Key Takeaways:
- Inspectors pull a sample of items from around your store, ring them up, and compare each price to the price you had posted. In most states you pass if 98% or more of them match.
- You only get fined for overcharges. Undercharges still count toward the error rate that decides how often you get inspected again.
- Most price mismatches stem from a broken process in your price book, promo calendar, or shelf tags; they are rarely cashier mistakes.
- Keeping a self-audit record with dated corrections is the best thing you can show an inspector. Recent settlements now require retailers to do so.
If a customer picks up an item marked $8.99, and your register charges $9.49, you’re working with a pricing or scanning inaccuracy. In most states, that scenario violates a pricing law, and retailers are subject to unannounced inspections to track how often it happens in your store.
These inspections are getting more attention. State attorneys general and county district attorneys have won multimillion-dollar settlements from national chains over checkout pricing in the last two years. The offices that ran those inspections also inspect smaller, independent stores, and your POS system is often where the mismatches lie and how to prevent them.
How a Price Verification Inspection Works
Most states follow the Examination Procedure for Price Verification, written by NIST with the National Conference on Weights and Measures and published in NIST Handbook 130. The inspector picks a sample of items from across your sales floor, rings them up at your register, and compares each one to the lowest price you had posted, advertised, or marked for that item.
You pass if 98% or more of the sampled prices match. The standard allows for some error, and a few states use a different number. Oklahoma, for example, penalizes stores that fail to accurately price 95% of the items sampled.
Keep these two details in mind when considering pricing violations:
- You only get fined for overcharges. If the register charges less than the shelf tag, there is no penalty. You just lose the margin.
- Undercharges still count against you. They go into the total error rate that determines how often you get re-inspected, which in some places can mean a return visit every 60 days.
Scanner Law Penalties by State
Penalties vary widely, and states with the most active enforcement tend to have the steepest penalties. Three examples:
- California. Charging more than the lowest posted price violates Business and Professions Code 12024.2. An overcharge that is willful or over $1 can be charged as a misdemeanor, with fines up to $1,000 and up to a year in jail. When overcharges are found on 10% or more of the items inspected, state rules treat it as a Category B violation, carrying civil penalties of $150 to $600 each.
- New York. Under Agriculture and Markets Law 197-b, penalties run up to $300 per violation on your first inspection of the calendar year and up to $600 per violation on any inspection after that. Penalties apply only when overcharges account for more than 2% of the sample.
- Michigan. The Shopping Reform and Modernization Act, known as the Scanner Law, allows customers to collect. A shopper who was overcharged has 30 days to tell you. You then have two days to refund the difference, plus an optional bonus equal to 10 times that difference, with a $1 minimum and a $5 cap. If you pay neither, the customer can sue for actual damages or $250, whichever is more, plus up to $300 in attorney fees.
Keep in mind:
Fines are not the only cost. Pennsylvania’s attorney general settled with a national discount chain for $1.55 million, and the agreement required the retailer to staff shelf tag updates weekly, run at least two surprise pricing audits per store each year, order a deeper audit at any store that fails three audits in 12 months, fix known price errors within 24 hours, and post a sign at the register saying the lowest posted price will be honored.
Recent Price Accuracy Settlements
California county district attorneys have been running these cases steadily. Walmart settled for $5.64 million in July 2025 over claims of overcharging and short-weighting. Lowe’s agreed to $1 million in September 2025, covering its 110 California stores. Tractor Supply paid $5.1 million in a Sonoma-led case in August 2026. Home Depot settled a similar case for about $2 million in 2024 and now faces a proposed federal class action filed in early 2026 over shelf prices that came in below what customers were charged.
Sonoma County ran 648 inspections at 401 retailers over about a year and found 232 of those businesses, roughly 36%, overcharging customers at the time of the inspection.
Six Reasons Shelf Prices and Register Prices Don’t Match
Price mismatches are usually a timing or sync problem rather than a cashier error. They tend to show up in the same six places:
- Promos starting or ending. A sale could end in the register at midnight, but the tag might stay up through the next day. This can happen in reverse, too, when tags go up before the promo turns on.
- Manual price entry. When an item will not scan and a cashier types in a price or a lookup code, there’s room for error. Inspection procedures specifically check manually entered prices.
- Tags are left behind after a reset. You might move a product during a reset, so the tag underneath belongs to something else. This is the most common finding on inspections and the hardest error to catch from the back office.
- Cost increases on the vendor side. A vendor might raise its cost, and if nobody recalculates the retail price, your markup shrinks. That one creates undercharges, so no inspector will ever flag it. It just costs you money.
- Stacked discounts and clearance stickers. You might put two discounts on one item, or a clearance sticker over an old tag, making it unclear which price is the lowest posted price. Your markdown strategy should say which tag comes off when.
- Price changes that skip a store. You might push a new price at one location and not another, so the same item rings up differently depending on where the customer shops.
How to Run a Price Accuracy Audit in Your Store
You can run the same test an inspector would, and doing it on a schedule will keep you on top of your numbers and ahead of serious mistakes. An audit takes about an hour in a typical specialty store.
- Pick 50 items from across your departments. Weight the list toward categories with active promos and recent resets.
- Write down the posted price for each one exactly as a customer would read it, including sale signs and clearance stickers.
- Ring all 50 through a live register instead of checking prices in the back office. The register is what the inspector uses.
- Mark every mismatch, and sort overcharges separately from undercharges.
- Do the math. Under 98% means you would fail an inspection today.
- Fix the errors within 24 hours, write down what was wrong and what you changed, and keep that log for at least two years.
- Repeat quarterly, plus once within a week of any big reset or promo changeover.
POS Settings That Prevent Price Mismatches
If your shelf tags and your register prices come from two different sources, it’s essential to keep the numbers in sync. A few settings in your POS system can do most of the work for you:
- Keep one price book as the single source of truth, and print shelf tags from it rather than typing them separately.
- Schedule promo start and end dates in the system so the register price and the tag change on the same day.
- Limit manual price entry and overrides to manager permissions, then check the override report weekly. A cluster of overrides usually means a tag is wrong, and sometimes it means something worse. (Our overview of retail fraud covers the difference.)
- Keep a price change log with timestamps and user names. That log proves you fixed an error rather than ignoring it.
- Look at electronic shelf labels for categories where prices change constantly, since they remove the lag between a price change and the shelf.
PRO TIP!
KORONA POS manages prices centrally across locations, logs every price change with the user who made it, and reports override activity in KORONA Studio, where a price problem usually shows up before an inspector finds it. Register habits matter too, and our cashier training guide covers how to handle a price dispute at the counter.
Price Accuracy Rules for Alcohol Sales
If you sell alcohol, a second set of pricing rules applies. In Michigan, alcohol is not exempt from the Scanner Law, but the Liquor Control Code also sets a minimum retail selling price for spirits and bars selling beer and wine below cost. A customer who was overcharged on alcohol can only collect if the price charged was above the state minimum.
So you cannot always fix a price mismatch by charging whatever the tag says. The lowest posted price wins, unless that price is illegal in the first place. Liquor store operators need both rules in mind when setting prices.
Run Your First Audit This Week
Price accuracy is one problem where fixing the compliance risk and fixing the operations are the same job. Tighten the connection between your price book, your promo calendar, and your shelf tags, and you cut your penalty exposure, stop losing margin to undercharges, and give your cashiers fewer troubles to work through at the counter.
Pull 50 items and check them. If you come in under 98%, you have a process gap you can close, and finding out yourself is a lot cheaper than having an inspector find out for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do scanner accuracy laws apply to small independent stores?
Yes. The price verification procedure in NIST Handbook 130 applies to all types of retail stores, including convenience, hardware, general merchandise, and specialty retail. Inspectors tend to spend more time at larger stores, but nothing in the law exempts a single location business.
What accuracy rate do I need to pass an inspection?
In most states, at least 98% of the items sampled have to ring up at the posted price. A few states use a different number, so check with your state department of agriculture or your county weights and measures office.
Can I get fined for charging less than the shelf price?
No. Penalties apply to overcharges only. Undercharges still count toward the error rate that decides how often you get inspected, and they cost you margin every time.
What records should I keep in case of a price complaint?
Keep your price change log with timestamps and user names, your self-audit results with the corrections noted, your promo start and end dates, and any customer complaints and how you resolved them. Recent settlements treat regular audits and 24 hour fixes as evidence that your program works.
Who enforces price accuracy in my state?
Usually your state department of agriculture or a county weights and measures office, sometimes with the attorney general’s consumer protection division. A customer complaint is a common reason an inspector shows up.
