Concert and festival tickets: what changed in the rules for buying

Concerts and festivals in Britain are ceasing to be a lottery run by touts. The rules for buying tickets have changed twice in the last two years, and both changes favour the audience. Here is what changed and how to use it.

Reselling above face value becomes illegal

On 19 November 2025 the government announced measures making it illegal to resell tickets for concerts, theatre, comedy, sport and other live events for more than their original cost.

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The ceiling is defined in legislation as the original ticket price plus unavoidable fees, including service charges. The service fees charged by resale platforms will themselves be capped, so that the limit cannot be undermined through them.

Platforms acquire a legal duty to monitor and enforce compliance with the price cap. And individuals will be banned from reselling more tickets than they were entitled to buy in the original sale.

The rules apply to any platform reselling tickets to UK fans, including secondary ticketing platforms and social media sites. Businesses breaking them face financial penalties from the Competition and Markets Authority of up to 10% of global turnover.

The government's own estimate of the effect: resale tickets £37 cheaper on average, saving fans collectively £112 million a year.

The second change: they must tell you about tiered pricing

After the row over the Oasis sale, the Competition and Markets Authority investigated Ticketmaster and on 25 September 2025 secured formal undertakings from the company.

The regulator found two problems. First, fans waiting in lengthy online queues were not told that standing tickets were being sold at two different prices, and that prices would jump as soon as the cheap ones sold out. Second, some tickets were sold as "platinum" at almost 2.5 times the price of standard ones, without sufficient explanation that they offered no additional benefits over some standard tickets in the same areas of the venue.

The company must now tell fans 24 hours in advance if a tiered pricing system is in use, and provide price-range information inside the online queue, updating fans swiftly when the cheaper tickets sell out.

What this means in practice

First: if you are in an online queue and cannot see a price range, that is now a warning sign. They are required to show it.

Second: the word "platinum" on a ticket means nothing in itself. The regulator stated plainly that such tickets may offer no advantage over standard ones in the same part of the venue. Compare the seating plan, not the labels.

Third: an offer to buy a ticket at a huge markup from a private seller on social media is precisely the practice the new rules target. And money handed over there is usually unrecoverable.

How to buy

Buy from the venue's own site or the event's official seller. If tickets are gone, wait for an official resale run by the venue itself: that is where the price limit bites.

Before buying, work out the full amount including every fee — the ceiling is measured against that, not against the figure on the poster.

And do not rush in the first minutes of a sale: the expensive tiers usually go last, and cheaper tickets return to sale when someone's payment fails.