Ninety-seven dealership groups received a warning letter from the Federal Trade Commission in March of this year to warn of possible misleading advertising tactics. And in April, the FTC staff stated plainly that not showing a total price including fees is itself deceptive. Full stop.

In September, the federal agency released a FAQ to formalize, in the agency's own words, the same rule the letters and the webinar had already been signaling.

It spells out what counts as a mandatory fee versus a government charge, what "most prominent" means when MSRP and the real price are both on the page, and how a dealer stays on the hook even when a third-party site or an OEM template is the one displaying the number.

THE FTC says price transparency is a decades-old requirement and they expect compliance now, not later. And they ain’t messin’ around.

Penalties tied to this pattern have ranged from $10K to more than $19.8M with new actions landing at a faster pace every year, and those figures don't even include legal fees, the hours a GM spends in depositions instead of on the lot, or what a case does to a dealership's reputation once it shows up in the local news.

The goal of this guide is two-fold:

1️⃣ Translate the FTC's requirements into something easy to digest.

2️⃣ Hands you ready-made prompts to run today against your own fee schedule, your own VDPs, your own BDC scripts, so you know where your soft spots are before you end up on the phone with your attorney.

Disclaimer: None of this is legal advice, including the prompts. Dealers should loop in actual counsel for clarification, direction, or complex scenarios.

Every one of the FAQ's fourteen questions comes back to the same rule: the advertised price has to be 100% the price any consumer can walk in and write a check for.

The only thing you're allowed to leave out is a charge the government requires the consumer, specifically, to pay.

Two questions settle almost every fee argument a desk has ever had:

1️⃣ Does the law itself put this charge on the buyer, no matter who collects it? If yes, exclude it. That’s things like your sales tax, title fees, registration, and plates.

2️⃣ Is this a transaction tax that just happens to land on the seller, like a state's sales-tax stand-in, or a cost of doing business the dealer is choosing to pass along? Only the first case gets to stay out. Everything else—doc fees, processing fees, dealer prep, freight, that pre-installed nitrogen package—goes in the price.

No state requires a dealer to charge a doc fee. States authorize it, which makes it dealer-required wherever it shows up, and it belongs in your advertised price in all fifty of them.

You can still show the itemized number your state requires. You just can't use it to advertise a second, friendlier price sitting next to the real one.

📍 Run this Prompt: The Fee Audit

A recent Maryland case named the owner and two managers on purpose, not as a formality tacked onto the dealership's penalty.

Nobody at a dealership sits down and writes a memo authorizing deceptive pricing. What happens is smaller than that. Someone decides the doc fee lives in its own quiet corner of the website template. Someone signs off on a layout where the MSRP gets bold treatment up top and the real number gets demoted below it. Someone tells the BDC to lead with the number that books the appointment and let the desk sort out the gap in person. Nobody in that chain thinks of it as a legal decision. They think of it as a Tuesday decision.

That's exactly why regulators have started attaching names to these orders instead of just the dealership's letterhead. The people who made those calls are the only ones who can unmake them, and most of the fixes cost nothing but attention.

📍 Run this Prompt: The Five-Minute-Decision Audit

The agency's first two answers in the FAQ spend more time on market damage than on any single buyer. When the price in an ad isn't real, comparison shopping stops meaning anything, because a customer with five tabs open is comparing five numbers that don't describe anything she could actually drive home.

Then the FTC says something worth remembering. Dealers who advertise truthful, all-in prices are disadvantaged by competitors willing to advertise numbers no customer could ever actually get. The agency isn't only protecting the buyer here. It's pointing out that the honest dealer has been getting outflanked by people playing a different game with the same scoreboard.

If a competitor's price has ever beaten yours by eleven hundred dollars and some part of you thought there's no way that number survives a test drive, you were probably right. The FTC gives you somewhere to put that instinct: report them.

📍 Run this Prompt: Documenting a Deceptive Ad

The rule covers dealership and third-party websites, social media, print, roadside signs, phone calls, and text messages from your own staff. Wherever a price shows up, it applies.

On vehicle listing pages, the actual price has to be the most prominent number, and prominence has almost nothing to do with font size. The FTC's own example: a dealer can print the real price in 16-point type and the MSRP smaller elsewhere, and still violate the rule if that smaller MSRP sits where the eye lands first. Placement beats size.

MSRP and rebates are still fine to show. A dealer can advertise $34,999 with $1,000 off for first responders, as long as $34,999, the price anyone else pays, stays the most prominent number and the terms are clear.

Add-ons follow the same logic. Sell protection packages and accessories all you want, just don't imply something optional is required, misstate the cost, or charge for anything the customer never agreed to. The FTC has already sued over this and said it will again.

Lease ads add one wrinkle: any processing fee due at signing has to show up in the total due-at-signing figure, not somewhere the shopper finds it after booking the appointment. This sits on top of Reg M and Reg Z, not instead of them.

And "Call for Price" isn't the gray area dealers think it is. Per the April webinar, not posting a total price at all is itself likely deceptive. A "Get Your E-Price" button or a phone number standing in for a real number fails the same test as a hidden fee. The shopper still can't tell what the car costs without spending time she didn't plan on spending.

📍 Run this Prompt: The Prominence Audit

Advertising a car that isn't physically at your store yet isn't automatically deceptive. In transit, stored offsite, shared from another store's inventory, all fine, as long as the ad makes that status clear. What's not fine is letting a shopper believe a car is sitting on your lot when it isn't.

Two conditions matter for anything in transit: it has to actually be coming, and it can't already be spoken for by someone else's paid order.

"In transit" also doesn't stretch to cover a car that hasn't been built yet. An in-production allocation isn't in transit or arriving, it's a promise with a build date, and advertising it that way without saying so is the kind of gap that gets wider the longer it sits unbuilt.

The sold-car version of this is simpler and less forgiving. Advertising a car that's already been paid for and delivered, just to get a shopper in the door and pitch her something else, is a bait-and-switch, plain and simple.

Photos follow a similar logic. A representative stock photo is fine for a new vehicle or one in transit, where units are largely interchangeable and a shopper reasonably expects a stand-in image. Used and antique vehicles don't get that same leeway, because condition is the entire point of a used listing. A shopper looking at a used car expects to see the actual car.

Everyone with control over an ad shares responsibility for what it says: the dealer, the third-party site, the OEM if it supplied the template.

A dealer has to give the correct price to whoever's building the ad and make sure nothing internal contradicts it.

A third-party site has to display that price as the most prominent number once it's handed to them. An OEM has to make sure its own co-op requirements or ad templates don't force a dealer into nonconformance.

None of that shifts the dealer's own exposure. If your name is on the ad, you're on the hook for it, even when a third party built it or an OEM mandated the layout.

📍 Run this Prompt: The Feed and Template Check

A store might run a few hundred VDPs at once, across its own site, three or four third-party listings, social ads, and whatever the BDC is texting that week. Nobody's reviewing all of that by hand on a Tuesday, and nobody's reviewing it again the following Tuesday when a price changes, a disclaimer gets dropped, or a manager edits a listing without touching the fee field next to it.

That's the actual failure point. A field gets misconfigured once and stays wrong for months because nobody's rechecking it. A third-party feed strips a fee disclosure during its own formatting and nobody at the dealership notices because nobody's comparing the two versions side by side.

Documentation matters almost as much as the check itself. If your pricing is ever questioned, being able to show that the advertised price matched the actual price on a given date, across every channel, is the difference between a quick resolution and a drawn-out (potentially costly) one.

📍 Run this Prompt: Setting Up a Recurring Check

Every one of the fourteen questions in the FAQ comes down to whether the number in front of a stranger is one she can actually walk in and pay.

Somewhere tonight, somebody's screenshotting a price on your website and deciding whether the drive is worth it. Make sure the number still holds up once she's standing in your showroom.