A £3 fee cost the AA £5 million. Could your website be next?
The AA was fined £4.2 million over a £3 booking fee shown too late. Here is what drip pricing is, why it is now illegal, and how to check your own site.
In April 2026, a £3 booking fee turned into a bill of almost £5 million.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) fined the AA £4.2 million and ordered its AA Driving School and BSM Driving School brands to refund more than 80,000 learner drivers a further £760,000. The cause was not a scam or a hidden trap. It was a single mandatory £3 booking fee that was shown too late in the online booking process.
If a charge that small can cost a company that much, it is worth understanding exactly what went wrong, because the same mistake is sitting on a lot of UK business websites right now. Including, quite possibly, yours.
What the AA actually did wrong
Between April and December 2025, someone booking driving lessons on the AA or BSM websites was first shown a headline price that did not include a mandatory £3 booking fee. For new customers, the full price only appeared at the checkout, after they had already chosen their lessons, picked their times, and entered their personal details. For returning customers, the fee was listed separately and only folded into the total at the very end.
The fee itself was not the problem. The problem was when it appeared. By the time the real total was visible, the customer had already invested time and effort, which makes them far more likely to go ahead anyway. That is the whole point of the tactic, and it now has a name in law: drip pricing.
What drip pricing is
Drip pricing is showing an initial headline price and then adding extra mandatory charges as the customer moves through the purchase. Booking fees, service fees, handling charges, admin fees, unavoidable delivery costs: if a customer cannot avoid paying it, but it is not in the first price they see, that is a drip.
It is more common than most business owners realise. Government research in 2023 found that 46% of online businesses used at least one dripped fee, costing UK consumers somewhere between £595 million and £3.5 billion a year. For a long time it was treated as a grey area, mostly a matter for the advertising regulator, with little real consequence. That has changed completely.
Why this is suddenly a serious risk
Since April 2025, drip pricing has been explicitly illegal under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (the DMCCA). The law is simple to state: whenever you invite someone to buy, you must show the total price, including every mandatory fee, from the outset.
What makes this different from the old days is who enforces it and how hard they can hit. The DMCCA gave the CMA direct enforcement powers. It no longer has to take a business to court first. It can investigate, decide that the law has been broken, and impose a fine of up to 10% of global annual turnover, or £300,000, whichever is higher, on its own authority.
The AA case was the first time the CMA used these powers to issue a financial penalty, and the regulator was clear it will not be the last. As CMA Chief Executive Sarah Cardell put it, dripped fees can tip the balance for people watching every pound, and when it comes to something as important as learning to drive, people deserve clarity.
The AA is not an isolated target. The CMA reviewed more than 400 businesses across 19 sectors, opened investigations into several, and sent advisory letters to around 100 more. The sectors it flagged as highest risk include event tickets, cinemas, gyms, holidays and travel, hospitality, parking, homeware, and delivery services. If you operate in any of those, you are already in the area the regulator is watching.
How to tell if your own site has a problem
You do not need a lawyer to do a first check. Walk through your own website as if you were a customer, and ask:
Is the very first price a customer sees the full price they will actually pay? Or does a booking fee, service charge, or other mandatory cost appear later?
If a charge is unavoidable, for example a fee every customer must pay or a delivery cost with no genuine free option, is it included in that first price, not just revealed at checkout?
Are any optional extras pre-ticked, so a customer pays for something unless they notice and untick it?
Does the price in your ads, your search listings, and your homepage match the price at the final step?
If you found yourself hesitating on any of those, your pricing journey may have the same gap the AA had. The fee does not have to be large. The AA's was £3.
The cheap way to check before it costs you
This is exactly what Total Price was built for. You enter your website address, and we run an automated check of your public pricing journey against the price-transparency rules the CMA is enforcing. You get a plain-English report with a score and the specific issues to fix, in about a minute.
It is the affordable first step before you ever need a solicitor: find out whether you have a problem for a few pounds, rather than discovering it the way the AA did.
Your first audit is free. Check your website now
This article is general information about UK price-transparency rules, not legal advice. The figures and case details are drawn from the CMA's published decision of 15 April 2026.