The Federal Trade Commission and 20 states have sued Dollar General, the nation’s largest dollar-store chain, for persistently overcharging customers at its more than 20,000 stores across the United States.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Nashville, cites a Guardian investigation published last December.

“Dollar General has for years engaged in deceptive conduct that harms the very consumers it claims to serve,” the 95-page legal complaint claims.

“Although Dollar General promises convenience, low prices, and value, the company has routinely charged customers more at the register than the prices displayed on shelves, price tags and advertisements. This pattern of inaccurate pricing has persisted for years and affects millions of purchases across the country.”

The lawsuit says the scope of the retail chain’s “pricing misconduct” is “staggering”.

The FTC is the federal agency charged with protecting consumers from deceptive, unfair and anticompetitive business practices. State authorities from Mississippi to Ohio to Nebraska to Utah have joined the case as plaintiffs.

Dollar General pushed back against the allegations.

“The lawsuit filed today ... suggests that we have abandoned our mission and willfully disregarded the affordability needs of our customers,” the company said in statement. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Our goal is 100% accuracy between shelf and register prices in every store.”

The FTC’s allegations are consistent with the Guardian’s December 2025 investigation, which found that Dollar General stores failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states over a three-year period. That article “was the subject of significant internal deliberation and discussions” within the company, the lawsuit said.

The agency noted in the lawsuit that Dollar General has policies in place that are supposed to align register prices with shelf prices. For example, it directs employees to remove and replace outdated labels on certain days of the week. Workers told the Guardian that, because of understaffing, they are often too busy to change those labels.

“Dollar General’s on-paper policies to update pricing achieve little in practice,” the lawsuit said, because “they do not track whether the printed labels are actually affixed to shelves.”

The FTC cited a Guardian interview with a former lead sales associate in Louisiana who said: “I threw away tags sometimes, to keep me or a co-worker out of trouble.”

The lawsuit indicates that FTC investigators made undercover purchases at Dollar General stores in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri and Maryland over a two and half month span. The first of these secret shopper tests took place this January, six weeks after the Guardian’s investigation focused wide attention on the discount chain’s pricing practices.

Every single undercover visit, the suit says, turned up overcharges on multiple products. At a Dollar General in Cleveland, 8 of 58 items purchased rang up more costly than the prices listed on the product label or shelf – an overcharge rate of nearly 14%.

Dollar General said it first learned of the FTC’s investigation in February when it received a civil investigative demand from the agency. The company said that the investigation appeared to have “an unusually accelerated timeline” but that it “engaged cooperatively with the commission, producing more than 200,000 documents and over 350 gigabytes of data and making several company representatives available to provide sworn testimony on relatively short notice”.

The company’s statement said it pushed back against the calculations behind the FTC’s demand for financial compensation for consumers, but that it was surprised when the agency did not respond to its counteroffer and instead filed suit.

Dollar General said it “will defend this litigation vigorously”.

The company said that, in the retail marketplace, “occasional price discrepancies can occur. When that happens, our store teams are instructed, empowered and expected to make things right for the customer. In recent years, we have enhanced our price-accuracy processes and remain committed to continuous improvement.”

In a separate case, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, announced earlier this month that Dollar General had agreed to a $1.875m deal to settle allegations that it had repeatedly overcharged customers across the state.