FTC Dismisses Its Payment Packing Case Against Car Dealer Group Asbury, With No Ruling on the Merits

FTC Dismisses Its Payment Packing Case Against Car Dealer Group Asbury, With No Ruling on the Merits

The Federal Trade Commission dismissed its own administrative complaint against Asbury Automotive Group, three North Texas dealerships and their general manager on October 5, 2026, ending Docket No. 9436 after two years of procedural delay. The Commission decided nothing about the merits, and the allegations remain unproven.

Information last verified on October 8, 2026. This is a developing story; we update it as the record changes.

Jurisdiction scope: This article covers one federal administrative order issued by the Federal Trade Commission in Docket No. 9436, a proceeding whose respondents included dealerships in North Texas. It does not cover the merits of the August 2024 complaint, the substance of the pending Northern District of Texas litigation beyond what the dismissal order itself recites, or any state-law claim against any dealership.

What Happened

On October 5, 2026 the Commission issued a two-page Order Returning Matter to Adjudication and Dismissing Complaint in Docket No. 9436, captioned In the Matter of Asbury Automotive Group, Inc., a corporation; Asbury Ft. Worth Ford, LLC, also d/b/a David McDavid Ford Ft. Worth; McDavid Frisco-Hon, LLC, also d/b/a David McDavid Honda of Frisco; McDavid Irving-Hon, LLC, also d/b/a David McDavid Honda of Irving, and Ali Benli, individually and as an officer of the three dealership entities. The order is signed by Secretary April J. Tabor and lists Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson and Commissioner Mark R. Meador.

The order recites procedural history and nothing else about the conduct at issue. The Commission issued the administrative complaint on August 16, 2024, "seeking permanent injunctive relief." Shortly after that, the order says, Asbury sued the Commission in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, "seeking a preliminary injunction and asserting constitutional claims regarding the Commission's structure and administrative procedures."

The administrative case then stopped moving. The Commission's case page dates the first stay order to October 29, 2024, on a joint expedited motion filed a week earlier, and the case never resumed. In the order's words, the proceeding "was subsequently stayed to permit resolution of the collateral issues in the federal court action, and has remained stayed, without the opportunity for substantial prosecution, ever since."

By the Commission's account, the district court denied Asbury's request for a preliminary injunction and dismissed several of its constitutional claims in an order entered August 11, 2025 in No. 4:24-cv-00950-O. As of the order's own date of October 5, 2026, the Commission described the district court case as still pending while an interlocutory appeal of the denial of preliminary relief is resolved, after which the matter would return to the district court for any remaining issues.

That timeline is what the Commission says drove the dismissal:

Based on the totality of the circumstances, we have come to the difficult conclusion that the public interest requires that this litigation no longer be continued.

FTC, Order Returning Matter to Adjudication and Dismissing Complaint, Docket No. 9436, at 2 (Oct. 5, 2026)

The operative text then returns the matter to adjudication and dismisses the complaint. The order contains no admission, consent order, monetary judgment, or finding either way.

Two further details sit in the order itself. Footnote 1 records that the Commission amended the complaint on July 17, 2025 to drop a count alleging discriminatory financing practices under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and Regulation B, consistent with Executive Order No. 14281, 90 Fed. Reg. 17537 (Apr. 23, 2025), which directed the Commission to "evaluate pending proceedings that rely on theories of disparate-impact liability." And the order states that the agency "remains committed to pursuing price transparency in the appropriate forum, including for automobile dealers," pointing to its March 13, 2026 warning letters to 97 auto dealership groups and to an August 20, 2026 stipulated order in FTC and Connecticut v. Chase Nissan LLC, No. 3:24-cv-00012-VDO.

What the 2024 Complaint Alleged, and What Payment Packing Means

The dismissal order says nothing about the conduct at issue, so everything in this section is attributed to the FTC's own 2024 filings in this matter, both of which we opened: the administrative complaint in Docket No. D-9436 and the press release the Commission published when it issued that complaint on August 16, 2024. None of it was ever adjudicated.

The Commission said at the time that it was acting against Asbury "for systematically charging consumers for costly add-on items they did not agree to or were falsely told were required as part of their purchase," and in the same passage alleged that Asbury "discriminates against Black and Latino consumers, targeting them with unwanted and higher-priced add-ons." The release put figures on that allegation, saying that in financed transactions at one dealership Black consumers were charged on average $298 more, and Latino consumers on average $214 more, for the same add-ons than non-Latino White consumers. It alleged that the three Texas dealerships, together with Ali Benli, who the FTC said acted as general manager of those dealerships, "engaged in a variety of practices to sneak hidden fees for unwanted add-ons past consumers." The Commission vote to issue the administrative complaint was 5-0.

That release is also where the FTC defines the term in its own words:

These tactics included a practice called "payment packing," where the dealerships convinced consumers to agree to monthly payments that were larger than needed to pay for the agreed-upon price of the car, and then "packed" add-on items to the sales contract to make up that difference.

FTC press release, FTC Takes Action Against Auto Dealer Group Asbury Automotive for Discriminating Against Black and Latino Consumers and Charging for Unwanted Add-Ons (Aug. 16, 2024)

Paragraph 12 of the complaint puts numbers on the mechanism. It describes a salesperson representing that a buyer qualifies for financing at a monthly payment of $400 when the payment for the vehicle under the contract is actually $350, then packing the contract with add-ons to absorb some or all of the difference, so that the buyer appears to be getting a similar or smaller monthly payment.

What the alleged tactic turns on is that the negotiation moves from price to payment. A buyer who has agreed to a payment rather than a price has no figure to compare, and the complaint alleges the add-ons were therefore never separately priced or separately agreed to. The products it names are ordinary dealership add-ons: extended warranties, maintenance plans, service contracts, chemical coatings, dent protection, guaranteed asset protection, and life and disability insurance policies, commonly costing hundreds or thousands of dollars per transaction.

The complaint pleaded three counts under Section 5 of the FTC Act, 15 U.S.C. 45(a) and (n): misrepresenting that the charges appearing on buyers' sales contracts were authorized by them, misrepresenting that buyers were required to buy add-ons, and, as an unfair practice, charging buyers without their express informed consent. A fourth count, titled Discriminatory Financing Practices, alleged that in motor vehicle credit transactions the respondents imposed higher costs on Black and Latino applicants on average than on similarly situated non-Latino White applicants, in violation of Section 701(a)(1) of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, 15 U.S.C. 1691(a)(1), and Section 202.4(a) of Regulation B, 12 C.F.R. 202.4(a). That is the count the Commission dropped when it amended the complaint on July 17, 2025, and the reason the Executive Order reached it is that the Commission read the count as resting on a disparate-impact theory rather than on intentional discrimination alone.

All of it was contested and none of it was tested. As the Commission's own notice explains, it issues an administrative complaint when it has "reason to believe" the law has been or is being violated, and the proceeding that was supposed to try those allegations before an administrative law judge never reached them. They remain allegations.

The Law the Event Touches, and What Still Applies

The federal hook in the FTC's auto pricing work is Section 5(a) of the FTC Act, 15 U.S.C. 45(a), which prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce. A September 15, 2026 FTC press release announcing staff guidance on price transparency for auto dealers states that the guidance "reiterates that the advertised price of a vehicle must be the actual price that any consumer can walk in and pay to purchase the vehicle, excluding only charges that the government requires the consumer to pay." The press release describing that guidance is about advertised pricing and does not mention payment packing.

One federal rule written for this conduct is no longer on the books, which is worth stating plainly because the FTC's own 2024 announcement in this case pointed to it. The Combating Auto Retail Scams Rule, published in January 2024, would have required dealers to obtain a buyer's express, informed consent for charges and to advertise accurate prices. The Fifth Circuit vacated it on January 27, 2025 in National Automobile Dealers Association v. FTC, 127 F.4th 549, holding that the Commission had violated its own regulations by failing to issue an advance notice of proposed rulemaking. The Commission then withdrew the rule from the Code of Federal Regulations in a final rule effective February 12, 2026, 91 Fed. Reg. 6507. Section 5 is therefore the federal provision that remains for this conduct, which is part of why the agency's current auto work runs through warning letters, staff guidance and district court suits rather than rule enforcement.

The Equal Credit Opportunity Act also still applies on its own terms. Section 701(a)(1), 15 U.S.C. 1691(a)(1), and Section 202.4(a) of Regulation B prohibit a creditor from discriminating against a credit applicant on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status or age, and Section 704(c), 15 U.S.C. 1691c(c), gives the FTC authority to enforce it. What changed in this matter was the Commission's willingness to press a disparate-impact theory under that statute, not the statute itself.

A dismissal of one administrative complaint does not change any of that law. It ends a proceeding. The FTC Act reads today exactly as it read before the order issued, and the Commission's own order says its price-transparency work continues.

State law is the other half of the picture, and in practice it is the busier half for dealer sales-practice complaints. Every state has a consumer-protection statute, commonly called a UDAP statute for unfair and deceptive acts and practices, enforced by the state attorney general and in many states supporting private claims as well. Those statutes are unaffected by a federal agency's docket decisions. Our overview of the reporting routes Texas gives consumers sets out how the state channel works there, and our hub on remedies after a deceptive business practice covers the complaint pathways generally. Whether any particular set of facts supports a claim is a question for a lawyer in that state, not something a dismissal order answers.

Vehicle-defect law is a separate track, and the two are easy to conflate. A dispute about what was added to a contract is not a dispute about a car that will not stay fixed, which runs instead through state lemon law protections for vehicle buyers and, in this matter's home state, through how Texas handles defective vehicle claims.

Analysis: Why This Matters

The following is analysis from the Recording Law Editorial Team.

The important thing about this order is how little it decides. An agency that drops a case for reasons of litigation posture and resources has made no finding about the conduct it complained about. The order also states that the FTC remains committed to price transparency for automobile dealers, though it does not connect that statement to the alleged conduct.

That distinction is easy to lose. Headlines that say the FTC dropped its payment packing case can read, to a car buyer, as though the practice has been cleared. It has not. No tribunal reached the merits, no respondent was exonerated, and the conduct described by the term payment packing is still measured against the same federal and state deceptive-practices standards it was measured against before.

It is worth noticing what the order offers as proof of continuing work: warning letters and a stipulated order obtained in federal district court, rather than administrative complaints. We are not predicting what the agency does next, and the order does not say. For an individual buyer, though, the practical picture is unchanged: a state attorney general complaint under a UDAP statute was already the main route for a dealer-practice grievance, and it still is.

One procedural fact is worth sitting with. The complaint issued in August 2024 and was dismissed in October 2026 having never, in the Commission's phrase, had "the opportunity for substantial prosecution," because a respondent's parallel constitutional challenge consumed the entire life of the administrative case.

This is general legal information, not legal advice. It covers federal administrative practice before the Federal Trade Commission and, in general terms, state consumer-protection law, and reflects sources verified on October 8, 2026. Laws change and this story is developing; consult a lawyer licensed in your jurisdiction about your specific situation.

Related articles

• The reporting routes Texas gives consumers
• Our hub on remedies after a deceptive business practice
• State lemon law protections for vehicle buyers
• How Texas handles defective vehicle claims

Last updated: 2026-10-08. This is a developing story; details verified as of 2026-10-08.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the FTC dismissal mean payment packing is now legal?

No. The October 5, 2026 order in Docket No. 9436 dismissed one administrative complaint without any adjudication of the merits, and it contains no finding that the conduct alleged was lawful. The FTC Act and every state unfair and deceptive acts and practices statute read exactly as they did before the order issued, and the order itself says the Commission remains committed to pursuing price transparency for automobile dealers.

What is payment packing in a car deal?

The FTC describes it as a dealership convincing a buyer to agree to a monthly payment larger than needed to pay for the agreed-upon price of the car, then packing add-on items into the sales contract to make up that difference. The add-ons named in the agency's 2024 Asbury complaint were ordinary dealership products such as service contracts, maintenance plans, chemical coatings, and guaranteed asset protection. Because the buyer agreed to a payment rather than a price, the add-on is not separately priced or separately agreed to, which is why regulators and consumer advocates treat it as a transparency concern.

Did the FTC find that Asbury or the David McDavid dealerships broke the law?

No. The Commission issued an administrative complaint in August 2024, stayed the proceeding on October 29, 2024 while Asbury's parallel federal suit went forward, and dismissed it on October 5, 2026 without reaching the merits. The order reflects no adjudication of the allegations, no consent order, and no monetary judgment, so the allegations were never proven and remain allegations.

Why did the FTC dismiss the complaint?

The order says there are a variety of factors the Commission had to consider. It points to the stay that had left the administrative proceeding without the opportunity for substantial prosecution, Asbury's separate constitutional suit in the Northern District of Texas, No. 4:24-cv-00950-O, which is awaiting an interlocutory appeal and which the Commission anticipates could mean years of additional federal court litigation before any administrative adjudication reached the merits, the increasingly unlikely possibility of reaching a timely resolution of the merits, and the Commission's statement that it must constantly evaluate the deployment of its limited agency resources.

Who handles a complaint about a dealer adding products a buyer did not agree to?

Dealer sales-practice complaints are generally handled at the state level, by the state attorney general under that state's unfair and deceptive acts and practices statute, and in many states through private claims as well. The FTC also asks the public to report potential violations at ReportFraud.ftc.gov with details about the dealership and the practice. Whether a specific contract supports a claim depends on state law and on the documents, which is a question for a lawyer licensed in that state.