Minnesota's Junk Fee Law Says "Include," Not "Disclose." The Safe Harbors Tell You Why.

The price you picked is not the price you pay. One number gets you to the cart; a screen or two later a mandatory fee lands on the subtotal and produces a second number, and somewhere in between the seller tells you about it. That sequence — attractive price first, fee surfaced before the final click — is the compliance posture I have seen most often since Minnesota’s all-in pricing rule took effect January 1, 2025. It is a real behavioral change, and it beats an unexplained charge discovered on a receipt. It is also not what the statute says.

Subdivision 1a(a) does not say a price must be accompanied by a disclosure of mandatory fees. It says the price must include them. Those are two different acts and they produce two different first numbers. I worked through the remedy architecture — why the junk fee provision itself yields an injunction and why the money claim comes from a different chapter — in an earlier piece on where the legislature put this law. That piece left one question open: whether a business that discloses a mandatory fee before checkout has complied.

I read the statute to say it has not. The Minnesota Supreme Court decision a defendant will open with against the damages claim is quoted at length below, along with what I think the answer to it is.

The verb is “include,” and the legislature used it deliberately

Minn. Stat. § 325D.44, subd. 1a(a):

(a) A person engages in a deceptive trade practice when, in the course of business, vocation, or occupation, the person advertises, displays, or offers a price for goods or services that does not include all mandatory fees or surcharges. If the person that disseminates an advertisement is independent of the advertiser, the person is not liable for the content of the advertisement.

Three structural features of that first sentence decide the drip-pricing question.

First, the operative verbs — advertises, displays, or offers — govern the price at the moment it is shown. Not at the moment of sale, not at the moment of payment, not at the moment the consumer signs. A listing page, a shelf tag, a menu, a search result, and a checkout screen are each a display, and each is separately covered.

Second, the prohibition is stated against the displayed number itself. The violation is described as a defect in the price shown, not as a failure to communicate something. Nothing in the paragraph conditions liability on what the consumer eventually learned, when the consumer learned it, or whether the consumer completed the purchase.

Third — and this is the part that resolves the argument — the same subdivision contains six compliance paragraphs, and three of them let a described business comply by disclosing a fee rather than including it. The legislature plainly knew how to write a disclosure rule. It wrote one three times, for three named categories, and it wrote a different rule in paragraph (a) for everybody else.

Three safe harbors let a business disclose instead. That is the argument.

Subdivision 1a is unusual in that most of its paragraphs are not prohibitions at all. Each says a described business “is compliant with this subdivision if” it does a specified thing. Here is what each one demands, in the statute’s own terms:

Sort those six and the pattern is plain. Paragraphs (c), (f), and (g) permit compliance by disclosure — the fee is told to the consumer, not folded into the number. Paragraph (h) is a hybrid: it requires the advertised total price, with the gratuity percentage disclosed inside it. The Attorney General’s FAQ reads (h) the other way, saying automatic gratuities “do not need to be included in the advertised total price” so long as the percentage is disclosed; on that reading the disclosure route runs to four paragraphs rather than three. The canon below reaches the same place at either count. Paragraphs (i) and (j) are not disclosure rules at all; they substitute compliance with a federal pricing regime, which is a third mechanism again.

Now read paragraph (c) closely, because it is the most damaging paragraph in the subdivision to a drip-pricing defense. A delivery platform is compliant if it discloses the fee when the consumer selects, and shows an itemized subtotal “prior to checkout.” That is drip pricing, described with precision, and expressly authorized — for delivery platforms. A legislature that had meant pre-checkout disclosure to satisfy paragraph (a) generally would have had no reason to write paragraph (c) at all.

Minn. Stat. § 645.19 states the canon in a single sentence: “Exceptions expressed in a law shall be construed to exclude all others.” I read subdivision 1a the way that canon reads it. Six categories were given an alternative route to compliance. A business outside all six has the route in paragraph (a), and the route in paragraph (a) is inclusion.

The concessions in the text are real, and a reader planning around this statute needs them. Taxes are carved out by express language: “mandatory fee does not include taxes imposed by a government entity on the sale, use, purchase, receipt, or delivery of the goods or services.” § 325D.44, subd. 1a(b). Paragraph (d) permits “a reasonable postage or shipping fee that is actually incurred by a consumer who has purchased a good that requires shipping.” Paragraph (e) preserves discounting: “Nothing in this subdivision prevents a person from offering goods or services at a discounted price from the advertised, displayed, or offered price.”

And subdivision 1b takes three categories out of subdivision 1a entirely — certain motor vehicle dealer fees authorized by law, businesses and affiliates regulated by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, and RESPA settlement service fees, with real estate broker commissions and fees expressly back in. Those are exemptions from the rule. They are not a license to disclose instead of include.

Does disclosing the fee before checkout comply?

The Attorney General’s Office has published a five-page document titled “Frequently Asked Questions About Minnesota’s New Price Transparency Law,” bearing the footer “Revised: 4/2025.” It puts the question in exactly the terms the market has been asking it:

Can businesses comply with this law by disclosing mandatory fees or surcharges separately from the advertised price, before a consumer finalizes a transaction?

No. The price advertised, offered, or displayed to consumers must be the full price that the consumer is required to pay, inclusive of all mandatory fees or surcharges.

The same document describes the object of the law this way: “The law seeks to prohibit drip pricing—which involves advertising a price that is less than the actual price that has to be paid for a good or service—as well as other tactics used to hide or obscure the true, total price that must be paid for a good or service.”

And it answers the objection that all-in pricing interferes with a business’s pricing freedom: “No. A business is generally free to charge however much it wants and can then provide a breakdown of the various fees that are included in its advertised, displayed, or offered total price. But the total price advertised, displayed, or offered must include the full amount, including all mandatory fees or surcharges, that a consumer must pay for that good or service.”

Under Minn. Stat. § 645.16(8), “legislative and administrative interpretations of the statute” are among the matters a court may consider when a law’s words are not explicit. An agency FAQ is a permitted consideration and nothing more; it does not bind a district court and it does not amend a statute. On this question it does not have to. The FAQ and paragraph (a) reach the same place because paragraph (a) already says it.

Where the FAQ and the statute part company

On one point they do not match, and anyone quoting the FAQ should know it before a defendant quotes it back.

The statute defines the operative term disjunctively. Section 325D.44, subd. 1a(b):

For purposes of this subdivision, “mandatory fee” includes but is not limited to a fee or surcharge that:

(1) must be paid in order to purchase the goods or services being advertised;

(2) is not reasonably avoidable by the consumer; or

(3) a reasonable person would expect to be included in the purchase of the goods or services being advertised.

The FAQ renders the same test conjunctively:

Mandatory fees and surcharges that must be included in the total price advertised, displayed, or offered include any fee or surcharge that: (1) must be paid in order to purchase the good or service; (2) is not reasonably avoidable by the consumer; and (3) a reasonable person would expect to be included in the purchase of the goods or services being advertised.

The statute says “or.” The FAQ says “and.” Under the statute any one of the three clauses makes a fee mandatory; under the FAQ’s formulation a fee would have to satisfy all three. That is a materially narrower test than the one the legislature enacted, and the enacted text controls. I state the divergence and leave it there: the point is which text governs, not how the difference arose.

The “includes but is not limited to” phrase matters just as much. The three clauses are illustrations, not an exhaustive definition. A fee that satisfies none of them can still be a mandatory fee if it is, in fact, mandatory.

Prong (3) is the clause a seller cannot engineer around

Clause (2) — “not reasonably avoidable by the consumer” — is the clause businesses restructure around, because avoidability is something a seller can engineer. Clause (3) is the clause they cannot engineer, and it is the one I would put first in any complaint: a fee is mandatory if “a reasonable person would expect to be included in the purchase of the goods or services being advertised.”

That benchmark was strengthened during passage, and the record is short enough to check. As introduced, H.F. 3438 placed the all-in pricing rule in § 325D.44, subd. 1, as clause (15), and its third illustration read: “(iii) a reasonable consumer would expect to be included in the purchase of the goods or services being advertised.” That version was posted February 1, 2024. The First Engrossment, posted March 13, 2024, moved the provision into its own subdivision and changed the benchmark to “a reasonable person.” Every later version, and the enacted law, keep “reasonable person.”

The edit is small and it is not cosmetic. Minnesota Statutes § 645.16 lists “the former law, if any, including other laws upon the same or similar subjects” and “the contemporaneous legislative history” among the matters bearing on legislative intent. A “reasonable consumer” standard would measure expectation against the seller’s own customer base — the population most thoroughly trained to expect the fee, precisely because the seller has been charging it. A “reasonable person” standard does not. The legislature made that substitution before the bill left the House the first time.

Take a hypothetical, invented for this article. A lodging listing shows $129 a night. You pick your dates, and the booking page adds a $22 per-night “facility fee” that every guest pays. On clause (1), the $22 must be paid to complete the purchase. On clause (2), no guest can avoid it. On clause (3), an ordinary person shown a $129 nightly rate would expect $129 to be the price of the night. Any one of the three is enough. The advertised price was $151.

The case a defendant opens with

The damages claim runs through the Consumer Fraud Act, and the Minnesota Supreme Court has said something about prices that sounds, read quickly, like the end of the discussion.

Graphic Communications Local 1B Health & Welfare Fund “A” v. CVS Caremark Corp., 850 N.W.2d 682 (Minn. 2014), was a Rule 12.02(e) decision on the pleadings. Two benefit funds alleged that pharmacies had overcharged them for generic prescription drugs in violation of the Pharmacy Practice Act, and pleaded a Consumer Fraud Act count on the theory that the pharmacies concealed their acquisition costs. The court held that an omission-based CFA claim requires more than materiality. At 695: “We conclude that an omission-based consumer fraud claim is actionable under the CFA when special circumstances exist that trigger a legal or equitable duty to disclose the omitted facts.”

Then, at 698, the sentence every defense brief in a Minnesota pricing case is going to quote:

Notably, there is no allegation that the Pharmacies made any representation to the Funds other than to state the price of the dispensed generic prescription drug. But merely stating the purchase price of a product does not constitute a violation of the CFA unless the defendant omits material facts that render the words spoken false, deceptive, or misleading. Put differently, merely stating the purchase price is not deceptive and does not trigger a duty to disclose.

And two sentences later, also at 698: “But a violation of the Pharmacy Practice Act, without more, does not constitute a violation of the CFA.”

A statute with no private damages remedy; a defendant who did nothing but state a price; a consumer fraud count built on top of the regulatory violation. Structurally, that is the shape of a junk fee case, and it is why I would not file one without an answer to Graphic. What follows is mine, and a court has not yet passed on it.

Is a price the legislature calls deceptive the same as the silence in Graphic?

Three things distinguish the two situations, and they are all in the opinion or in the statute books.

The “unless” clause is the case. Read the sentence at 698 to its end: merely stating the purchase price is not a violation “unless the defendant omits material facts that render the words spoken false, deceptive, or misleading.” Graphic did not hold that a stated price can never be actionable. It held that a stated price, standing alone and accurate as far as it went, was not. The pharmacies in Graphic charged the price they stated. A business that advertises $129 and charges $151 has not stated its price accurately; the mandatory fee is not information it declined to volunteer, it is the reason the number it published is untrue. That is the third of the three Klein circumstances the court reaffirmed at 695 — “a person who speaks must say enough to prevent the words communicated from misleading the other party” — and on a displayed-price theory, the claim is not an omission claim at all. It is a claim about an affirmative statement of price. Drafted as a failure to disclose, it walks straight into Graphic. Drafted as a misstatement, Graphic supplies the standard.

A legislative declaration is the “more.” Graphic rejected a claim that a Pharmacy Practice Act violation is by itself a CFA violation, and that rejection stands. But the conduct here is not merely regulated; it is defined by statute as deceptive. Section 325D.44, subd. 1a(a) says that a person who advertises a price without all mandatory fees “engages in a deceptive trade practice.” A court asking whether a display is misleading is not being asked to infer deception from a bare regulatory breach. The legislature has answered the deception question in the text. That is different evidence than the plaintiffs in Graphic had, and it goes to the element the court found missing.

The Consumer Fraud Act itself has changed since 2014. Graphic construed § 325F.69, subd. 1, as it then read: “any fraud, false pretense, false promise, misrepresentation, misleading statement or deceptive practice.” In 2023 the legislature inserted a new category. Subdivision 1 now prohibits “any fraud, unfair or unconscionable practice, false pretense, false promise, misrepresentation, misleading statement or deceptive practice,” and a new subdivision 8 defines the added term:

For purposes of this section, an unfair method of competition or an unfair or unconscionable act or practice is any method of competition, act, or practice that: (1) offends public policy as established by the statutes, rules, or common law of Minnesota; (2) is unethical, oppressive, or unscrupulous; or (3) is substantially injurious to consumers.

Both changes came in 2023 Minn. Laws ch. 57, art. 4, §§ 16–17, and neither section carries its own effective-date clause, so the default in Minn. Stat. § 645.02 controls. Chapter 57 is a Department of Commerce budget act whose first article makes appropriations, and § 645.02 gives an act having appropriation items an effective date of July 1 next following its final enactment. Both changes took effect July 1, 2023. A pricing practice the Minnesota Legislature has declared to be a deceptive trade practice by statute is a practice that “offends public policy as established by the statutes … of Minnesota” in about as literal a sense as that clause can be given.

I will mark the limit of that argument rather than let a reader walk into it. The same 2023 act added clause (13) to § 325D.44, subd. 1 — unfair methods of competition and unfair or unconscionable acts or practices — and added § 325D.44, subd. 2(b), which provides: “For purposes of subdivision 1, clause (13), the standard of proof provided under section 325F.69, subdivision 8, applies.” By its terms that cross-reference runs to subdivision 1, clause (13). It does not run to subdivision 1a. The subdivision 8 argument has to be made directly under the Consumer Fraud Act, not imported through the junk fee provision.

And one more piece of Graphic belongs in this discussion, because defendants quoting page 698 tend to stop before page 693. The court held, at 693, that the absence of a private remedy in the regulatory statute is not itself a bar:

We conclude that an injured party may bring a consumer fraud claim and recover damages under the Private AG Statute for conduct that violates section 151.21, subdivision 4, of the Pharmacy Practice Act provided that the plaintiff pleads and proves the required elements of a consumer fraud claim.

And, spanning 693–94: “The fact that the Pharmacy Practice Act does not provide a private cause of action does not bar a plaintiff from bringing a consumer fraud claim, provided that the alleged conduct is proscribed under the CFA.” Section 325D.44, subd. 1a, provides no private damages remedy of its own. Under Graphic, that fact does not end the inquiry — it just means the elements have to be proved under the Consumer Fraud Act, on Consumer Fraud Act terms. The case a defendant leads with contains the answer to the defendant’s threshold objection.

Causation does not come free

The junk fee provision sits inside an act whose remedies section says proof of monetary damage is not required. That language belongs to the injunction remedy and it does not travel to a damages claim. Group Health Plan, Inc. v. Philip Morris Inc., 621 N.W.2d 2 (Minn. 2001), made causation an element of a § 8.31, subd. 3a damages action — the sentence is quoted in my earlier article on this statute’s placement — and it went further in a sentence that gets quoted far less often. At 13:

Therefore, in a case such as this, it will be necessary to prove reliance on those statements or conduct to satisfy the causation requirement.

That sentence has to be met, not avoided. The answer in a pricing case is structural. In Group Health the claimed injury was the cost of treating smoking-related disease, several steps removed from the statements alleged to have caused it, which is why the court spoke of reliance as the bridge and then held, at 14, that the reliance component may be shown by direct or circumstantial evidence rather than consumer-by-consumer testimony.

A drip-pricing loss has no comparable gap: the plaintiff’s damage is the mandatory fee actually charged, computed off the display the seller controlled, on the seller’s own transaction record. The buyer did not have to believe anything for the fee to be added. Causation runs through the transaction rather than through a state of mind, which is the strongest thing about this claim and the reason I would not plead it as I would never have bought it if I had known.

How I would frame one of these claims

The representation is the price. Plead the displayed number as an affirmative statement of what the purchase costs. A complaint whose operative allegation is failed to disclose is a complaint aimed at the one theory Graphic forecloses.

Plead clause (3) expressly and independently. Businesses restructure to defeat clause (2) by making a fee nominally avoidable. Clause (3) does not ask whether the fee could have been dodged; it asks what an ordinary person would have expected the advertised price to cover. The clauses are joined by “or.”

Identify the display, not the receipt. The violation is defined by what was advertised, displayed, or offered. What the invoice itemized afterward is a different document answering a different question.

Check the six compliance paragraphs and the three exemptions before anything else. A delivery platform, an auction, a variable-cost service, a food and beverage establishment, a broadband provider, and a cable provider each have a defined route to compliance that most businesses do not have. Motor vehicle dealer fees authorized by law, PUC-regulated businesses and their affiliates, and RESPA settlement services are out of subdivision 1a altogether.

The two statutes stack rather than compete. Section 325D.44, subd. 3, provides that “[t]his section does not affect unfair, deceptive, or misleading trade practices otherwise actionable at common law or under other statutes of this state.” The relationship between the Deceptive Trade Practices Act and the Consumer Fraud Act, and who may recover under each, is worked through in my article on Minnesota’s two consumer statutes and in the one on the private attorney general statute. The line between an actionable misstatement and mere silence, at common law, is in my article on fraud and negligent misrepresentation. For a single hidden fee measured in dollars rather than thousands, conciliation court is frequently the proportionate venue.

Do not wait. Limitations questions in this area are unsettled enough that I will not put a number on them in an article, and the conservative instruction is the only responsible one: a consumer who thinks a mandatory fee was kept out of an advertised price should get the question in front of a lawyer promptly rather than reason backward from a period.

No Minnesota appellate court has yet construed subdivision 1a, so far as my research shows. The first decision that does will be worth reading closely, because the questions it reaches — the force of the six safe harbors, the weight given the FAQ, and the distance between Graphic’s silent seller and a seller whose posted number the legislature has declared deceptive — are the questions in every one of these cases.

Madgett Law, LLC

Madgett Law, LLC represents Minnesota consumers in deceptive pricing and consumer fraud matters, and in landlord-tenant, debt collection, and credit reporting disputes, in state and federal court. If you were charged a mandatory fee that was not in the price you were shown, we can tell you whether a statute reaches it and what a claim would involve. Call 612-470-6529 or send us a message.

Sources: Minn. Stat. § 325D.44, subd. 1a(a) (advertised, displayed, or offered price must include all mandatory fees or surcharges), subd. 1a(b) (definition of “mandatory fee”; “includes but is not limited to”; disjunctive clauses (1)–(3); tax exclusion), subd. 1a(c) (delivery platform compliance: disclosure at selection and pre-checkout itemized subtotal), subd. 1a(d) (reasonable postage or shipping fee actually incurred), subd. 1a(e) (discounting preserved), subd. 1a(f) (auction compliance by disclosure), subd. 1a(g) (variable-cost service compliance by disclosure), subd. 1a(h) (food and beverage establishments, including hotels; disclosure of the percentage of automatic and mandatory gratuities within the total price), subd. 1a(i) (broadband; 47 C.F.R. § 8.1(a)), subd. 1a(j) (cable and video; FCC Report and Order FCC 24-29 under 47 U.S.C. § 552), subd. 1b (motor vehicle dealer, PUC-regulated, and RESPA settlement-service exemptions; real estate broker commissions and fees excluded from the exemption), subd. 2(b) (standard of proof under § 325F.69, subd. 8 applies “[f]or purposes of subdivision 1, clause (13)”), and subd. 3 (other law unaffected); Minn. Stat. § 325F.69, subd. 1 (unlawful practices, as amended to add “unfair or unconscionable practice”) and subd. 8 (definition of an unfair or unconscionable act or practice; “offends public policy as established by the statutes, rules, or common law of Minnesota”); Minn. Stat. § 645.16 (legislative intent; clause (5) former law and similar subjects, clause (7) contemporaneous legislative history, clause (8) legislative and administrative interpretations); Minn. Stat. § 645.19 (exceptions expressed in a law construed to exclude all others); Minn. Stat. § 645.02 (an act having appropriation items takes effect July 1 next following its final enactment unless a different date is specified; 2023 Minn. Laws ch. 57, art. 1 is an appropriations article); 2023 Minn. Laws ch. 57, art. 4, §§ 6–7 (adding § 325D.44, subd. 1, clause (13) and subd. 2(b)) and §§ 16–17 (amending § 325F.69, subd. 1 and adding subd. 8); H.F. 3438, 93d Minn. Leg. (2024), Introduction posted February 1, 2024 (“a reasonable consumer would expect to be included”) and First Engrossment posted March 13, 2024 (“a reasonable person would expect to be included”); Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, “Frequently Asked Questions About Minnesota’s New Price Transparency Law” (Revised: 4/2025), at 1 (purpose; drip pricing; the conjunctive rendering of the “mandatory fee” test) and at 3 (pre-checkout disclosure does not comply; the law does not limit what a business may charge); Graphic Communications Local 1B Health & Welfare Fund “A” v. CVS Caremark Corp., 850 N.W.2d 682, 693, 693–94 (Minn. 2014) (a regulatory statute’s lack of a private cause of action does not bar a consumer fraud claim on the same conduct), 695 (omission-based CFA claim requires special circumstances triggering a duty to disclose; the third Klein circumstance), 698 (merely stating the purchase price is not deceptive and does not trigger a duty to disclose; a regulatory violation without more is not a CFA violation); Group Health Plan, Inc. v. Philip Morris Inc., 621 N.W.2d 2, 13 (Minn. 2001) (reliance necessary to satisfy the causation requirement in that case), 14 (the reliance component of the causal nexus may be shown by direct or circumstantial evidence rather than individual consumer testimony). This article is general legal information about Minnesota law. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney–client relationship, and no particular outcome is promised or implied.