Maryland’s Grocery Pricing Ban Starts October 1—but Personalized Discounts Survive
Maryland has enacted its grocery pricing restrictions, but they are not yet in force. Maryland’s enacted Chapter 154 was approved on April 28, 2026, and takes effect on October 1, 2026.
The law remains narrower than a requirement that every shopper receive the same grocery price. It will prohibit covered businesses from using personal data to impose certain higher food prices, while continuing to permit loyalty offers, subscription pricing and discounts exchanged for consent to provide data.
What changes on October 1
The principal prohibition covers a food retailer operating an establishment of at least 15,000 square feet that sells food exempt from Maryland sales and use tax. It also applies to third-party services that facilitate delivery of such food, even though those providers are not themselves classified as food retailers.
For those businesses, the statute defines dynamic pricing as a personalized price for a particular consumer based on that person’s personal data. The definition covers data acquired directly or purchased from another party and does not depend on whether artificial intelligence is involved.
A covered retailer or delivery provider may not use that process to set a higher price for qualifying food for a specific consumer. It also may not use personal data to set a higher price for that food for a single consumer or a group of consumers.
The act separately addresses protected-class information. Covered grocery businesses may not use such data in a way that withholds an accommodation, advantage or privilege available to other consumers. Protected-class data includes information that directly or indirectly identifies a characteristic protected under Maryland or federal discrimination law.
Not every price variation falls within the ban. Differences tied to costs, supply or demand in separate locations remain permissible, as do corrections of pricing errors and resets following a system or network outage. A supermarket chain can therefore retain geographic pricing without treating each customer’s personal record as a reason to charge more.
Personalized discounts remain a legal route
The most important limitation is the law’s treatment of lower prices. Loyalty, membership and rewards prices remain available when any consumer may voluntarily enroll or consent to participate. Subscription prices are also excluded from the prohibition.
A business may additionally offer a price to someone who consents to provide personal data or other information in exchange for that price. The statute therefore regulates certain personalized increases more strictly than personalized discounts.
This distinction creates a baseline problem. A retailer could maintain a comparatively high regular price while directing lower offers to selected participants, leaving customers outside those programs to pay the posted amount without technically raising their individual price through the prohibited process. An IAPP analysis of the enacted law describes it as the first state ban of its kind for grocery stores and identifies the missing comparison baseline, loyalty exclusions and limited enforcement as significant constraints.
That does not make every loyalty discount a disguised surcharge. It means the act does not guarantee a single universal price and does not resolve whether a retailer’s regular price represents a meaningful common baseline. Its protection turns on how a higher price was set, not simply on whether another customer obtained a discount.
Why different prices do not automatically prove surveillance pricing
The Instacart controversy that preceded the Maryland law illustrates an important evidentiary distinction. Customers can encounter several prices for an identical item without establishing that income, purchase history, location or another personal attribute determined which price they received.
The Associated Press account of Instacart’s discontinued test documented five prices—from $3.99 to $4.79—for the same dozen eggs at one Washington, D.C., Safeway and included the company’s position that customers had been assigned prices randomly rather than through personal-data profiling.
The episode demonstrated that platform-based price experiments can be opaque to shoppers. It did not, by itself, demonstrate the conduct prohibited by Maryland’s statute. A violation would require evidence connecting a higher price for covered food to dynamic pricing or the use of personal data as defined by the act.
Enforcement rests with the state
Violations of the new grocery provisions are treated as unfair, abusive or deceptive trade practices under Maryland consumer-protection law. Before beginning an enforcement action, the Consumer Protection Division must notify the alleged violator and provide 45 days to cure the problem.
If the business cures the violation within that period, the division may not initiate an action over it. The act also expressly provides no private right of action, so an individual shopper cannot use these provisions as an independent basis to sue for damages or an injunction.
Those limits matter because personalized pricing can be difficult for one customer to detect. A shopper usually sees only the price presented to that account and may have no direct way to compare it with contemporaneous offers shown to other people.
The legislation also creates a separate rule for merchants outside the covered grocery category. When those merchants advertise or display a price set through dynamic pricing or personal data, they generally must place a clear disclosure with the price stating that an algorithm or the customer’s personal data was used. Food retailers and delivery providers governed by the grocery prohibition are excluded from that broader disclosure section.
As of August 13, 2026, Maryland therefore has an enacted law awaiting its October start, not an operating regime with an enforcement record. Its immediate effect will be to establish a legal boundary against specified data-based grocery price increases; whether that boundary produces clearer prices will depend on state enforcement and on how retailers structure the discount programs the law leaves intact.
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