The Price Ban That Skips Your Uber

Introduction

The median gap between the highest and lowest price two people get quoted for the same Uber or Lyft ride, ordered from the same corner in the same minute, is 42.4 percent. That's from Consumer Reports, which had 174 volunteers price more than 40 routes across 18 states this spring. Investigators now want to know whether the number your app shows you is less a market rate than a read on what your data says you'll put up with paying.

In June, Colorado Governor Jared Polis decided you didn't need protecting from that. A Democrat, he vetoed a surveillance-pricing ban his own party's legislature had passed, the second time in about a year he'd killed one, and the argument in his veto letter reads almost word for word like the one Uber and Lyft's lobbyists make. The single-company headlines missed the bigger move: lawmakers already tried to outlaw this, more than 40 bills across 24 states this year. Two got signed, both written with carve-outs that keep the practice legal. So the version federal investigators are chasing, the price on your rideshare and travel apps, isn't banned anywhere it happens.

Forty Bills and a Federal Probe That Went Quiet

Start with the federal piece, because it's the loudest and the most stalled. On March 5, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, sent document-demand letters to the chief executives of Booking Holdings, Expedia, Uber, Lyft, and Instacart, giving them until March 19 to hand over records on their "revenue management algorithms." The letters describe the practice without much diplomacy, accusing the companies of using data like geolocation, browsing history, device type, and even battery life to "weaponize personal data" and pad profit margins. Reuters reported them the same day.

Then it mostly went silent. Four months later there's no public record of what those five companies produced, no hearing, no follow-up subpoena. The one visible move came from the other side of the aisle: on June 23, four House Democrats led by Pramila Jayapal sent Uber and Lyft their own letter, noting the two companies control roughly 95 percent of U.S. ride-hailing between them. Both parties have now written pointed letters, and neither has turned one into a rule or a penalty.

The states moved faster, and further. Advocacy trackers and the Groundwork Collaborative count more than 40 surveillance-pricing bills introduced across at least 24 states in 2026, up from zero the year before. But look at what's actually crossed the line. Only two states have signed a ban into law, Maryland and Connecticut. New Jersey passed its version and New York passed the One Fair Price Act through both chambers, and both now wait on a governor's signature. And Maryland's, the one that earned the "first in the nation" press release, reaches food retailers and delivery services and nothing else, so it doesn't touch the rideshare and travel companies the House is investigating.

The Same Ride, Priced Two Ways

The best-documented version of this is that Consumer Reports investigation from June. Volunteers ordered more than 40 routes on Uber and Lyft, often within the same minute as one another. In Austin, one route ran anywhere from $25 to $65 depending on who was asking. Across the routes they measured, the median gap between the cheapest and priciest quote for an identical ride was 42.4 percent, and 12.4 percent of the advertised "discounts" were fake, an inflated reference price marked back down to the standard fare.

That 42.4 percent number is worth sitting with, partly because it moved. Consumer Reports first reported a 49.8 percent median gap, then revised it down on June 25 after Uber re-identified some of the supposedly anonymized volunteers and flagged three data-collection errors. The fake-discount rate went up in the same correction, from 10.8 to 12.4 percent. Uber and Lyft both call the methodology flawed and blame ordinary supply and demand. Even after the revision, two riders ordering the same trip in the same minute get quotes 42 percent apart at the median.

Comer's letters bring their own figures, citing a Washington Post road test of 80 rides that found Uber varied its price between customers by an average of 11 percent and Lyft by 13 percent. The committee's press release goes further, relaying an unnamed report of a 221 percent gap on one trip, one rider quoted $76.82 and the other $23.92, which reads as an anecdote it's passing along, not a verified finding. The pattern underneath it does have a federal paper trail: the FTC's surveillance-pricing study opened with orders to eight pricing-technology firms in 2024, and found the six it analyzed worked with at least 250 retail clients, targeting prices down to a shopper's mouse movements. Uber, Expedia, and Instacart have all denied it, with Uber saying fares track "location, time, and demand, not a customer's individual characteristics" (Reuters, via Cybernews).

Where the Loopholes Came From

Maryland's law is the tell. Governor Wes Moore signed it on April 28 under a "first in the country" banner, and the same day, Consumer Reports, which had campaigned for the bill, said it "has too many industry-friendly loopholes, and weak enforcement provisions." The Capitol Forum later spelled out what those were: undefined exemptions for "promotional offers," "temporary discounts," and "loyalty programs," plus a clause stripping shoppers of the right to sue under Maryland's consumer-protection statute for breaking this law. The piece, co-written by a former FTC chief technologist, argues the carve-outs "played directly into the hands of industry lobbyists" who claimed, falsely, that the law would outlaw ordinary coupons.

Which brings it back to Polis. His June 2 veto of Colorado's HB 1210 was the second time in about a year he'd blocked a bill like it. The veto letter warned that a ban might "punish differentially lower prices, not just higher prices," and could stop companies from offering deals through loyalty programs and discounts. Set that next to the Maryland loophole fight and it's the identical move: banning personalized pricing supposedly threatens your coupons. It doesn't, and the antitrust lawyers who fought Maryland's carve-outs have said as much, but it's a clean line and it keeps working.

Who Benefits

The companies are the obvious winner, and the mechanism is money. Comer's own letters name it: surveillance pricing lets a company find each customer's individual pain point, the most that person will pay, instead of charging one posted price everyone sees. Every dollar of that spread not explained by real supply and demand is revenue Uber or Lyft books that a single visible price would have left on the table. Run it across a market two companies split roughly 95 to 5, and small per-trip margins add up fast.

Officials who get to say they acted are the quieter beneficiaries. A narrow, loophole-heavy law still comes with a signing ceremony and a "first in the nation" line, a real asset in an affordability-focused election year, and it costs almost nothing because it constrains almost no one. The advocacy groups who fought for Maryland's bill called it loophole-ridden the same day it was signed.

Lobbyists get the most durable prize of all: language written straight into the statute. Maryland's exemptions for "promotional offers" and "loyalty programs" didn't fall from the sky, they were the product of a specific argument made in specific rooms, and it's already running in Albany, where the American Economic Liberties Project has been pressing Governor Hochul to reject the carve-outs industry wants in New York's still-unsigned bill. Strip the private right of action, as Maryland did, and even the loopholes that survive can't be challenged in court by the person who got overcharged.

Your Airport Ride Is Still Fair Game

The House Oversight investigation is aimed at travel and rideshare, the sectors where individualized pricing is best documented. Both state laws actually on the books restrict "retail sellers" and third-party delivery services specifically, groceries and food delivery. Those two circles barely overlap: Maryland and Connecticut banned the practice in the one place the federal probe isn't looking, and left the rideshare and travel pricing that started this conversation untouched. New York's One Fair Price Act is the exception, broad enough to reach rideshare and even subscription pricing, and it's the one still sitting unsigned on a desk.

A Democratic governor, twice, picked the industry's framing over his own legislature's, while a Republican committee chairman ran the loudest federal investigation. That doesn't fit the usual partisan script, because the argument beating these bills isn't partisan: shielding you from data-driven pricing will quietly cost you your discounts. There's a real economics debate underneath it, a 2022 University of Chicago study cited by NBC News even found personalized pricing can raise travelers' welfare on average by widening their options, but that same coupon line gets used to beat disclosure and consent rules too, not just price caps, enough to move a governor who brands himself a consumer champion.

What gets me is the sequencing. The practice got documented, the federal probe got opened, Data for Progress polling came back lopsided at 76 percent support for a ban, and the laws still came out riddled with loopholes. The public isn't confused about what it wants here, and the carve-outs got written in anyway. And it's spreading past rideshare: a June class action accuses the Bezos-owned Washington Post of charging its most loyal subscribers more than newcomers for the same plan, a suit Courthouse News reports a New York disclosure law helped bring to light.

The Bottom Line

Add it up: a federal probe that has produced letters and nothing else, two enacted laws that skip the sector under investigation, and a governor who has vetoed the toughest alternative twice. The thing this whole wave is nominally about, your fare or your subscription priced off your own data, stays legal in every state where it's happening.

New York is the real test, since Hochul is unlikely to sign before November and industry is already lobbying to write Maryland's loopholes into her desk copy. If the strongest bill in the country gets carved up before it's signed, the lesson every other statehouse takes is that you can answer a 40-bill wave with a press release and a signing pen. So what would it take for one of these laws to reach the price on your screen?