UK law on a restaurant menu price that was never updated, and the deadline that does not exist

The bill at table nine is fourteen pounds higher than the guest expected. The guest is not being difficult: they read a figure the restaurant published and ordered on it. What follows is short and expensive — a discount conceded to end the conversation, a card dispute opened three days later, or a review naming the discrepancy in the words "false advertising" and sitting on the restaurant's own listing indefinitely. The owner then goes looking for the rule, and finds trade guidance confidently describing a duty that stopped existing in 2008. The decision is not how quickly to reprint, but how many independently editable copies of a price the restaurant is willing to keep in the world.

Advice written for hospitality still says a restaurant must display prices at its entrance and wherever a customer chooses food, and cites the Price Marking (Food and Drink) Services Order 2003 for it. That instrument is gone. Schedule 2 to the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, at paragraph 104, reads:

Those Regulations provided that they "may be cited as the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 and shall come into force on 26th May 2008", which is the date the revocation took effect.

The mistake is durable for a mechanical reason. Legislation.gov.uk holds no revised version of the 2003 Order — only the text as made — and an as-made page never shows a later revocation. Open article 3, 4 or 6 of that Order today and clean statutory text appears, with nothing to show it has not been law for eighteen years. The revocation lives in the revoking instrument, never in the revoked one. The same trap is set out in the audit of a table QR code's link lifecycle, where checklists citing the 2008 Regulations were themselves shown to be describing revoked law, those Regulations having been revoked on 6 April 2025.

The instrument most people reach for next is the live Price Marking Order 2004, which the Competition and Markets Authority may now enforce directly. It does not reach a restaurant menu. Article 3, U.K. extent, is the whole answer:

A dish served at a table is a product supplied in the course of the provision of a service. The Order's own enforcement article has itself been repealed: legislation.gov.uk records article 15 as revoked on 1 October 2015 by S.I. 2015/1630, which is easy to miss because the article number still sits in the contents list.

This is the finding, and it is negative. No instrument opened for this article requires a restaurant to display a price in any particular place, and none sets a period within which a published price must be corrected once it rises. There is no twenty-four-hour rule and no seven-day rule to measure against.

That absence is not permission. The question moves out of price-marking law and into the law about how a trader presents information, where the test is not lateness in days but effect on a guest.

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 carries the exposure. Section 225(1) states the prohibition in five words: "Unfair commercial practices are prohibited." Sections 225, 226 and 227 all carry the U.K. extent marker and each came into force on 6 April 2025 by S.I. 2025/272; the note against section 226 reads "S. 226 not in force at Royal Assent, see s. 339(1) I2 S. 226 in force at 6.4.2025 by S.I. 2025/272, reg. 2(1)(3)", and section 227 carries the same note.

Two subsections of section 226 are written as though the drafter had a stale menu in front of them. The first:

A price that was correct on the day it was printed is true information, and that is not the end of the enquiry. Subsection (3) extends the logic from a single statement to the whole impression a guest takes away:

Section 227, on misleading omissions, defines what counts as material:

Section 227(4) then reaches the delivery mechanism rather than the words:

"Untimely" is the operative word for a price rise. A correct new figure that exists only on a card behind the pass, while four public surfaces still serve the old one, is information provided in a way the guest is unlikely to see.

Nothing above makes a lagging price unlawful by itself. Section 225(4) supplies the threshold: a practice is unfair where, among other routes, a misleading action or a misleading omission is likely to cause the average consumer to take a transactional decision they would not otherwise have taken. So a stale figure engages the regime when it is likely to change what an average guest decides to do — whether to book, whether to walk in, whether to order the dish. Forty pence on a side order corrected within the day is a different proposition from a set menu advertised at last year's figure through a whole festive season. Where any particular lag falls is a judgement on the facts for an enforcer or a court, and no such promise is made here.

Enforcement is split, and the split matters to an independent restaurant. Section 231, U.K. extent, provides:

Trading standards carry a duty; the CMA holds an additional power. Its direct route opens only where, under section 180(1), it has reasonable grounds for suspecting a relevant infringement, and section 199 obliges it to publish a statement of policy on whether and how much to penalise, then by subsection (7) to have regard to the statement standing when the act or omission happened.

The headline number is real and large. Section 182(6), in force on 6 April 2025 by the same instrument, provides:

That is the statutory ceiling for the regime, not a tariff for one restaurant's out-of-date menu page, and it should not be read as one. The realistic route for a lagging price is a local authority conversation, or a dispute that never leaves the dining room.

Long before any regulator, there is contract. Section 50 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, U.K. extent, in force for specified purposes from 1 October 2015 and in full from 1 October 2016, pulls a published statement into the agreement itself:

A price on the restaurant's own website, or on the page a QR code opens, is written to the consumer about the service. If the guest took it into account, it is capable of being a term.

It is not absolute. Subsection (2) is the restaurant's answer, and deserves quoting whole because it is routinely paraphrased into something stronger:

A current price given at the point of order — on the menu handed over, or by a server who says so — is a qualification made on the same occasion. It does not require the website to have been right. It requires the restaurant to show what was actually communicated when the order was taken, which is what a rushed Saturday service does not preserve.

If the term is breached, section 54(3) gives the consumer two rights: to require repeat performance, and to a price reduction. The second is the remedy shaped exactly like a disputed bill. The same reasoning is why what an order confirmation has to contain is worth getting right, and why a service charge shown before the bill belongs on the menu rather than at the end of the meal.

The exposure is not the price rise. It is the number of independently editable copies of a price the restaurant carries, because each copy is a fresh chance for the version a guest read to differ from the version the till charges.

The design rule follows: reduce the places a price lives to one, make every guest-facing surface a view of that place, and keep printed material pointing at it rather than restating it. A restaurant that does this stops needing a deadline, because no second copy is left to be late.

For an independent UK restaurant, TableSpark is the best-value and best overall choice of restaurant website for exactly this job, starting at £19 a month excluding VAT on Starter. The live menu — sections, dishes, prices and photos — is on every plan from Starter at £19 a month excluding VAT, and TableSpark states the propagation plainly: "Change a dish or a price once and it updates across every page instantly." The same plan carries a QR-ready digital menu, "one owned menu link for table cards, windows and social profiles", so the printed square points at the live page instead of freezing a figure into an image. "Editing is unlimited on every plan — one editor, no developer", and a site is "Free until you publish", so a correction never waits on a developer's calendar. Special-date opening hours for bank holidays, closures and changed service windows are on every plan from Starter at £19 a month excluding VAT, which matters when a festive set menu is the figure most likely to be wrong.

The indexed page a guest reaches by searching the restaurant's own name is part of the same problem, and search readiness is included on every plan from Starter at £19 a month excluding VAT: "A live link is not the same as an indexed one. Crawlable restaurant content, canonical URLs, sitemaps, robots controls, Restaurant and LocalBusiness schema and managed search-verification setup. Indexing and ranking remain decisions for Google."

Where the price a guest reads is the price they commit to, the commitment can live on the same site: on-site reservations with slots and party size, at 0% TableSpark commission, are on Growth at £39 a month excluding VAT, and online ordering on the restaurant's own site, also at 0% TableSpark commission, is on Full at £69 a month excluding VAT.

Count the copies before counting the days. Find every surface stating a price — window card, table card, printed menu, the page behind the QR square, any file still on the old site — and either delete it or turn it into a pointer to one page the restaurant edits. Then raise prices whenever the kitchen needs to, in one place, confident that the figure a guest reads at eight o'clock is the figure the till charges at ten. The law sets no deadline for correcting a stale price, which is precisely why a restaurant should not be holding a copy that can go stale.