Connecticut’s new all-in pricing law took effect July 1, 2026, and it’s worth understanding even though it never mentions parking apps by name. The statute — Public Act 25-44, originally Substitute Senate Bill 3, signed by the governor on June 10, 2025 — creates new per se violations of the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act (CUTPA) for any business that advertises, displays, or offers a price for goods or services while leaving out a mandatory fee the customer has to pay. That’s broad language, and broad language is exactly what tends to catch industries lawmakers never specifically discussed while drafting a bill.
What the Law Actually Says
Strip away the legal phrasing and the rule is simple: if a fee is required for the consumer to complete the purchase, it has to be part of the price shown up front, not added at the end. A business can’t advertise $2.00 an hour and then tack on a 35-cent “convenience fee” at checkout without disclosing it earlier in the process.
The law does carve out real exceptions. Taxes and government-imposed fees are excluded, as long as they’re disclosed before purchase is completed. Fees that vary depending on choices the customer makes — or that genuinely can’t be calculated until later in the transaction — are allowed, provided the existence of that fee is disclosed upfront and the actual amount is shown before the customer pays. Mandatory gratuities are fine too, as long as the calculation method is clear before the customer selects it.
Enforcement runs through the Connecticut Attorney General, who has exclusive authority to bring CUTPA actions under the new provisions. Consumers who believe a business is violating the law can also file a complaint with the Attorney General’s office or the state Department of Consumer Protection.
The Part the Bill Doesn’t Say — And Why It Still Applies
Here’s the honest caveat: nothing in the text of Public Act 25-44, or in the legislative summaries covering it, singles out parking payment apps, mobile ticketing platforms, or the mobility sector at all. This is a general consumer-pricing statute aimed at “any company” offering goods or services, written in response to the same broad pattern of surprise fees that’s shown up in concert tickets, hotel bookings, and restaurant bills.
That’s precisely why it reaches parking apps anyway. A mobile parking platform charging a per-session service fee is doing exactly what the law describes: offering a service (a parking session) at an advertised price (the hourly or session rate) while a separate, mandatory charge — the app’s own convenience fee, distinct from whatever the city or garage charges — gets added before the transaction completes. Whether that fee is disclosed clearly enough, and early enough, to satisfy the statute is a fact question the law doesn’t resolve app-by-app. But the statute’s plain language doesn’t need to name “parking apps” for a Connecticut driver’s ParkMobile, PayByPhone, or Passport checkout screen to fall within its reach the same way a restaurant bill or an event ticket does.
Connecticut Joins a Pattern, Not a One-Off
This isn’t an isolated Connecticut policy experiment. Colorado’s own all-in pricing law — the “Honest Pricing” statute, part of HB 25-1090 — took effect January 1, 2026, and requires mandatory, non-avoidable fees to be folded into the total price shown to consumers from the start. Minnesota has had a similar rule on the books since January 2025, barring hospitality and service businesses from tacking on undisclosed “convenience” or “processing” surcharges. Connecticut’s version follows the same structural logic each of those states landed on independently: disclose the real number before the customer commits, not after.
For an industry that has quietly normalized a 25-to-50-cent add-on fee across nearly every major parking app, that pattern matters. It’s the same legal reasoning behind the recent SpotHero class-action settlement over its Map View search tool — a claim that a fee technically disclosed somewhere in the terms doesn’t satisfy a transparency requirement if it only becomes visible to the customer after they’ve already picked a spot and started checkout.
What Changes for a Connecticut Driver
Practically, Connecticut-facing parking apps should already be showing the full per-session cost — base rate plus service fee — earlier in the flow, ideally on the search results screen rather than only at final checkout. If you’re parking in Connecticut this fall and a checkout total still jumps unexpectedly from what was advertised on the search screen, that’s now something you can raise directly with the state Department of Consumer Protection rather than just shrugging it off as the cost of using an app.
This is worth watching specifically if you park regularly in a Connecticut city that already runs on one of the major apps — Greenwich’s metered spaces use PayByPhone, for example, and New Haven and several university-adjacent towns route drivers through similar app-based systems. None of those municipal contracts change because of this law; what changes is what the app has to show you before you commit to paying.
The bigger-picture takeaway is less about Connecticut specifically and more about direction of travel: state by state, the legal room to advertise one number and charge a different one at checkout is closing. For a deeper look at how convenience fees actually work and why they add up the way they do, see our explainer on parking app convenience fees.
