How California AB 1349 Changes Ticket Buying and Resale

Update, September 29, 2026: Governor Newsom signed AB 1349 on September 27, and it is now Chapter 474 of the 2026 statutes. It has no urgency clause, so it takes effect January 1, 2027 under the state constitution’s general rule. The provisions quoted below are the same in the chaptered text. A buyer-focused version, including the refund rules that already apply, is on our sister site Howply: How California’s New Ticket Law (AB 1349) Works: Refunds and Resale.

California’s rewrite of its ticket-selling rules passed both houses on August 31, 2026 and was signed on September 27. AB 1349 is unusually concrete for consumer legislation: it bans selling a ticket you do not actually have, it makes evading a queue or a ticket limit unlawful by name, and it lets a buyer who never receives a ticket sue for double the price. Here is what the text says, quoted from the bill itself, and what changes at checkout once it takes effect.

The quick answer

• Status: passed the Senate 29-5 and cleared Assembly concurrence 67-0 on August 31, 2026, and was “Approved by Governor September 27, 2026.” It takes effect January 1, 2027; until then the current rules apply
• Speculative sales banned: a seller may not list a ticket without “actual or constructive possession” or “authorization from the event presenter or venue operator to sell the ticket”
• Marketplaces are treated differently, not identically: the ban on speculative sales applies to “a person other than a ticket resale marketplace.” Marketplaces instead get a duty not to “knowingly or recklessly” facilitate such a sale and to “implement reasonable measures designed to prevent speculative ticket sales on its platform”
• A major supporter asked for a veto, and the Governor signed with a caveat: his signing message says the measure “appears to take an uneven approach” and asks for more work “in the coming year.” The National Independent Venue Association, which backed the bill, had asked Governor Newsom on September 1 to veto it, saying the bill “abdicates multibillion dollar resale platforms like StubHub from true accountability”
• Double damages: a seller who violates and “fails to supply a ticket at or below a contracted price” is “civilly liable to the ticket purchaser for two times the contracted price,” plus nonrefundable costs and “reasonable attorney’s fees and court costs”
• Bots and limit evasion named explicitly: it would be unlawful to “circumvent or evade an electronic queue, waiting period, presale restriction or presale code, ticket purchasing limit, account limitation, or other ticket distribution control,” including by “multiple Internet Protocol addresses, multiple purchaser accounts, multiple email addresses”
• Lookalike sites and “sold out” claims: using a domain or logo “substantially similar to” an official one becomes false advertising, as does claiming an event “is sold out when tickets remain available from the original seller”

Key facts at a glance

Provision	What the enrolled text says
Selling a ticket you do not hold	Prohibited unless you have “actual or constructive possession” or seller authorization
What “constructive possession” means	You “fully paid for the ticket,” hold “a legally enforceable right to receive delivery,” and “received confirmation of purchase or assignment”
Selling before tickets exist	Prohibited before the ticket “has been made available for sale,” absent express authorization or constructive possession
Exemptions	Season ticket packages, multigame packages, withheld inventory, and playoff packages sold by a rights holder before the season
If the seller cannot deliver	Buyer may recover “two times the contracted price,” nonrefundable expenses, fees and costs
Buying over the posted limit	Unlawful, as is using software or services to enable it
Evading a queue or presale code	Unlawful, named directly in the statute
Fake seat claims	Unlawful to imply “a ticket listing reflects a specific seat, section, row, or location if the seller does not have a reasonable basis”
Pro sports carve-out	California teams, their venues, and league-owned entities may still withhold, reserve, transfer, or allocate inventory
Penalty route	A violation of the advertising section “constitutes false or misleading advertising” under California’s false advertising law

The core change: you cannot sell what you do not have

Section 22502.1 of the enrolled text is the heart of the bill, and it defines the practice it bans. A “speculative ticket sale” is the listing or sale of a ticket by someone who has neither “actual or constructive possession of the ticket” nor “authorization from the event presenter or venue operator to sell the ticket.” The definition of constructive possession is where the teeth are: the seller must have “fully paid for the ticket,” hold “a legally enforceable right to receive delivery of the ticket,” and have “received confirmation of purchase or assignment from the original ticket seller, event presenter, or venue operator.”

That description rules out the pattern most fans have run into: a listing that appears the day a tour is announced, priced high, for seats the seller intends to buy later at the on-sale. The bill closes that timing gap separately too, prohibiting a seller from listing a ticket “before the ticket has been made available for sale by the event presenter, venue operator, rights holder, or original seller,” unless authorized or already in constructive possession.

Marketplaces are handled by a separate rule, and the difference is the most contested thing in the bill. Read the definition again: a speculative sale is one made “by a person other than a ticket resale marketplace.” A marketplace therefore cannot commit the offense the section creates. What it gets instead is subsection (b): it must not “knowingly or recklessly” process payment, collect a fee, or facilitate such a sale, and it must “implement reasonable measures designed to prevent speculative ticket sales on its platform.” A knowledge-or-recklessness standard plus an undefined duty of reasonable measures is a lighter obligation than a flat prohibition, and that gap is why the bill original supporters turned against it.

There are carve-outs. The section “shall not apply to the marketing, advertisement, or sale of season ticket packages, multigame packages, inventory withheld at the sole discretion of the rights holder or venue operator, or playoff ticket packages by a rights holder or their authorized ticketing agent before the beginning of the applicable season.”

What a buyer could actually collect

Most consumer statutes stop at prohibiting conduct. This one prices it. Under the amended Section 22502.3, a ticket seller, original seller, reseller, or marketplace that violates the speculative-sale rules “and fails to supply a ticket at or below a contracted price or within a contracted price range shall be civilly liable to the ticket purchaser for two times the contracted price of the ticket, in addition to any sum expended by the purchaser in nonrefundable expenses for attending or attempting to attend the event in good faith reliance on seat or space availability, and reasonable attorney’s fees and court costs.”

Read the middle clause carefully, because it is the part that matters for anyone who travels to a show: nonrefundable expenses incurred in “good faith reliance on seat or space availability” are recoverable. A canceled flight and hotel booked around tickets that never arrived would fall inside that language, not just the ticket price. Attorney’s fees being recoverable is what makes a small claim worth a lawyer’s time at all.

This is separate from marketplace guarantees, which are contractual rather than statutory and vary by platform; those are compared in our canceled show refund guide.

Queue jumping and ticket limits become a legal question

Section 22505.5 would make it unlawful to knowingly use or provide “software or services” to do any of five things, and the list reads like a description of how scalping operations actually work:

• “Purchase tickets in excess of posted limits for an online event ticket sale”
• “Circumvent or evade an electronic queue, waiting period, presale restriction or presale code, ticket purchasing limit, account limitation, or other ticket distribution control established and disclosed by the event presenter, venue operator, rights holder, or ticket seller”
• “Circumvent or disable a security measure, access control system, or other control or measure used to facilitate authorized ticket sales or authorized entry”
• Use “multiple Internet Protocol addresses, multiple purchaser accounts, multiple email addresses, or other technological means” to exceed limits
• Use “software, services, automated means, or other technological methods to automate, coordinate, facilitate, or otherwise enable” the above

Two things follow for ordinary buyers. First, the conduct platforms already punish by canceling orders would also be unlawful under state law; how Ticketmaster enforces limits today is in our queue guide, and the presale rules those controls sit behind are in our presale codes guide. Second, the statute protects controls that are “established and disclosed,” which puts weight on the limit being posted before the sale.

One exception is written in plainly: nothing in the chapter restricts “a California-based professional sports team, a sports venue operator, or an entity that is owned, directly or indirectly, by the professional sports league” from “withholding, reserving, managing, transferring, or allocating ticket inventory for operational or business purposes.”

The lookalike-site and “sold out” provisions

New Section 22505.6 targets the marketing layer. It would be unlawful to advertise tickets “in a manner that is likely to mislead a reasonable consumer regarding the source, sponsorship, authorization, availability, price, or nature of the ticket,” and specifically bars using a “website, internet address, domain name, trade name, trademark, service mark, logo, design, text, image, or other identifying characteristic” that is “substantially similar to, or likely to be confused with” an official one.

Four claims are named as unlawful representations:

1. That “a ticket is available from an authorized source when the ticket is being offered through resale”
2. That an event “is sold out when tickets remain available from the original seller or an authorized seller”
3. That the buyer is purchasing from the presenter, venue, rights holder, or original seller “when the consumer is purchasing from a reseller or ticket resale marketplace”
4. That “a ticket listing reflects a specific seat, section, row, or location if the seller does not have a reasonable basis to make that representation”

A violation “constitutes false or misleading advertising” under California’s false advertising law, which carries civil penalties and, for some violations, misdemeanor exposure. The domain-impersonation clause is the one most likely to change what fans see in search results, and it sits next to a problem we have already documented from the other direction, the fake-notice emails covered in our settlement email guide.

One definition worth noticing

The bill defines “ticket resale marketplace” to include “an original seller to the extent that the original seller operates a website or other online application that advertises, lists, markets for sale, processes payments for, or facilitates resale or original sale of tickets that were not offered to the general public during the public onsale.”

In plain terms, a primary ticketing company is treated as a resale marketplace when it runs resale, and also when it sells inventory that never reached the public on-sale. That pulls held-back inventory into the same rules as third-party resale. It is a narrow sentence with a wide reach, and it is the sort of provision that is easier to read now than to reconstruct from coverage later.

The fight over the final text

The bill own backers split from it before it reached the Governor. On September 1 the National Independent Venue Association, the trade group for independent venues, festivals, and promoters, asked Newsom to veto it. Executive Director Stephen Parker framed it this way: the bill “could have been an opportunity to stop the sale of ghost tickets,” but “instead, AB 1349 abdicates multibillion dollar resale platforms like StubHub from true accountability for selling ghost tickets,” and “late amendments were adopted to remove danger for billion dollar sports teams while leaving artists, small businesses, and nonprofits exposed.”

NIVA lists four objections to the amended text. Two are verifiable in the bill itself, one is a reading of a definition, and one concerns a disclosure this page could not locate in current law:

1. The speculative-sale ban carves out marketplaces. Confirmed by the text: the prohibition reaches “a person other than a ticket resale marketplace”
2. Venues that run a presale, waitlist, or VIP package could be swept into the marketplace definition. The definition covers an original seller “to the extent that the original seller operates a website… that… facilitates resale or original sale of tickets that were not offered to the general public during the public onsale.” Presales, waitlists, and VIP allocations are, by construction, tickets not offered during the public on-sale
3. The damages provision names a term the bill never defines. Section 22502.3 makes a “ticket seller, original seller, ticket reseller, or ticket retail marketplace” liable for double the price. The definitions section defines “ticket resale marketplace,” not “ticket retail marketplace”
4. A seat-and-row disclosure is removed. NIVA says the amended bill “strikes the requirement that resale listings are required to show a seat number and row.” The bill does repeal two existing sections, and this page could not confirm which one carried that disclosure, so this is reported as NIVA characterization rather than as verified text

StubHub position is not stated in the bill or in NIVA release, and this page does not repeat the lobbying figures circulating in trade coverage, because they appear in neither primary document.

What the bill repeals, and why venues care

Two repeals do more work than the new language does, and they explain the objection better than any press release.

Section 22503.5 disappears. Current law reads, in full: “This chapter does not apply to any primary contractor or seller of tickets for the primary contractor operating under a written contract with the primary contractor,” where a primary contractor is “the person or organization who is responsible for the event.” That is a blanket exemption for event organizers and the sellers they contract with. AB 1349 repeals it without replacement, which would put venues and presenters inside the chapter for the first time.

The current disclosure escape hatch disappears too. Today Section 22502.1 lets a seller take money for a ticket it does not hold, as long as it “informs the purchaser orally at the time of the contract… and in writing within two business days” that it lacks possession and “may not be able to supply the ticket at the contracted price.” The new version deletes that option: possession, constructive possession, or authorization, with nothing in between. For buyers that is a clear gain, and it is the strongest consumer provision in the bill.

What happens now

The Governor signed the bill on September 27, 2026, and the official status page records it as chaptered: Chapter 474, Statutes of 2026. The chaptered text has no urgency clause, so the state constitution’s general rule applies: a statute enacted at a regular session takes effect “on January 1 next following a 90-day period from the date of enactment of the statute.” That is January 1, 2027. Until then the existing ticket-seller rules, including the current cancellation refund requirements, stay in place.

The signing message is short and pointed. The Governor writes that the measure “appears to take an uneven approach, allowing select ticket sellers to avoid certain obligations under the bill,” that “such a carve-out deserves further discussion,” and that he encourages the author “to continue to work with stakeholders to refine this policy in the coming year.” The practical questions now are which “reasonable measures” marketplaces adopt, how quickly listings without possession disappear from California-facing pages, and whether a follow-up bill arrives in 2027. Those are also the questions the federal Live Nation settlement leaves open from a different angle, covered in our settlement guide.

Bottom line

AB 1349 bans listing tickets nobody holds, puts a screening duty on resale marketplaces, makes queue and limit evasion unlawful in its own right, and lets a buyer who is left without a ticket recover twice the price plus travel costs and legal fees. It passed 29-5 and 67-0, was signed on September 27, 2026, and takes effect January 1, 2027. The Governor’s signing message flags the marketplace carve-out for more work, so a follow-up bill is possible.

Provisions quoted from AB 1349 as chaptered (Chapter 474, Statutes of 2026), rechecked on September 29, 2026 against the chaptered text, the bill history, the Governor’s announcement and signing message, and the California Constitution. The NIVA statement and the current code sections were read on September 11, 2026.