Vermont caps resale at 110%, Maryland doesn’t cap it at all. On a tour, that’s a routing variable.

A tour routes across state lines. The artist doesn’t change, and neither does the GA / Reserved / VIP ladder you built for the run. But the rules governing what happens to a ticket after you sell it now change city by city — and that changes the pricing job at each stop.

For most of the last decade the resale market was effectively one national regime: uncapped nearly everywhere, so the pricing discipline was the same in every market you booked. That’s over. The US resale map has broken into a patchwork of different rules with different mechanisms and different start dates, and a promoter routing a multi-market run is the one who has to read the difference.

Three different regimes now sit within a few tour dates of each other. In Vermont, Act 109 caps ticket resale at 110% of face for independent venues of 3,000 seats or fewer (Act 109 enacted text), and it has been in effect since July 1, 2026 — the first enforceable resale price cap live in the US (Vermont Arts Council; TicketNews). D.C. passed the RESALE Act, a 110%-of-face cap — 10% over face — due to take effect January 1, 2027 (DC Council; Pollstar). Massachusetts has a 110% cap filed by Gov. Healey in July (Mass.gov). California went the other way: its own 10%-over-face cap, AB 1720, died in the Senate Appropriations Committee in August 2026 — held on its suspense file after StubHub’s California lobbying spend hit $3.4M for the year (MBW). The map contracts as fast as it spreads.

Then there’s the other half of the map. Maryland bans speculative listings and mandates all-in price disclosure, but sets no resale price ceiling at all (Billboard). North Carolina’s new law, effective for tickets sold on or after October 1, 2026, requires all-in pricing and resale disclosure — again, transparency, not a price cap (NCDOJ). Maine caps the resale marketplace fee at 10% but explicitly does not limit the resale price itself (Press Herald). And everywhere else, the resale market is still open.

Washington moved twice in September, and neither move touches what a ticket costs. On September 15, 2026 the House passed S. 195, the American Music Tourism Act, by voice vote (NIVA), finishing a ladder the Senate started with unanimous consent on May 14, 2025. It is a travel-promotion mandate for the Commerce Department’s National Travel and Tourism Office (Pollstar). A day later the House Energy and Commerce Committee cleared H.R. 2713, the MAIN Event Ticketing Act, 36–0 (MBW).

The one federal rule that already governs how a ticket’s price reaches the buyer didn’t come from Congress. The FTC’s Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees took effect May 12, 2025 and names this industry outright: it prohibits “bait-and-switch pricing and other tactics used to hide total prices … in the live-event ticketing and short-term lodging industries,” and requires any business advertising a price to show the total up front (FTC). That is the federal floor under the state transparency laws above, and the rule our all-in pricing post builds on.

It settles the display question and explicitly declines the price question. In the FTC’s own words, “The Final Rule preserves flexibility for businesses by not prohibiting any type or amount of fee or specific pricing strategies.” Disclosure is federal. Price level is not. No federal instrument caps what a ticket may be resold for, which is why the map above is a state map.

What MAIN would add is enforcement machinery, and the most recent published text is the September 1 committee print. It requires online ticket issuers to maintain access control systems enforcing their own posted purchase limits, to report known circumvention incidents to the FTC within 30 days, and sets civil penalties of not less than $10,000 for each day a violation continues plus not less than $1,000 per violation (MBW). The committee adopted a substitute on September 16 that has not been published, so every requirement here describes the print, not what cleared.

The 36–0 is not an upset, and the sharpest question in the bill is still open. Live Nation supports MAIN; the Coalition for Ticket Fairness, the resale lobby, welcomed the vote. MBW reports the print ties circumvention to defeating “an access control system, security measure, safeguard, or other technological control” — so on the secondary market’s reading, breaking a posted purchase limit alone may not be a federal violation. But the prohibition covers automated applications used “in circumvention of posted online ticket purchasing order rules,” with defeating a control offered as an example rather than a limit (MBW). “The text stops short of settling the point,” MBW writes. Bipartisan plus both lobbies is why it moves.

Everything else is parked, including the bill nobody opposes. H.R. 1402, the TICKET Act, an all-in pricing bill, passed the House 409–15 in April 2025 (MBW) and has sat on the Senate Legislative Calendar since September 16, 2025 — one year to the day before the 36–0 vote. S. 281, the Senate’s TICKET Act, has been there since April 2025; S. 196, MAIN’s own Senate companion, since September 2025 (MBW). None has a floor vote scheduled, and S. 196 is an enforcement bill, not a pricing one. The chokepoint is the Senate floor, not the subject.

So route on state law. What moved in September changes your compliance surface — purchase limits your ticketing has to enforce, incidents you report inside 30 days — not your pricing surface. Whether a ticket resells at 110% of face in Burlington or at any price at all in Baltimore is still a state question.

The through-line makes the point better than any map. Vermont’s cap was backed by Noah Kahan, who testified for it before the state Senate (MBW); Massachusetts Gov. Healey invoked the same artist when she filed her state’s version (WBUR). One artist, one resale problem, two states writing two different answers — and a promoter routing that artist has to price for both.

In a capped market, the premium has to live on the on-sale

Start with the capped end of the map, because it’s the one that changes your math. When a market caps resale near face, the gap between what you charged and what the ticket was worth doesn’t get deferred to a scalper — it disappears. A conservative face price in Vermont is just money you decided not to collect.

So in a capped market, the tier ladder is the only instrument left to hold the premium, and it has to do that work on the primary on-sale. This is the single-market discipline covered in full in our post on designing tiers for a capped market — the short version is that a defined VIP or premium-Reserved tier is where the superfan spend goes when resale can’t carry it, so you price for it up front or you don’t capture it.

There’s a second habit the cap breaks: in a capped market, secondary-market markup stops working as a demand thermometer. A show that would clear at 2x face and a show that barely moves both sit at the same legal ceiling, so the resale price stops carrying information about heat. Don’t misread a flat secondary line in Vermont as a soft show. It’s the law working, not the room going cold.

In an open or transparency market, the secondary still reads

Now route the same tour into Maryland, North Carolina, or any of the states with no price ceiling, and the read flips back.

Where resale isn’t capped, secondary markup still prices the premium and still works as a heat signal. A conservative face is partly recoverable — the resale market prices the difference — and the secondary markup on comparable dates still tells you whether demand outran supply. The pricing posture that would leave money on the table in Vermont is the posture that keeps a demand read intact in an open market.

The transparency-only states add one wrinkle that isn’t about resale at all. Where all-in display is law — Maryland, North Carolina, Maine — the most prominent number the buyer reads is the fee-inclusive total, not the face. That reframes where each tier lands against the round numbers a buyer anchors on, and it’s a primary-pricing decision we cover in the all-in pricing post, not a resale one. On the routing map it’s just one more thing that differs by state.

Read the cap map like a Radius Clause

Here’s the practical shape of it. A promoter already reads a set of per-market variables when routing a run — a Radius Clause that restricts nearby dates, a competing on-sale the same week, the Comparable Shows for that artist in that market. The resale-cap status is now one more line on that read: for each stop, is this market capped, open, or transparency-only?

The answer sets your primary-premium discipline for that city — and it’s no longer safe to run one uniform posture across a whole tour. In the capped stops you build the premium into the ladder on the on-sale because nothing downstream will price it. In the open stops you can price a touch more conservatively and let the secondary read demand back to you. Same artist, same run, different pricing job three times over.

A Promoter Brief hands you the raw material for that read: the recommended GA / Reserved / VIP tier structure and the revenue range for each market. What it doesn’t do is ingest ticketing statutes or read the resale spread — the Brief is single-artist, single-market, and the cap map is your overlay on top of it, the same way the Radius Clause is. The Brief tells you what the tiers should be for the artist and the room; the cap map tells you how much of that structure has to hold on the primary in that particular city.

The one before you route the next on-sale

Before you set pricing for a multi-market run, tag each date with its resale-cap status the way you already tag each date with its Radius Clause. Capped markets get the premium built into the on-sale ladder; open markets keep a lighter face and a live secondary read. The artist and the tier ladder stay fixed; the pricing posture is a per-city decision now, and the map won’t hold still long enough to memorize.