Two riders open the same app, punch in the same destination, and request a car within seconds of each other. One pays under $40. The other pays $50. A new investigation says that gap is not a glitch, it is the business model.
Consumer Reports tested ride-hailing fares across 17 states in March and April 2026 and found that the median price difference between the lowest and highest fare for rides ordered at nearly the exact same time was 50 percent. Worse, the watchdog group said nearly 11 percent of all discounts displayed on Uber and Lyft appeared to be fake, built on falsely inflated prices that made the "savings" illusory.
The investigation, reported by the New York Post, lands at a moment when both companies are posting record profits. Uber's earnings nearly quadrupled between 2019 and 2025, climbing from roughly $2.1 billion to $7.9 billion. Lyft swung from a $679 million loss in 2019 to a profit of nearly $529 million in 2025. Riders, meanwhile, have no meaningful way to know why their fare is higher than the person standing next to them on the same curb.
Consumer Reports enlisted 175 volunteers to place orders for identical rides at nearly the same time. In some cases, volunteers stood side by side. The results were striking.
On a 30-minute Uber ride from Manhattan's Chinatown to Long Island City, three customers saw fares under $40. Seven were quoted between $40 and $47. Seventeen shoppers landed in a tight band between $47.94 and $47.96. Two more came in at $49 and $50. One New York City route produced a price spread of 152 percent.
Consumer Reports said the variation could not be explained by ordinary surge pricing, noting that volunteers "booked identical rides within a few minutes of one another and, in many cases, within the same minute." The group said the methods appeared to go beyond standard dynamic pricing.
Uber pushed back, arguing that prices change "nearly every second" and that volunteers may not have placed orders at precisely the same instant. Lyft suggested that the experiment itself may have inflated prices because many volunteers placed orders simultaneously, creating a localized demand spike.
The fake-discount finding may be the most troubling piece. Consumer Reports described a test in which a volunteer named Tessa saw an UberX ride priced at $65.95, with $82.08 crossed out and a banner reading "Fares lower than usual." Another volunteer, Chuck, opened his app for the same route and saw a $65.95 fare with no discount at all. Forty other riders saw non-discounted prices ranging from $65.93 to $65.99.
In other words, the "discount" Tessa received appeared to be a markdown from a price nobody was actually paying. An Uber spokesperson told the Post that crossed-out prices paired with phrases like "Fares lower than usual" are not actual discounts but "historical comparisons." That distinction, between a discount and a "historical comparison", is unlikely to be obvious to a rider in a hurry.
Both Uber and Lyft denied engaging in fictitious pricing. Both said they do not use personal information to set base fares, though they acknowledged using personal data for promotions and discounts.
That acknowledgment matters. If the base price is the same but the discounts are personalized, and some of those discounts are based on inflated reference prices, the net effect on the rider's wallet is the same as personalized pricing. The label changes. The bill does not.
The investigation flagged Uber patents showing the company can determine that a rider who frequently requests a car to a day care center before heading to a workplace or university is likely a single working parent, and can estimate rough ages of their children. Whether that data feeds into fare calculations is unclear. But the mere existence of such granular profiling raises fair questions about how "marketplace dynamics" actually work under the hood.
Derek Kravitz, the lead investigator on the Consumer Reports study, told the Post that nearly all 175 volunteers shared the same worry. They "were concerned about their personal data being used for discounts," he said. In a legal and corporate environment where accountability for financial misconduct remains a live issue, that concern is not paranoid, it is rational.
Kravitz described what he sees as a deliberate strategy by ride-hailing companies to stay within the letter of consumer protection law while skirting its spirit:
"A lot of companies have figured out, well, base pricing, we don't want to personalize that too much. We don't want to run afoul of consumer protection laws... so we're going to personalize promotions and discounts... and the net effect is that people are paying more for rides than they were just a few years ago."
The pricing questions sit atop a broader shift in how Uber and Lyft divide the fare between the company and the driver. Consumer Reports found that Uber started increasing passenger prices and lowering driver pay in September 2022. By the end of 2024, Uber was keeping 42 percent of ride fares for itself, up from 32 percent just two years earlier.
Both companies pivoted to algorithmic pricing around 2016, moving away from transparent per-mile and per-minute rate cards. The result is a system in which riders cannot see how their fare was calculated and drivers cannot see how their cut was determined. The algorithm sits between them, and neither side gets a clear look at the math.
Phil Radford, Consumer Reports' CEO, framed the issue in terms most consumers would recognize:
"People expect prices to change when demand spikes. What they don't expect is for two customers taking the same ride at the same time to be charged very different amounts, or to be shown discounts that may not be discounts at all."
Radford called for companies to "clearly explain how prices are set and ensure that advertised discounts are genuine, so people can comparison shop and know they're being treated fairly."
Sid Patil, Lyft's executive vice president of Rideshare, issued a flat denial: "We do not engage in surveillance pricing. Period." But he added a telling qualifier: "We recognize our pricing model can be opaque, and I want to add transparency to our process."
Patil said Lyft's pricing "reflects marketplace dynamics, which includes driver availability, demand, and time of day," and insisted the company's "base marketplace price is consistent across accounts" and its "applied discounts are real."
Consumer Reports has been down this road before. The group published a study on Instacart's dynamic pricing practices last year, and the grocery delivery company eventually reversed its dynamic-pricing model after public backlash. Whether Uber and Lyft face similar pressure remains to be seen.
The investigation leaves several questions unanswered. Which 17 states were tested? What exact routes beyond the New York City examples were examined? What specific methodology did Consumer Reports use to classify nearly 11 percent of discounts as fake? And what data, precisely, fed into the price variations volunteers encountered?
Kravitz summed up the frustration riders face:
"They want to know why, they want to know when it's happening, they want to know the factors that go into it, and they want to know what to do about it, and they don't have any of that information at their disposal."
That opacity is the core problem. In a functioning market, buyers can compare prices and sellers compete on transparency. Uber and Lyft have built a system where the price you see depends on variables you cannot inspect, discounts may be measured against prices no one pays, and neither the rider nor the driver gets a clear accounting of the split.
Conservatives who believe in honest markets should find this worth watching. Free enterprise depends on informed buyers. When the algorithm knows more about you than you know about the algorithm, and uses that edge to dress up a higher fare as a bargain, the market isn't free. It's rigged.