At a glance. The CMA can now impose fines directly; penalties can reach 10% of worldwide turnover; and compliance requires a review of both contractual terms and the full customer journey.
What has changed?
Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCC Act), the Competition and Markets Authority can now investigate suspected breaches of consumer law and impose substantial financial penalties (up to the higher of £300,000 or 10% of the business’s worldwide annual turnover) for those found to be infringing consumer law. The CMA doesn’t need to take businesses to court to use these powers. It can also require businesses to compensate affected consumers.
Since these powers came into force on 6 April 2025, the CMA has acted against businesses over mandatory additional fees, misleading time-limited offers and the automatic selection of paid extras.
As of October 2026, these interventions have resulted in more than £5.8 million in fines and secured more than £1.95 million in refunds for consumers, with further CMA investigations ongoing.
Why does this matter?
If you’re a business selling to consumers, many of the underlying principles, particularly those governing unfair contract terms, are familiar. What the DMCC Act has done is to introduce new or more explicit consumer protection requirements, as well as transforming the CMA’s enforcement powers.
The CMA’s current enforcement priorities and guidance indicate that businesses should pay particular attention to:
- Discretionary price increases
- Automatic renewals
- Cancellation arrangements
- Excessive termination charges
- Mandatory and non-refundable fees
- Misleading urgency claims, including false countdowns, time-limited offers and scarcity claims
- Pre-selected or automatically added paid extras
- Unclear or incomplete pricing throughout a consumer journey
Drip pricing is a particular focus of the CMA’s current enforcement activity. The key idea here is that any mandatory fees should be included in the price shown to customers when the price is first presented, where they can reasonably be calculated at that stage. Disclosing them only later in the purchasing journey may not be sufficient.
Who is at risk?
Businesses likely to require particular attention include:
- ticketing and events;
- travel and holidays;
- subscription services;
- online retail; and
- any business that charges mandatory booking, administration, service or platform fees separately from the advertised price.
However, any business selling to consumers (whether online or in person) needs to make sure they’re complying with the rules or be at risk of enforcement action.
What does the CMA’s updated guidance say?
On 22 July 2026, the CMA published a substantially revised version of its unfair contract terms guidance, CMA37.
The updated guidance places particular emphasis on: ensuring that consumer terms are transparent and prominent; making key terms accessible at the relevant stages of the customer journey; and avoiding terms that are unusual, particularly onerous or significantly imbalanced in favour of the business.
At 134 pages, however, the guidance is detailed and may be difficult for businesses to translate into practical compliance steps.
What should your business do now?
- Review your consumer-facing terms and conditions to check they’re up to date;
- Review your customer journey to check terms are prominent, clear and visible at the right time;
- Ensure any mandatory fees customers have to pay are clear up front;
- Ensure any use of timers, time-limited offers or limited stock claims are accurate;
- If you offer optional extras, be clear that these are optional;
- If you’re offering subscription deals, make the terms and renewal process obvious;
- Make your cancellation process clear, transparent and easy to access;
- Check that key terms, pricing information and cancellation routes are appropriately presented for customers with different accessibility needs (on both web and mobile).
Although many of the underlying consumer law principles are established, the CMA’s ability to enforce them directly is new and materially increases the risk of non-compliance.
Businesses often focus on their written terms without giving the same attention to how prices, choices and contractual information are presented throughout the customer journey. We can help with both.
An effective compliance audit should involve not only legal, but also marketing, product, ecommerce and customer-service teams. This helps ensure that the customer journey complies with consumer law while remaining consistent with the business’s brand and commercial objectives.
Lastly please don’t assume that your third-party e-commerce platform provider has taken care of this for you – in most cases they haven’t and that’s not going to save you from a big fine if the CMA finds you’re not compliant.
If you’re overdue a review of your consumer law compliance, please get in touch with Howes Percival’s Digital & E-Commerce experts and we’ll be happy to help.
