The number on an event page is the lowest total price for a ticket the site can sell you right now, fees included and taxes excluded. Artists, teams or promoters set it for standard seats; it moves with demand on Official Platinum seats; sellers set it on resale listings. It can change at any time, and usually does.
That's the short version. Here is each number in the order you'll meet it.
What does "from $89" mean on Ticketmaster?
"From" is a floor. The Federal Trade Commission's guidance on its fee rule says a seller may advertise a lowest available total price only if people can actually buy tickets at that price and the pricing isn't otherwise misleading. So "from $89" means that when the page loaded, at least one ticket was available for $89 all-in. It doesn't mean many were, or that the one you want is.
Two things about that number changed in 2025. First, it now includes fees. The rule, in force since 12 May 2025, requires the total price — every mandatory charge the seller knows about and can calculate up front — to be displayed more prominently than any other price. Taxes, shipping and optional extras can still be added later. Ticketmaster switched its US site to what it calls All In Prices the same day, showing the full price "including all fees (before taxes)" from the first screen. If you remember a $49 sticker turning into $67 at checkout, that was the old world. Now the $67 is the sticker, and the remaining surprise, where there is one, is sales tax.
Second, not every site did the same. In April 2026 the FTC sued StubHub, alleging it kept showing base prices without mandatory fees on its ticket-selection and checkout screens; in the FTC's own example the total came out 25% higher than the price first advertised. So "from" on Ticketmaster and "from" on a resale site can mean different things, and outside the US the rules differ again. When we record a price we record what the page advertised, and we label it that way.
Why is the price different once I pick a seat?
Because "from" was the cheapest seat, and you didn't pick the cheapest seat. On the seat map you're looking at the promoter's price levels by section, with three kinds of ticket mixed in that are priced by different people.
Standard tickets carry the face value. Ticketmaster's help pages say "Artists, sports teams or promoters set the face value ticket price, which Ticketmaster doesn't keep any portion of", and that they "can also decide to change that price at any time". That last clause is why the same section can cost more a week after on-sale without anything underhand happening.
Official Platinum tickets are the seats with the Platinum label. Ticketmaster describes them as "some of the most popular tickets at a price set by the Event Organizer" and, asked whether that is surge pricing, answers "No, Ticketmaster does not use any algorithmic surge pricing technology." The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations' minority staff report from March 2026 puts it differently: Platinum tickets "are dynamically priced—meaning the price can change in response to customer demand", for seats Ticketmaster and the venue identify as particularly desirable, and allocating 8–10% of the house to Platinum had become standard. Both can be true at once: the organiser sets the parameters and the price moves inside them. What it means for you is that a Platinum price isn't a face value plus a markup you can work out. It's a price for today. The longer story is in face value, Platinum, resale: why one seat has three prices.
Verified Resale tickets are seats other fans, or brokers, are reselling through Ticketmaster. The seller sets the price, above or below face, unless the artist has capped resale or switched on Face Value Exchange. Fees on resale run higher on average: the Congressional Research Service cites 20–56% of the base price on secondary sales against 13–58% on primary. On a seat map the three kinds sit side by side, and the "from" price could have been any of them.
What is the fee stack?
In the US you now see it as one number, but it is still built from parts, and the parts explain why the same seat costs different amounts in different buildings. Ticketmaster lists four: a service fee, charged per ticket and "shared between Ticketmaster, venues, sports teams, leagues, promoters"; an order processing fee, charged once per order and shared between the venue and Ticketmaster; a facility charge, which the venue keeps; and delivery, for the few events that still ship physical tickets. Taxes sit on top. A dearer seat carries more fee: the Senate report notes that because many of Ticketmaster's fees are proportional to the ticket price, price increases on dynamically priced tickets "also yield more revenue from fees".
Here is a fictional listing pulled apart, with round numbers. It is not a real event and the rates are illustrative; real fee lines vary by venue and contract.
| Line | Who sets it | Example, per ticket |
|---|---|---|
| Face value (standard seat) | Artist, team or promoter | $49.00 |
| Service fee | Ticketmaster and venue or promoter, by contract | $12.50 |
| Facility charge | Venue | $3.00 |
| Order processing fee ($5.00 per order, split across two tickets) | Ticketmaster and venue | $2.50 |
| Advertised "from" price, all-in before tax (what the event page shows) | $67.00 | |
| Sales tax, where it applies | State or city | $4.50 |
| Charged to your card | $71.50 |
How large that slice is in practice has its own guide, how much are Ticketmaster fees. The short version: studies cited by the CRS put primary-market fees at about 27% of the base price on average, the FTC's 2025 complaint against Live Nation says they have run as high as 44%, and when Ticketmaster moved to all-in display, documents from two venues show it raised per-ticket service charges to offset processing fees it dropped. The fees didn't shrink. They moved to the first screen.
What does a price chart record?
Ours records the advertised "from" price for the event, as the page showed it, each time we checked. On Ticketmaster US that is an all-in price before tax; on other sites it's whatever they advertise, and the chart says which. Three things follow.
A step down is the floor moving, not every seat. When the line drops from $102 to $89, the cheapest available ticket got cheaper, because a cheaper section opened, a Platinum price was lowered, or a resale seller cut their ask. The $180 seat you had your eye on may not have moved.
A step up is often a sell-through, not a price rise. If every $89 ticket sells, the floor becomes whatever is next, $102 say, and nobody raised anything.
The chart can't see inside the seat map. It sees the number the page leads with, which is the number the FTC rule governs: the lowest available total price. That's why it's the one worth recording. It is the figure every fan sees before deciding whether to join the queue.
Gaps are honesty, not zeros
Sometimes a check finds nothing advertised. We record that as a gap. Treating it as $0 would flatter the chart and be useless to you, so we don't. A gap doesn't mean sold out, either. It means one thing: nothing advertised when we looked. When tickets come back after a gap, whether from a release of held seats, a new resale listing or a cancelled order, the line picks up wherever they land. "Sold out" rarely means gone for good covers where they come from.
What we'd do
Carry one number onto the seat map: the total you'd pay at checkout, per ticket, tax included, that you'd still be happy with tomorrow. Compare every price you see against it, Platinum included, and stop treating "from" as the price of anything but the cheapest seat in the building.
That is how a Found My Tickets tracker works. You give it a fee-inclusive maximum and a quantity, it watches the Ticketmaster listing for you, and it emails you when a matching ticket is advertised at or under your number. The price history for every US and UK event we watch is public and free. We don't buy tickets and we don't predict prices. We watch, you buy.