Every new car sold in the United States carries a federally required window sticker, officially called a Monroney label, listing the manufacturer’s suggested retail price down to the last accessory. What that federal law does not stop a dealer from doing is taping a second sticker right next to it, one listing a “market adjustment,” “additional dealer markup,” or simply “ADM,” adding anywhere from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars on top. Buyers often assume that because the first sticker is legally mandated, the second one carries some matching legal weight. It does not, and the actual leverage a shopper has depends on one narrow legal distinction almost nobody explains before they walk onto the lot.

Why the Monroney Sticker Cannot Simply Be Removed

The Automobile Information Disclosure Act is a genuinely strict federal law. Under it, a manufacturer must “securely affix” a label to every new car’s window before it ever reaches a dealer’s lot, and that label must list the base price, factory-installed options, destination charge, and total price. Separately, federal law makes it a crime, punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 and up to a year in prison, for anyone to willfully remove, alter, or render illegible that label before the car reaches its first retail buyer. That is why a dealer will never peel off the factory sticker to hide a markup. Instead, they leave the Monroney label fully intact, exactly as the law requires, and simply place a second, dealer-printed addendum sticker beside it. Because the ADM sticker is not the federally regulated label, adding it does not violate the statute at all.

Key Points

• The Monroney sticker is federally mandated and cannot legally be removed, altered, or covered before a car’s first sale.
• A dealer-added “market adjustment” sticker is a separate, unregulated document that federal law does not restrict in the same way.
• An advertised or MSRP price is generally not treated as a binding legal offer, so a dealer can typically add a markup right up until a specific document is signed.
• The one document that does carry legal weight is a signed purchase agreement or buyer’s order, which is why getting a price commitment in writing before signing anything is the single most effective point of leverage a buyer has.

The Legal Term That Actually Decides Whether You Can Fight It

The concept that determines whether an ADM sticks is ordinary contract formation, specifically whether a binding written agreement exists yet. An advertised price, an MSRP figure, or a salesperson’s spoken promise about “knocking off the market adjustment” is not, on its own, an enforceable contract term. The Federal Trade Commission’s own consumer guidance on buying a used car is blunt about this, warning shoppers that “spoken promises are difficult to enforce” and advising buyers to get any add-on costs and terms “in writing” rather than relying on what a salesperson says on the floor. Once a customer and a dealer both sign a purchase agreement, sometimes called a buyer’s order, that document is what a court will look to, not the sticker in the window or a verbal assurance made an hour earlier. If the ADM appears on that signed document, the buyer generally owes it. If it does not, the dealer cannot add it back in afterward without the buyer’s separate agreement.

There is a narrower federal protection that applies at one specific moment in the transaction. The FTC’s Guides Against Bait Advertising specifically prohibit a seller from accepting a deposit for a product at an advertised price and then switching the buyer to a higher-priced version of it. That rule gives a buyer real standing if they put money down on a specific advertised deal and the dealer then tries to layer an ADM on top before delivery. Outside of that narrow deposit scenario, however, there is no federal rule requiring a dealer to honor a window’s advertised number if no money or signature has changed hands yet.

What Buyers Should Do

The practical version of all this legal detail is straightforward. Before agreeing to anything verbally, ask the dealer to write the full out-the-door price, including or explicitly excluding any market adjustment, onto a purchase order or buyer’s order and have it signed by a manager before any financing paperwork begins. Do not accept a verbal promise that the ADM will be “taken care of” or “knocked off at the end,” since that promise has no legal standing if it never makes it onto paper. If a dealer has already accepted a deposit at one advertised price, keep the receipt or confirmation, since that creates the narrow bait-advertising protection described above. And because state consumer protection laws vary considerably in how aggressively they police undisclosed dealer add-ons, a buyer who feels a markup was misrepresented also has the option of filing a complaint with their state attorney general’s consumer protection division, which several states have used in recent years to pressure dealers over pandemic-era and inventory-shortage markups.

None of this makes a market adjustment illegal in most states, and it will not stop a dealer from trying one when demand outstrips supply. What it does is move the fight to the only place it can actually be won, which is the paper both sides sign, not the sticker in the window or whatever gets promised across the sales desk before that paper exists.