Uber and Lyft routinely charge customers wildly different prices for identical trips and offer discount promotions that often save riders little or nothing compared to standard fares, a bombshell investigation has found, raising fresh questions about whether the practices could breach consumer protection laws.
The investigation by Consumer Reports recruited 174 volunteers who priced more than 40 routes on both apps across 18 states. In Kansas City, Missouri, 55 volunteers testing a single route were quoted 29 different prices. In Austin, Texas, fares for another identical route ranged from $25 to $65 — a difference of 160 per cent. Critically, many of these requests were made within the same minute, suggesting the variation could not be explained simply by fluctuating traffic or demand.
The investigation also found discounts appearing in nearly half of all ride requests analysed, with researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, finding that 12 per cent of Uber rides and 21 per cent of Lyft rides displayed promotional offers — a significant rise from levels recorded just two years earlier. Riders were shown lower prices alongside struck-through higher figures and labels such as “fares lower than usual,” but Consumer Reports found that around 11 per cent of those discounts appeared to be based on inflated original prices, making the apparent savings illusory.
Uber and Lyft both pushed back on that characterisation. An Uber spokesperson described the struck-through figures as “historical comparison messaging,” saying they were intended to show how current prices compared with previous fares for similar journeys rather than to advertise a guaranteed discount.
Legal experts told the Daily Mail that while dynamic pricing itself is not illegal, the way savings are presented to consumers could raise serious concerns under existing deception standards. “The FTC looks at the overall net impression, not just literal truth,” said global trademark and IP attorney Relani Belous. “What matters is whether a reasonable consumer believes they are getting a real discount from a bona fide reference price. If the reference price is inflated or not used in a meaningful way, that can be a problem. In a consumer’s mind, when you see a price crossed out, that means a discount.”
Belous added that regulators would ultimately focus on whether consumers were genuinely misled. “If you say ‘you saved X percent,’ and the original price is algorithmically generated and not a genuine prevailing price, that could be a material omission.”
Riders have expressed frustration about exactly these issues on social media. One Reddit user said Uber’s pricing had “broken my trust” after seeing the cost of an airport ride swing from $21 to $45, while his partner was offered the same trip for $6.40 through a promotional discount. Another user questioned whether the Uber One subscription was a “scam” after discovering that his discounted membership fare of $91.61 for a New York City airport run was actually more expensive than the $78.70 his partner was quoted without any subscription at all.
Data privacy and digital surveillance expert Harry Maugans told the Daily Mail the situation becomes legally concerning when price differences appear tied to the individual user rather than market conditions. “The line gets crossed when the price increases not due to the trip itself or the market, but the person specifically,” he said. “If two people request the same ride at the same time and receive different prices because of what the company knows about them, like their address or their history, that’s when you start running into unfair practice territory. At that moment you’re not paying for the market price, you’re actually paying for whatever the company guesses you’ll tolerate.” Maugans described such practices as “surveillance pricing” — using personal data collected through the app to estimate what individual riders will accept. “The textbook definition of surveillance pricing is when you see people getting different prices for the same thing based on their personal data,” he said, adding that while no single federal law explicitly bans the practice, regulators are increasingly focused on the area.
Derek Kravitz, the report’s lead author, noted that both Uber and Lyft collect extensive customer data within their apps that could potentially be used to estimate individual price tolerance. In a Medium post in March, Uber acknowledged that “riders may sometimes see different prices for what they consider to be the ‘same’ trip” but stopped short of detailing what factors drive those differences.
