A dated ticket sold in the UK carries no 14-day cooling-off right. That's what the regulations granting that right for distance purchases say: Part 3 doesn't apply to leisure services with a set date. So far, good news for the organiser. The rest of this article is the other half: what UK law does require when the event falls through, moves, or isn't what the advert said, and what the CMA has been fining since April 2025.
Can a UK buyer cancel within 14 days?
No, if the ticket has a date. Regulation 28 of the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 is titled "Limits of application: circumstances excluding cancellation" and excludes from Part 3 — the part governing the cancellation right — "the supply of accommodation, transport of goods, vehicle rental services, catering or services related to leisure activities, if the contract provides for a specific date or period of performance".
A concert, festival or theatre performance with a set date and time falls squarely within that limb (h). A buyer who simply changes their mind has no statutory refund right: they have whatever your terms of sale say. That's the key difference from the Spanish market, where the debate centres on article 103 of the consolidated consumer law, and from ticket refunds in Italy, which starts from the same EU-derived framework.
Two nuances worth putting in writing before the first complaint lands. The first is that only Part 3 is excluded; the pre-contract information duties the regulations impose remain in force. The second is our own reading of limb (h), not a statement from the UK Government: the exclusion rests on the contract providing for "a specific date or period of performance", so an open voucher or gift card with no fixed date or period sits on shakier ground. If you sell open vouchers, don't assume the exclusion applies.
What rights does the Consumer Rights Act 2015 give when things go wrong?
The rights of a services contract. Chapter 4 of Part 1 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 writes into every consumer services contract the term that "the trader must perform the service with reasonable care and skill" (section 49) and, where no time was agreed, that it must be performed "within a reasonable time" (section 52).
When the service doesn't match what was agreed, section 54 sets out two remedies: "(a) the right to require repeat performance…; (b) the right to a price reduction". Section 55 requires the trader to repeat performance "within a reasonable time and without significant inconvenience to the consumer" and to bear the cost, unless repeat performance is impossible. Section 56 allows the price to be reduced "by an appropriate amount" and fixes the timeline for the money: the refund is made "within 14 days beginning with the day on which the trader agrees" and "using the same means of payment as the consumer used".
A practical consequence follows from this — our own reading of how the pieces fit, not a rule written into the Act: a concert can't be "repeated" within the meaning of section 55, because the date and line-up were the service. For most promoter incidents — a changed zone, worse visibility than advertised, an altered running order — the realistic remedy is the price reduction under section 56, which can reach the full amount if nothing of the performance was worth keeping. And the 14-day clock starts when you agree, not when the buyer writes in.
Do you have to refund the money if you cancel or postpone the event?
If you cancel, yes. The Competition and Markets Authority published its position on consumer contracts, cancellation and refunds on 28 August 2020: when a consumer has paid in advance for services they haven't received, "they will generally be entitled to obtain a refund", and the CMA expects a full refund when "a business has cancelled a contract without providing any of the promised goods or services". On terms that let a business keep the money without providing anything, the document is explicit: "terms which allow a business to provide no service but keep a consumer's money (including deposits or advance payments) are likely to be unfair, and therefore unenforceable".
Postponement is greyer territory. The CMA accepts alternatives — a new date, a voucher — but treats them as options the consumer can accept, not as forced substitutes for a refund. Worth remembering where the document comes from: it was written during the pandemic and sets out the CMA's interpretation of existing law, not a new rule. It's the clearest public statement of what the regulator expects, which is why it's relied on, but a court rules on the contract you actually wrote.
The practical consequence is that postponement needs two things written down before you ever sell a ticket: what happens to someone who can't make the new date, and how quickly they get their money. The same thing a good ticket refund policy resolves, applied to UK law.
Which "no refunds" clauses fall as unfair?
Those that unbalance the contract. Section 62 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 opens bluntly: "An unfair term of a consumer contract is not binding on the consumer". And it defines unfairness by outcome: a term is unfair if, contrary to good faith, it causes a significant imbalance in the parties' rights and obligations to the detriment of the consumer.
Schedule 2 lists the suspect types. Three matter to anyone selling tickets. Paragraph 4 flags a term that lets the trader "retain sums paid by the consumer where the consumer decides not to conclude or perform the contract, without providing for the consumer to receive compensation of an equivalent amount from the trader where the trader is the party cancelling the contract". Paragraph 5 flags one requiring a consumer who doesn't go ahead to pay "a disproportionately high sum in compensation or for services which have not been supplied". Paragraph 6 flags one imposing a disproportionate sum for breach.
Read together: a term of sale that keeps 100% if the buyer doesn't show up, but refunds only part if you're the one who cancels, sits exactly in the pattern of paragraph 4. It isn't automatically void — the Schedule is indicative — but it's the first place a court or an ADR body will look.
What gets refunded in each scenario
| Scenario | Applicable law | What the buyer expects | Risk if you don't |
|---|---|---|---|
| Changes their mind | CCR 2013, reg. 28(1)(h) | Nothing by law; only your terms | Reputational |
| You cancel the event | CRA 2015 (breach) + CMA position of 28/08/2020 | Full price, mandatory charges included | Clause not binding and a consumer enforcement case |
| You postpone the date | CRA 2015, ss. 52 and 54 | New date or price reduction | Individual claim |
| Zone or line-up different from what was sold | CRA 2015, ss. 49, 54 and 56 | Price reduction within 14 days | Claim and redress |
| Misleading ticket label | DMCCA 2024, ss. 226 and 230 | Correct information before paying | CMA fine |
| Mandatory charge left out of the advertised price | DMCCA 2024, s. 230(2) and (4) | Total price from the first advert | CMA fine |
| Ticket bundled with travel or accommodation | PTLTA 2018, reg. 13 | Full refund and notice within set deadlines | Package organiser liability |
| Paid by credit card | CCA 1974, s. 75 | Claim against the issuer | Chargeback and processing cost |
Do booking fees and service charges have to be refunded?
If the charge was mandatory, it's part of the price. Section 230 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 requires the total price to be given in any "invitation to purchase", and defines that total as including "any fees, taxes, charges or other payments that the consumer will necessarily incur if the consumer purchases the product". The duty to display it is explained in detail in our guide on VAT and HMRC for selling tickets in the UK; what matters here is the effect on refunds.
And the effect is this, on our own reading of the two provisions together: if the law treats a mandatory booking fee as price, a "refund" that keeps that fee hasn't refunded the price. It fits with what the CMA was already saying in 2020 about not charging administrative fees to process a refund that's owed.
That this isn't theory is shown by the most recent case. On 14 October 2026 the CMA fined three firms £6 million: £4.8 million to Wayfair over fake countdown-timer offers, £1.2 million to Appliances Direct over pre-ticked boxes and misleading discount banners, and £45,000 to Gold's Gym, plus £9,220 in refunds, for failing to clearly show mandatory joining fees in the total price. Section 230(2), the total-price provision, is among the grounds for the case. A gym and a ticket share the same problem: a charge nobody can avoid, shown too late.
The sector precedent came earlier. On 18 November 2025 the CMA launched an online pricing crackdown with 100 warning letters across 14 sectors, including live events, and investigations into eight companies, two of them StubHub and viagogo. Its price transparency guidance CMA209, published the same day and updated on 7 January 2026, explains *drip pricing* and split pricing; the general unfair practices guidance is CMA207, from 4 April 2025.
A tax detail that's easy to forget: if you refund, you reclaim the tax. Paragraph 8.13.1 of HMRC's VAT Notice 700 says that "if you refund the payment, then you can reclaim any VAT you have accounted for in your next return". The refund isn't paid for twice.
What changed on 6 April 2026 in complaints and ADR?
What changed is who can resolve your dispute and what you have to tell the buyer. The 2026/284 regulations brought Chapter 4 of Part 4 of the DMCCA 2024 into force on 6 April 2026, along with Schedules 25 to 27. From that date, under Chapter 4, "a person must not carry out ADR in relation to a consumer contract dispute unless the person is an exempt ADR provider… or is an accredited ADR provider" (section 293). Accreditation stopped being voluntary.
For the organiser, the specific duty sits in section 308: when you respond to a consumer's complaint, "the trader must, when communicating the outcome of the trader's consideration of the complaint to the consumer, also inform the consumer about any ADR or other arrangement that is available if the consumer is dissatisfied with the outcome". It doesn't require you to submit to ADR: it requires you to say whether it exists. Non-compliance is pursued under the enforcement notice regime in section 302. The 2026/293 regulations also came into force the same day, setting out what information accredited and exempt ADR providers must report, including the grounds on which they can reject a dispute.
There's a loose thread here worth checking in your contract with the ticketing company. The UK sector's self-regulatory body, STAR, still describes itself as approved "under the Alternative Dispute Resolution for Consumer Disputes (Competent Authorities and Information) Regulations 2015" — as checked on 17 October 2026 — the very framework the new regime replaces; regulation 19 of those 2015 rules is recorded as revoked from 6 April 2026 in the official text. A provider having been approved under the old rules doesn't by itself confirm its status under the new ones: ask for it in writing.
What can a buyer claim without going through you?
Three routes, worth knowing before they land on you. The first is the card. Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 makes the credit issuer jointly liable for the supplier's breach, except — under section 75(3)(b) — where the cash price of the item is £100 or less, or exceeds £30,000. This is our own reading of that threshold, not official doctrine: a single £65 ticket falls below the floor, while an order of two £65 tickets, £130 total, clears it. How you bundle the order changes the available claim route. Chargeback is a different thing: it doesn't arise from statute but from card scheme rules, the same mechanism behind ticket chargebacks in the United States.
The second is the private redress right for unfair commercial practices, and it sits in an odd place. The 2025/272 regulations brought Part 4, Chapter 1 of the DMCCA into force on 6 April 2025, but left out sections 232, 234 and 235, the consumer redress right provisions, which await the regulations under section 233. Until they arrive, the private route remains Part 4A of the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008: the right to unwind the contract within "90 days beginning with the later of" the contract date or the day the service started (reg. 27E), the right to a discount of 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% depending on severity (reg. 27I), and the right to damages for "financial loss" or for "alarm, distress or physical inconvenience or discomfort" (reg. 27J).
Those percentages make more sense with numbers. On a £65 ticket, the four tiers under regulation 27I come to £16.25, £32.50, £48.75 and £65. And the 90-day period has a quirk that's our own reading of the text: if the clock runs from when the service started, a ticket sold in November for a July festival opens the rescission window on the day of the festival, not the day of purchase. A claim over a misleading label could land as late as the following October.
The third is the courts. In England and Wales, section 5 of the Limitation Act 1980 gives six years: "An action founded on simple contract shall not be brought after the expiration of six years from the date on which the cause of action accrued". In Scotland it's five years, under section 6 of the Prescription and Limitation (Scotland) Act 1973. Section 234(4) of the DMCCA refers, for Northern Ireland, to the Limitation (Northern Ireland) Order 1989. Three different periods in the same market: your archive of terms of sale and correspondence needs to last six years, not one season.
And there's the precedent every UK promoter knows. The CMA opened its case against Ticketmaster on 5 September 2024 over the Oasis sale and closed it with commitments signed on 15 September 2025 and published on the 25th: giving 24 hours' notice if tiered pricing will apply, providing pricing information during the virtual queue, and not using misleading labels, with compliance reporting for two years. The CMA questioned why "platinum" tickets were sold at nearly 2.5 times the standard price without explaining what they added, and stated it found no evidence of algorithmic pricing in that sale. The full case file was handled under the 2008 rules, before the direct fining regime.
Because that's what raised the stakes: since April 2025 the CMA itself decides whether a consumer infringement has occurred and can impose fines of up to 10% of a company's turnover, as it noted when closing the Ticketmaster case and as its CMA207 guidance details. In its 19 November 2025 response to the call for evidence on live events pricing, the UK Government ruled out fresh legislation on this subject and pointed instead to existing law and CMA guidance. Where it is legislating is on resale, with the resale price cap as a separate piece.
What if you sell the ticket bundled with travel or accommodation?
Then you might not just be a promoter. The Package Travel and Linked Travel Arrangements Regulations 2018 define a "package" as the combination of at least two different types of travel service for the same trip, and regulation 2(6) excludes the combination where the tourism service doesn't represent a significant proportion of the value and isn't advertised as an essential feature. A ticket bundled with a coach and camping sold as a package can fall within scope.
If it does, regulation 13 changes your deadlines: an organiser who cancels because the minimum number of bookings wasn't reached, or due to unavoidable circumstances, owes "a full refund of any payments made for the package", and must give at least 20 days' notice if the package lasts more than six days, 7 days if it lasts between two and six days, and 48 hours if it lasts less than two days. These are notice deadlines, not refund deadlines, and they don't exist when selling a standalone ticket.
And Futura Tickets — what should you demand from the platform?
First, that the refund goes back through the same channel the money came in, because section 56 of the Consumer Rights Act requires it. Futura Tickets is a Spanish SaaS ticketing platform for professional organisers, accepting card, Bizum, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna, Bancontact, MobilePay, EPS and iDEAL, and processing payments through three live gateways: Stripe, Redsys and PayPal. With Futura Tickets, the attendee database belongs 100% to the organiser, full emails and phone numbers, GDPR-compliant, which is what lets you notify every buyer of a cancellation without depending on anyone else. And in Futura Tickets' official resale, the organiser sets the price cap — for example, 110% of face value — and takes a commission on every resale: an official-resale waiting list resolves, without refunds, a good share of the cases where a buyer can no longer attend. You can compare the ticketing software available against those criteria.
Checklist before you open sales in the UK
Seven checks, all of them before the first ticket is sold.
Write down what happens if you cancel. If your terms keep the money when the buyer doesn't show up but don't refund the full amount when you cancel, you're in the pattern flagged by paragraph 4 of Schedule 2 of the Consumer Rights Act.
Build mandatory charges into the advertised price. Section 230(4) of the DMCCA defines the total price as including unavoidable fees. The Gold's Gym fine of 14 October 2026 shows what happens when you don't.
Refund the fee if you refund the price. A refund that keeps the mandatory booking fee isn't the full refund the CMA expects when an event doesn't go ahead.
Set the deadline at 14 days and use the original payment method. That's what section 56 of the CRA 2015 requires for price reductions, and it's the standard you'll be measured against.
Check what you say about ADR when responding to a complaint. Since 6 April 2026, section 308 of the DMCCA requires you to disclose the available route when you communicate the outcome.
Ask your ADR provider for its new accreditation. Approval under the 2015 rules doesn't equate to accreditation under Chapter 4 of the DMCCA.
Keep your terms, prices and correspondence for six years. Six in England and Wales, five in Scotland: size your archive to the longer period.
Conclusion
The UK market is generous to organisers on one point and demanding on the rest. There's no cooling-off right for a dated ticket, which spares you a problem other European markets do have. On the other hand, the clause you write is judged against section 62 of the Consumer Rights Act, the price you advertise is judged against section 230 of the DMCCA — with the CMA's direct fining regime in place since April 2025 — and since 6 April 2026 you have to tell a dissatisfied buyer where they can go. All three need settling before you sell, in your terms document and in your platform configuration, not in the reply email to the first complaint. If you're selling there, it's also worth having sorted both the VAT on the ticket and the venue's premises licence at the same time.
Sources
- The Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013, reg. 28 (legislation.gov.uk)
- Consumer Rights Act 2015, Part 1, Chapter 4: services, ss. 49 to 57 (legislation.gov.uk)
- Consumer Rights Act 2015, s. 62: requirement for fairness of terms (legislation.gov.uk)
- Consumer Rights Act 2015, Schedule 2: terms which may be regarded as unfair (legislation.gov.uk)
- Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, s. 230: total price in the invitation to purchase (legislation.gov.uk)
- Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, Part 4, Chapter 4: consumer ADR (legislation.gov.uk)
- Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, s. 308: duty to inform of ADR (legislation.gov.uk)
- The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (Commencement No. 3 and Transitional Provisions) Regulations 2026 (legislation.gov.uk)
- The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (Alternative Dispute Resolution) (Information) Regulations 2026 (legislation.gov.uk)
- The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (Commencement No. 2) Regulations 2025 (legislation.gov.uk)
- Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, Part 4A: redress rights (legislation.gov.uk)
- Consumer Credit Act 1974, s. 75: joint liability of creditor (legislation.gov.uk)
- Limitation Act 1980, s. 5 (legislation.gov.uk)
- Prescription and Limitation (Scotland) Act 1973, s. 6 (legislation.gov.uk)
- Package Travel and Linked Travel Arrangements Regulations 2018, regs. 2 and 13 (legislation.gov.uk)
- CMA: the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, consumer contracts, cancellation and refunds, 28 August 2020 (GOV.UK)
- CMA fines firms £6 million for misleading sales tactics, 14 October 2026 (GOV.UK)
- CMA launches major consumer protection drive focused on online pricing practices, 18 November 2025 (GOV.UK)
- Price transparency: CMA209 (GOV.UK)
- Unfair commercial practices: CMA207 (GOV.UK)
- CMA secures changes from Ticketmaster following Oasis tickets investigation, 25 September 2025 (GOV.UK)
- Ticketmaster: consumer protection case (GOV.UK)
- Government response to the call for evidence on pricing practices in the live events sector, 19 November 2025 (GOV.UK)
- VAT guide (VAT Notice 700), para. 8.13.1 (HMRC, GOV.UK)
- Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers (STAR), accessed 17 October 2026