only kind of resale we think is worth pointing anyone at. But it is worth saying plainly that a face-value world is one where an alert matters more, not less.
What to do about it now
Nothing dramatic. Buy on the channels your event actually sanctions, read the event's own terms rather than a resale site's marketing, and do not pay marketplace prices in the belief that a cap is about to rescue you - it is not in force, and it may not be for some time.
If you want to be told the moment a face-value ticket appears for a sold-out event, that is what we do. See the events we watch.