The Federal Trade Commission's fee-disclosure rule that took effect in 2025 does not apply to your restaurant. It reaches live-event ticketing and short-term lodging, and that is where the enforcement attention has gone. Reading that as an all-clear is the expensive mistake.
The rule that actually governs what your phone agent says about price is older, plainer, and has been in force the entire time: a business may not tell a customer one price and then charge a different one. Federal and state deception statutes have said so for decades. The wave of junk fee laws mostly restated that with sharper teeth and specific timing requirements for specific industries. Your obligation on the phone never depended on them.
What the federal rule reaches, and what it skips
The federal rule is narrow on purpose. It targets the two industries where mandatory add-on fees had become close to universal, and it requires the total price including all mandatory charges to appear at the moment a price is first shown. Restaurants are outside its scope.
That narrowness is doing a lot of work in the trade-press coverage that told operators they were in the clear. What the coverage tended to skip is that the FTC's general authority over deceptive acts did not go anywhere, and it has always covered restaurants. A mandatory charge the customer only discovers at payment is a deception claim under that authority regardless of whether a dedicated fee rule names your industry.
Your state is where the real exposure sits
Several states passed their own price-disclosure laws in the same period, and a few of them do reach restaurants.
California is the instructive case. Its price-transparency law swept broadly enough to alarm the restaurant industry, and the legislature came back with a carve-out that lets restaurants keep mandatory service charges on the condition that they are clearly and conspicuously disclosed in menus, advertising, and anywhere else the price appears. The carve-out is real, and it is conditional. Operators who read the headline and skipped the condition are the ones getting demand letters.
Other states have taken narrower or broader swings, and city ordinances add another layer, particularly in places that also regulate delivery platform commissions. The practical instruction is unglamorous: ask your own counsel what applies at your address, and ask again if you open a second location in a different state. Anyone who tells you there is one national answer is selling something. This post is not legal advice.
A spoken quote is a price representation
Here is the part that matters more than any statute. Everything the disclosure laws are reaching toward is already satisfied if the number a caller hears out loud is the number that hits their card.
That is a lower bar than most operators think, and a bar the phone breaks more often than any other channel. A menu is a written document that can carry a footnote. A checkout page has a line-item summary the customer reads before clicking. A phone call has neither. The caller hears whatever the person or system on the other end chose to say, and then hands over a card number.
So the phone is the channel where fee disclosure depends entirely on script discipline, and it is the channel where most restaurants have never written a script at all. Whoever picks up says the total or does not, depending on how busy they are and how long they have worked there.
The order the caller needs to hear it in
Sequence matters more than completeness. A fee disclosed after the caller has already agreed to pay is not a disclosure, it is an apology.
The sequence that holds up is subtotal, then each mandatory charge by name and amount, then the total, then the request for payment. Three sentences. "Your subtotal is $42.50. There's a 3.5 percent service charge of $1.49 and $4.00 for delivery. Your total is $47.99." A caller who hears that and continues has consented to the price in a way no one can later characterize as a surprise.
Notice what the script does not do. It does not bury the charge inside a total. It does not describe the charge with a euphemism the caller has to decode. It does not wait to be asked. Each of those is a shortcut that a busy human on a Friday night takes without thinking about it, and each one is the fact pattern in a consumer complaint.
Where operators actually get caught
Four patterns come up repeatedly, and none of them involve anyone intending to deceive anybody.
The first is the fee that exists in the POS but not in anyone's script. Someone added a 3 percent kitchen charge two years ago, the online ordering page displays it correctly, and the phone process was never updated because the phone process was never written down.
The second is a card surcharge quoted as a percentage without a dollar figure, which is technically disclosed and practically useless to a caller doing arithmetic in their head while their kid yells in the background. The mechanics of that one are worth reading separately in surcharge disclosure on phone orders.
The third is a price mismatch the restaurant did not create. Callers who have been looking at your listing on a delivery app frequently quote a price back at you that is 15 to 25 percent above your menu, because platform pricing and direct pricing drifted apart. That is a separate problem with its own answer in menu price parity across third-party apps, and it produces the same argument at the counter.
The fourth is automatic gratuity on a large order, applied correctly and mentioned nowhere. Catering is where this bites hardest, because the dollar amounts are large enough that a customer notices and small enough that they will not sue, so you never learn about it. You just lose them.
Writing the fees into a voice agent instead of a policy binder
A voice agent turns fee disclosure from a training problem into a configuration problem, which is a meaningful downgrade in difficulty.
You define the charges once during setup. Every mandatory charge, its calculation basis, and the exact words it gets described with. The agent then says it on call number one and on call number four thousand, at 11 a.m. and at the peak of a Saturday, in the same order and the same words. Nobody skips it because the ticket rail is full. If you have ever tried to enforce a phone script across three shifts of hourly staff, the appeal is obvious.
It also gives you the thing you never had before, which is proof. The transcript of every call shows what the caller was told about price and when. A chargeback dispute over an undisclosed fee usually turns into a swearing contest between a customer's memory and a manager's assumption. A transcript ends it in about forty seconds. That evidentiary side effect is worth understanding along with its limits, which we cover in call recording consent laws for restaurants.
Pull your last twenty phone tickets and add up every line that is not food, tax, or a voluntary tip. Then call your own restaurant, order the same thing, and write down every number you hear before you are asked for a card. If those two lists do not match, you have a disclosure problem right now, and it predates every junk fee law anyone passed.