The Federal Trade Commission is proposing an enforcement policy for “personalized pricing,” the use of customer data to set prices for specific customers.
The enforcement policy was proposed on Aug. 19, 2026, and it does not seek to ban personalized pricing, which the FTC says it lacks 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 around when personalized pricing is used and how the price was calculated.
The FTC wants sellers to be clear about:
- The fact that a price was personalized.
- Why was it used?
- What types of data were used?
What does this mean for marketers?
On that last point, the FTC’s call for transparency includes first-party data. For the past several years, marketers were told to respond to the decline of third-party cookies by collecting first-party data from their customers to create personalized experiences. But in some instances, the personalization is being extended to the prices for goods and services.
For example, a retailer can examine a customer’s past purchase history and, finding that the customer is willing to pay more in general, price a particular product higher than it would be for other customers. The proposed FTC policy requires a disclaimer stating that the price was personalized based on their history of purchases.
If a company gets data from another company, the FTC says it may not be sufficient to simply assume the consumer consented to its use for pricing. Businesses could be responsible for verifying that consumers actually consented to the information being used that way.
Achieving the transparency the FTC wants will require some sellers to step into a hornet’s nest that’s already a nuisance to many — data governance and integration.
The customer data used to personalize experiences (and potentially pricing) sits in CDPs, loyalty platforms, personalization engines, and AI agents. Whether merchants trust that data and can operationalize it, either for personalized pricing or FTC compliance if that day comes, will present a challenge.
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“I’m working with the RMN (retail media network) and the merchant a lot, and I just don’t come across many — almost none — that have the systems and the transparency and the orchestration, if you will, of executing on it,” Paul Brenner, SVP, global retail media and partnerships at In-Store Marketplace, told MarTech. “There’s such a delineation between data you’re allowed to use and not allowed to use, I’m just not sure how they’re going to execute it. That’s what I think about.”
Personalized pricing vs. dynamic pricing
The FTC also draws a distinction 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 routinely change the prices of flights and rooms. Rideshare apps use dynamic pricing during periods of peak usage, like rush hour or a rainy day.
The FTC went so far in its proposed policy to include examples of when personalized pricing should be scrutinized. Those include:
- Consumers who can’t easily leave home to buy food.
- Consumers buying milk for several children.
- Consumers traveling because of a funeral or urgent obligation.
- Consumers need transportation during a medical emergency.
- Consumers who were recently victims of crime and are shopping for a security camera.
- Consumers browsing a retailer’s website while standing in that retailer’s store or parking lot.
With its examples, the FTC seems to be reminding marketers that, while they currently collect a lot of data, they don’t know everything.
The proposed FTC policy is open for public comment until Sept. 25, 2026.
