Published on 2026-07-25
'Up to 70% off': how much of that is actually real?
'Up to' and 'as much as' describe a ceiling, not a typical result. Regulators have caught retailers where almost nothing on sale hit that ceiling at all.
A banner across a shop window reads 'UP TO 70% OFF'. You walk in expecting a room full of bargains. What you actually find is a bin near the till with a handful of odd sizes marked down that far, and everything else sitting at a polite 15 percent. Nobody lied to you. One item, somewhere, really was 70 percent off. That's the entire job 'up to' is built to do: describe the single best case in the room and let you assume it describes the room.
'Up to' and its cousin 'as much as' are ceilings, not averages. A ceiling only has to be touched once to be true. That's what makes it such a comfortable phrase for anyone selling something: it lets the most flattering number in the entire dataset stand at the front of the sentence, representing everyone, while representing almost no one.
Twenty cars, out of sixteen hundred
In 2026, the UK's Advertising Standards Authority ruled on exactly this pattern. Motorpoint, a used car retailer, ran an Instagram advert promising to 'Save up to £17,000' on nearly new cars. The regulator looked at the actual stock behind the claim. Of the 1,611 vehicles covered by the promotion, only 20 were priced with a saving in the £17,000 to £17,999 band, the level the headline advertised. More than half the stock, 52.4 percent, carried savings of between £5,000 and £9,999 instead, nowhere near the number splashed across the ad.
The ASA ruled the advert misleading, in breach of the advertising code's rules on misleading claims, substantiation and pricing, and ordered it withdrawn. Its reasoning was straightforward: shoppers reading 'save up to £17,000' assumed that kind of saving was available on a meaningful chunk of the cars for sale. It wasn't. It was available on roughly one car in eighty.
How big does 'significant' have to be?
The ASA's own published guidance on savings claims spells out how it judges these cases. Advertisers using 'up to' or 'from' need a genuinely significant proportion of items available at the top saving, spread reasonably evenly across the price range rather than clustered at the cheap end. As a rule of thumb, the guidance states plainly that 'less than 10% is unlikely to be considered a significant proportion', and the regulator has rejected promotions where only 8 percent of items qualified for the maximum discount, treating that as too thin to support the headline figure.
That single number is worth carrying around: if the item, deal or result at the very top of the range applies to fewer than one in ten cases, the people who study this for a living consider the claim unsupported, no matter how accurate the top figure is in isolation. And the same logic applies well beyond price tags. A gym advertising members lose 'up to 12 kilos', a broadband provider promising speeds 'as much as' a certain number, a course promising graduates earn 'up to' a headline salary: the question worth asking is identical every time. How many people, out of how many, actually landed anywhere near that ceiling?
Why 'up to' lands as a promise, not a limit
The reason this phrasing works so well on us isn't a mystery. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission commissioned a consumer study after noticing how often 'up to' language appeared in energy savings advertising, including one campaign promising customers could save 'up to 47 percent' on energy costs. The study found that people overwhelmingly read 'up to' as a promise of the top figure, not a technical ceiling reached by a lucky few. Off the back of that finding, the FTC moved toward requiring that advertisers using an 'up to' figure show that all or almost all customers could realistically expect to reach it, not just the rare best case.
'Up to' is built for one exceptional case, then worn by the whole sale.
None of this means every 'up to' claim is a trap. Sometimes the top figure really does apply to most of what's on offer, and the phrase is doing an honest job of describing a range compactly. The difference between the honest version and the misleading one isn't the words. It's what's sitting behind them. So before a ceiling talks you into a decision, ask for the number that actually describes most cases, the typical saving, the typical result, the typical wait. The top of the range makes a great headline. It rarely makes a good estimate of what you'll get.