The Federal Trade Commission is proposing a policy of enforcing “personalized pricing,” the use of customer data to set prices for specific customers.
The enforcement policy was proposed on August 19, 2026, and does not seek to ban personalized pricing, which the FTC says it does not have the authority to do. Instead, it seeks to use Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive practices.
In other words, it’s seeking more transparency into when custom pricing is used and how the price was calculated.
The FTC wants sellers to be clear about:
- The fact that the price was personalized.
- Why was it used?
- What types of data were used?
What does this mean for marketers?
On this last point, the FTC’s call for transparency includes first-party data. In recent years, marketers have been asked to respond to the decline of third-party cookies by collecting first-party data from their customers to create personalized cookies experiences. But in some cases customization extends to the prices of goods and services.
For example, a retailer may examine a customer’s past purchase history and, finding that the customer is willing to pay more overall, set a higher price for a particular product than it would for other customers. The proposed FTC policy requires a disclaimer stating that the price has been customized based on your purchase history.
If a company obtains data from another company, the FTC says it may not be enough to simply assume that the consumer consents to its use for pricing. Companies may be responsible for verifying that consumers have actually consented to their information being used in this way.
Achieving the transparency the FTC desires will require some vendors to step into a hornet’s nest that is already a nuisance to many: data governance and integration.
Customer data used to personalize experiences (and potentially prices) is found in CDPs, loyalty platforms, personalization engines and AI agents. Whether merchants trust this data and can put it to work, whether for personalized pricing or FTC compliance, if that day comes, it will be a challenge.
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“I do a lot of work with RMN (retail media network) and with the merchant, and I don’t meet many – almost none – that have the systems and the transparency and the orchestration, if you will, to put that into practice,” Paul Brenner, SVP, global retail media and partnerships at In-Store Marketplace, told MarTech. “There’s such a distinction between the data you’re allowed to use and the data you’re not allowed to use, I’m just not sure how that’s going to be done. That’s what I’m thinking about.”
Personalized pricing versus dynamic pricing
The FTC also distinguishes between dynamic pricing, which is more akin to the laws of supply and demand, and personalized pricing.
Dynamic pricing is used by airlines and hotels, which regularly change flight and room prices. Rideshare apps use dynamic pricing during peak usage periods, such as rush hour or a rainy day.
The FTC has gone so far as to include examples of when personalized pricing should be examined. These include:
- Consumers who cannot easily leave home to buy food.
- Consumers purchasing milk for several children.
- Consumers traveling due to a funeral or an urgent obligation.
- Consumers need transportation during a medical emergency.
- Consumers who have recently been the victim of a crime and are purchasing a security camera.
- Consumers who visit a retailer’s website while in that retailer’s store or parking lot.
With its examples, the FTC seems to remind marketers that, even though they currently collect a lot of data, they don’t know everything.
The FTC’s proposed policy is open to public comment until September 25, 2026.
