Florida joined the Federal Trade Commission and 21 other states on September 16, 2026, in suing Amazon over alleged hidden surcharges in its advertising auctions. The case claims that Amazon presented its system as a second-price auction while charging advertisers more than genuine competition would have required. Amazon rejects the allegations, says its pricing rules do not overcharge advertisers, and disputes any resulting harm to consumers.
The multistate action was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. Florida's participation adds a state consumer-protection claim under the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act to a case that had already been announced by the FTC and 22 states on August 31.
Florida joins the FTC's Amazon advertising-auction lawsuit
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said Florida sellers and vendors were overcharged by hundreds of millions of dollars over more than four years. The national complaint alleges more than $20 billion in extraction from approximately 1.2 million advertising customers, including more than 500,000 small and medium-sized businesses.
Those figures are allegations in the lawsuit. The case seeks injunctive relief, restitution, disgorgement, civil penalties, attorneys' fees and other remedies under Florida law. The litigation has not produced a liability finding or final damages award.
What the FTC and states allege about Amazon Ads
The case concerns Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Display Ads, which Amazon sells through keyword-based advertising auctions. In the model described to advertisers, a winning bidder would generally pay about one cent more than the next-highest bid rather than its full maximum bid. That is the basic idea behind a generalized second-price auction.
The complaint alleges that Amazon began adding an undisclosed “soft reserve price” in 2019. It also alleges that the system used an “invented auction participant” to raise the price paid by the winner. In the plaintiffs' account, those practices turned an auction that appeared to be based on the next-highest bid into one that could charge the winner its own bid.
The complaint further alleges that Sponsored Products advertisers paid their own winning bid approximately 80% of the time in 2024. It puts that figure at about 30% to 40% in 2021 and about 70% in 2022.
The plaintiffs say the alleged pricing practices increased advertisers' costs and that some businesses passed those costs on through higher product prices. Andrew N. Ferguson, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, said the alleged impact reached millions of Amazon advertising customers. Florida's case similarly links the alleged surcharge to higher prices for household goods, including groceries and medicine.
The scale of the alleged overcharges
The more-than-$20-billion figure is a national allegation, not a Florida-only estimate. Florida's separate claim concerns hundreds of millions of dollars allegedly charged to sellers and vendors in the state over more than four years.
The complaint also places the alleged conduct against a large advertising base: approximately 1.2 million customers nationwide, more than 500,000 of them small and medium-sized businesses. The alleged $20 billion therefore concerns Amazon's national advertising operation, while Florida's claim addresses the state's own sellers and vendors.
The advertising products named in the case matter because they cover several common ways to buy visibility on Amazon: promoting individual product listings through Sponsored Products, promoting brands through Sponsored Brands and placing Display Ads. The lawsuit's central dispute is not whether advertisers could set a maximum bid, but how Amazon determined the amount charged when an ad won.
Amazon's response
Amazon says advertisers never pay more than their maximum bid. It also says its system uses hard and soft reserve prices and evaluates ad relevance alongside the bid, rather than selecting placements by bid amount alone.
Amazon disputes the claim that advertisers or consumers were overcharged. It says its inflation-adjusted average cost per click remained flat from 2019 through 2024, while Sponsored Products conversion rates rose 24% from 2021 through 2025. Amazon also says the complaint cites no evidence that the alleged advertising practices increased consumer prices.
That defense addresses both sides of the lawsuit's theory: whether the auction mechanics produced unlawful charges for advertisers and whether those charges reached shoppers through higher prices. The court will have to assess the competing accounts of the auction system and the alleged financial effects.
What happens next in the case
The lawsuit now includes Florida's state-law claims alongside the federal and multistate action in Washington. The remedies requested by the plaintiffs include changes to Amazon's practices, repayment to affected parties and monetary penalties, but the court has not awarded any of them.
The central legal questions are whether Amazon's auction descriptions matched how its system operated, whether the alleged reserve pricing and auction participant concealed an additional charge, and how any damages should be calculated. Florida's participation gives the national case a separate state consumer-protection claim while Amazon continues to deny the allegations.
