Airlines Just Got Permission to Hide Bag Fees From You Again. Check Before You Book.

If you booked a flight in the last three weeks and got a nastier total than you expected at checkout, you weren’t imagining it. On July 2, the Department of Transportation formally undid the 2024 rule that made airlines show checked-bag, carry-on, and change fees on the first page of search results. The disclosure is dead. Airlines are back to burying the numbers.

The bag fees didn’t come down with the rule. American, United, and Delta all charge around $45 to $50 for a first checked bag one way. A family of four flying round-trip with one checked bag each just added about $360 to a trip that never appeared on the search page.

Here’s what happened. The 2024 rule, called “Enhancing Transparency of Airline Ancillary Service Fees,” required carriers to show baggage and change fees up front so travelers could actually price shop. Airlines for America, the industry trade group, sued. On February 3, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals threw the rule out on a technical Administrative Procedure Act point: the DOT had not opened one of its consumer-research studies to public comment. The DOT issued a final rule on July 2 implementing the court’s order and reverting fee disclosure to the standards from 2011.

Translation: airlines won a procedural fight, and the price you see on the search page is once again a fiction. Bag fees, carry-on charges on basic economy, seat-selection fees, change fees, all of that can appear later in the checkout flow, or only at the airport when you show up with a bag. The airline’s own website is still required to list the fees somewhere. You now have to go find them yourself.

Here’s what they don’t tell you. The biggest winners are the fares built entirely on the checkout-page upsell: basic economy on United, American, and Delta, and Frontier’s whole model. On a $79 basic-economy fare that doesn’t include a carry-on, adding a $45 checked bag and a $49 carry-on nearly doubles the ticket. Under the old rule, you saw that at the top of the search. Under the new one, you see it only if you look.

Do this before you buy. Open the airline’s own baggage-fee page in a second tab and price out what your actual trip will cost with your actual bags. Southwest is no longer the free-bag exception it used to be. That policy died in 2025, and Southwest now charges $45 for a first checked bag on most fares, so run the math on it too. Google Flights still shows bag-fee estimates when you toggle them on, and Kayak’s total-cost filter tries to include bags where the data is available. Use those. Sort by total, not fare.

For change and cancel fees, the same move. Legacy carriers dropped change fees on main-cabin domestic tickets years ago and mostly still eat them, but basic economy is nonrefundable and non-changeable at most airlines. If your plans might shift, spend the difference to buy main cabin, not basic economy, because a $50 fare bump is cheaper than a $200 trip you can’t move.

Airlines are betting the numbers stay hidden. That bet only pays if you don’t check.

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