Warning If You Use Bank of America For Credit Card Processing
Credit Card Surcharge Rules — and Why Big Retailers Don’t Do It
Editor’s note. A version of this article was written for Entrepreneur and published on July 9, 2025. You can read the original on Entrepreneur.com. It also draws on a bonus chapter of my book, The Great American Heist, Special Edition for CEOs and CFOs.
Rewritten and expanded on August 8, 2026 to add the Visa and Mastercard interchange settlement, current fine schedules, and the consumer research. Rules described here are current as of August 2026.
I belong to a CEO peer group, and I love connecting with leaders who are further along in their journey. I work hard to keep my mouth shut and my ears open, because let’s be honest, they have far more to teach me than I have to teach them.
I used to think most business owners approached growth the same way, by learning from the people ahead of them. Lately I have started to wonder.
Because right now I am watching a surcharging frenzy unfold. Small and midsize merchants are racing to add extra fees to their customers’ bills to cover credit card processing costs. Yet not one major player is doing it. Not Apple. Not Walmart. Not Amazon. Not Target. Not Costco. In researching this for my book, I could not find a single one of the 500 largest companies in the United States adding a credit card surcharge, and many of them operate on some of the thinnest margins in business.
If anyone had the incentive, it would be them. Billions of dollars in card transactions run through their systems every year. A 1% to 3% surcharge would drop enormous money onto the bottom line tomorrow morning.
So what do they know that smaller merchants don’t?
What surcharging is, and what it is not
A surcharge is an extra fee added at checkout when a customer pays with a credit card. It sounds simple. Staying compliant with the card brand rules and the state laws around it is anything but.
Most of the confusion, and most of the violations, come from merchants who think these four things are interchangeable. They are not, and the difference decides whether you are compliant.
Surcharge
An added fee for paying by credit card. Credit only, never debit. Capped, disclosed, notified in advance, and regulated by state law. This is the one with all the rules attached.
Cash discount
The reverse. You post one price and reduce it for customers paying cash. Legal in all fifty states, including the states that ban surcharging outright, because you are lowering a price rather than adding a fee. The catch is that it has to be run as a genuine discount, not a surcharge wearing a different label. Visa’s own guidance is explicit that a card price reached by adding a fee at the end may be treated as a surcharge no matter what you call it.
Convenience fee
A flat dollar amount, never a percentage, for paying through a channel you do not normally use. It is a channel fee rather than a card fee, which changes almost every rule that applies to it. Narrow, frequently misapplied, and worth understanding properly before you use the term: surcharge vs. convenience fee, explained in full.
Dual pricing
Both prices posted side by side, cash and card, so the customer sees the difference before choosing. Some states that restrict surcharging permit this. It is also, in my experience, the version customers resent least, because nothing is sprung on them at the register.
The credit card surcharging rules, in the order they apply to you
It helps to know where the right to surcharge came from, because it explains why the rules feel designed to trip you. Surcharging was not a gift from the payments industry. It came out of a landmark antitrust settlement won by merchants who spent years fighting for the right to recover their processing costs. The networks complied. They were not happy about it. And each brand then wrote its own rulebook, independently, with its own caps, its own disclosure requirements, and its own enforcement.
So three separate rulebooks govern this: the card networks, your state, and your merchant agreement. All three apply at once, and the strictest one wins.
Credit card surcharge signage requirements
Disclosure is where compliant programs most often fail, because it is the part nobody owns. The processor sets the rate, the POS applies it, and the signage becomes somebody’s job that never got assigned.
At the entrance
A customer should learn about the surcharge before they start shopping, not after they have made their choices. Post it at the point of store entry, readable at normal walking pace. For an online store, this is your site, before the cart.
At the point of sale
A second notice at the register or checkout screen, near the terminal rather than across the counter. State the amount as a percentage and make clear it applies to credit cards only.
Before the transaction completes
The customer must be able to see the surcharge and choose a different payment method before authorization. A fee revealed on the final screen, after they have committed, is the pattern state pricing laws were written to stop.
On the receipt, as its own line
The surcharge is included in the transaction total, but it must also appear separately on the receipt so the customer can see exactly what it was. Rolling it silently into the sale amount is a violation even when everything else was done correctly.
Several states demand more than this. New York requires the total price a card customer will pay to be posted rather than just a percentage, and both New York and Maine expect the cash and card prices side by side.
When signage is wrong, you usually find out from a stranger. Visa and Mastercard use secret shoppers to check surcharge compliance in the field, and any customer can report a merchant through Visa’s rules complaint form.
A missing sign is enough to start the fine schedule at $1,000, and it escalates from there while the violation stands. Then your processor passes its own assessment through to you under the indemnity clause. A laminated sheet of paper is the cheapest compliance you will ever buy.
Where surcharging is banned or restricted
This is where it gets genuinely messy, and I want to be honest with you about how messy rather than hand you a tidy table that gives false confidence.
Banned and actively enforced
Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine prohibit credit card surcharges, and Puerto Rico maintains its own ban. Massachusetts and Connecticut are the oldest and most consistently enforced. Cash discount programs generally remain available in these states, which is how most merchants there handle it.
Banned on paper, struck down in court, enforcement unclear
California, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas all have surcharge bans in statute that federal courts have ruled unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds, following the reasoning in Expressions Hair Design v. Schneiderman. The statutes are still on the books. In Texas, the Attorney General has issued an opinion that the state’s ban is enforceable anyway. This is exactly the kind of gray zone where a merchant gets confident and then gets a letter.
Legal, but capped below the network maximum
Colorado caps surcharges at 2%. New York, New Jersey, Nevada, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Georgia limit the surcharge to the merchant’s actual cost of acceptance. New York additionally requires, since February 2024, that the total price a card customer will pay be posted, not just the percentage. Maine and New York impose stricter disclosure than most, requiring the cash price and card price be shown side by side.
While researching this update, I pulled six published state-by-state surcharging guides, all written by payments companies, all updated in 2026. They contradict each other on California. Some list it as banned. Others say surcharging with proper disclosure is now generally permitted there.
If six payment industry sources cannot agree on whether it is legal in the most populous state in the country, that tells you everything about the risk of setting this up yourself from a blog post. Including this one. Talk to an attorney licensed in your state.
What the fines actually cost
Merchants ask me what happens if they get it wrong, usually expecting to hear about a warning letter. The numbers are considerably less friendly than that, and they compound.
Visa’s non-compliance structure, as summarized by the law firm ArentFox Schiff from Visa’s own Core Rules, escalates on a schedule.
First identified
An immediate $1,000 fine, plus a request for a remediation plan.
Continuing violation
Fines increase and compound, reaching up to $150,000 once 150 calendar days have passed and the violation has not been corrected.
After 180 days
Penalties increase by another $25,000 every month until the violation is fixed.
Worst case
Loss of surcharging privileges, or disqualification from accepting Visa cards at all.
In December 2023, a payments processor sent a memo to its sales partners warning that merchant clients who did not comply with Visa’s surcharge rules could face fines between $50,000 and $1 million, and Payments Dive reported that Visa was stepping up enforcement. That range has been repeated across the industry ever since.
And this is not enforcement by complaint alone. Visa and Mastercard use secret shoppers to check surcharge compliance in the field. A customer can also report you directly through Visa’s rules complaint form. You will not necessarily know you are being reviewed until the assessment arrives.
The advice trap: the person telling you to surcharge cannot be held responsible for it
This is the part of the conversation almost nobody has with merchants, and in my view it is the most important thing on this page. I have been writing and speaking about it for years, and it still surprises people every time.
Every merchant agreement I have ever audited contains an indemnity clause. The wording varies. The effect does not. It shields the processor from liability for the guidance it gives you. If your processor tells you to surcharge, sets it up incorrectly, and the card networks fine both of you, that clause lets them pass their penalty straight through to you.
You get hit twice. Once by the networks for the violation, and once again as a pass-through of the fine your processor received for the advice they gave you.
In all my years auditing merchant agreements, I have never once seen a processor agree to strike that clause. Not once. I have watched them walk away from signing a new account rather than give it up.
That should tell you exactly how valuable it is to them, and exactly how dangerous it is for you.
Now stack that on top of the economics, because this is where the incentive stops being subtle. When a processor sets up a flat surcharge program, they are not only earning on a larger ticket. They are frequently repricing the account at the same time, and the margin change is not small.
A competitive processor margin on a well-audited account runs around 5 basis points. Under a typical flat surcharge program we see that margin land near 70 basis points. That is roughly a 13 times increase in processor profit, on the same merchant, doing the same volume, for the same work.
What those 65 extra basis points are worth to them
$1,000,000 in annual volume: $6,500
$5,000,000: $32,500
$10,000,000: $65,000
$50,000,000: $325,000
$100,000,000: $650,000
$5,000,000: $32,500
$10,000,000: $65,000
$50,000,000: $325,000
$100,000,000: $650,000
Read that table as the answer to a question you may not have thought to ask: why is your processor so enthusiastic about this? The same party assuring you the program is compliant is the party whose margin multiplies when you say yes, using an agreement that makes them unaccountable for the advice.
The mechanic is usually invisible from the merchant’s side. The processor sets a flat 3% charge to your customers and bills you roughly 3%, so the math appears to balance and you are told there is nothing to worry about. What that arrangement never asks is what your costs actually are, which is the only number that legally sets your ceiling.
This is not a hypothetical concern. Industry watchdogs have documented processors marketing surcharge programs with a fixed rate set above what Visa’s rules allow, and in some cases programming the equipment to charge above the permitted amount, without telling the merchant that the configuration itself is a violation. The merchant finds out when the assessment lands.
Why the big players still don’t do it
Here is the asymmetry nobody names out loud.
When Walmart evaluates surcharging, the question goes to in-house counsel, outside firms, and a payments team of career experts who read the network rules for a living. They model the compliance exposure, the customer behavior, and the brand cost before anyone touches a terminal.
When a small or midsize business evaluates surcharging, it usually looks at two sources. What other small and midsize businesses down the street appear to be doing, which tells you nothing about whether those merchants are compliant or profiting. And their processor, who earns more when the answer is yes and holds an indemnity clause if the answer turns out to be wrong.
Two groups of business owners, facing the same decision, getting advice from opposite ends of the quality spectrum. They reach opposite conclusions. That is not a coincidence, and it is worth thinking about which end of that spectrum your own information came from.
Something else happened in 2026 that makes the point better than I can. Walmart and other large merchants went to federal court to object to the interchange settlement that hands them expanded surcharging rights. One of their stated concerns was the considerable work involved in building surcharge and discount programs at all. They were offered the tool and told a judge it was not worth what it costs to use.
Three reasons the big operators keep declining.
Compliance at scale is close to impossible
A company operating in forty states faces forty different legal postures, several of them unsettled, plus network rules that update on their own schedule. Every location, every terminal, every online checkout has to be right, continuously. One misconfigured lane in one state starts the fine clock.
They know what a customer costs
McDonald’s spends billions a year reminding the public that it wants them there. The Ritz-Carlton famously authorizes employees to spend up to $2,000 to fix a single guest’s problem without asking a manager. These companies have measured what it costs to win a customer and what it costs to lose one, and the answer keeps them from nickel-and-diming at the register.
Somebody is waiting to take the customer
There are always competitors ready to be the friendlier option. Once a customer leaves over how they were treated, they rarely come back.
That last one is not theoretical either. Chris Marley, sales manager at Fort Smith Restaurant Supply, told me he was glad when his competitors started surcharging:
“When they started adding fees to their customers’ bills, people began coming to us instead, and they stayed.”
Chris Marley, Fort Smith Restaurant Supply
You may think you are protecting your margin. You may be funding your competitor’s growth.
What the data says about customer backlash
When I wrote about this in The Great American Heist, I went looking for research that would complicate the picture. I did not find any. Surveys from J.D. Power, LendingTree, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, USA Today, and Payments.com all point the same direction.
3 in 5
Consumers who consider it unfair for a merchant to pass payment processing fees on to them.
57%
Cardholders who believe surcharge fees should be illegal outright.
67%
Consumers who say a surcharge negatively affects their impression of the merchant.
56%
Credit card users highly likely to switch to a different merchant to avoid a surcharge.
73%
Consumers who would use their credit cards less often if they had to pay a surcharge every time.
Some merchants read that last number and think it sounds like good news. Fewer card transactions, fewer fees. Stay with that thought for a second, because it leads somewhere expensive.
“It’s just the new normal”: what B2B buyers actually do
Every one of those numbers describes consumers, and I know what a B2B merchant is thinking right now. That is retail. My buyers are professionals. They understand costs, they have accepted surcharging as the new cost of doing business, and they have moved on.
I test that claim for a living, in front of the exact audience in question.
From the stage
When I speak at B2B conferences and CEO groups, I ask for a show of hands. When you are buying from a vendor and they surcharge you, do you accept it as the new normal, or do you start looking at other options?
Every hand in the room goes up for shopping around. Every single time.
These are sophisticated buyers. They are the same kind of people your customers are. They understand the economics of card acceptance perfectly well, and several of them surcharge their own customers. They still hate it. They still shop around. They still leave.
The sting is worst in long relationships. When a vendor you have used for years adds a surcharge, it does not read as a business decision. It reads as a signal that something changed, that you are now a transaction rather than a partner. Business buyers describe it to me in exactly those terms. They understand the reason and they still feel devalued by it.
Here is what makes B2B worse than retail rather than safer. Business buyers do not leave loudly. They do not complain, they do not post a review, and they do not tell you anything is wrong.
They quietly send the next RFQ to your competitor, and you find out months later when the renewal does not come. That silence is the most expensive sound in business.
Which also means a B2B merchant cannot measure this the way the math section above suggests. There is no bad review to point at. The revenue simply stops arriving from accounts you assumed were secure, and nothing on your statement will ever tell you why.
The myth that cash is cheaper
Cash and checks are not free. Studies put the true cost of handling them somewhere between 4.7% and 15.3% once you count everything that goes into it:
• Labor to count, reconcile, and deposit it
• Bank fees on cash deposits
• Counterfeit bills and bad checks
• Armored car services
• Worst of all, lost sales, because a customer with a $10,000 credit line does not always have $10,000 in cash
So if 73% of your customers respond to a surcharge by reaching for cash and checks instead, you did not eliminate a cost. You traded a 2% cost you could have audited down for one that runs higher and shows up nowhere on a statement. That is the cash is cheaper myth, and it falls apart the moment you price it.
The real math behind surcharging
Let me put actual numbers on it, because this is where the decision usually flips. I will be honest, when I started researching this I did not know how it would come out.
Step 1: the gain
A client spends $10,000 a year with you. You add a 3% surcharge to cover card fees. Extra revenue: $300. That is your win, on paper.
Step 2: the damage
One bad review over that fee costs you roughly 10% of your business. On a $10,000 client base that is $1,000 gone, and most of it never announces itself, because it is customers who read the review and never walked through the door.
Step 3: replacing it
At a client acquisition cost ratio of 3.5 to 1, you spend $3.50 in sales and marketing for every $1 of new revenue. Replacing that $1,000 costs $3,500.
Step 4: the net
Gain of $300, minus $1,000 in lost revenue, minus $3,500 to win it back. Net: a loss of $4,200. The quick win cost you fourteen times what it earned.
Run your own numbers instead of mine. Change the review impact, change the acquisition ratio, use your real spend. The shape does not change, because the gain is capped at 3% and the downside is not capped at all.
A smarter alternative: just raise your prices
Merchants tell me constantly that they cannot raise prices. Let’s be honest with each other: surcharging is raising prices. It is just the most damaging way to do it.
If someone will pay $100 for what you sell, chances are they will pay $102. That covers a typical 2% processing cost and nobody feels anything. Surcharge instead and that same customer pays $103, and now they feel penalized for how they chose to pay.
That extra dollar between $102 and $103 is not a math problem. It is the difference between a customer who feels valued and a customer who feels punished.
What changed in 2026: the interchange settlement
The biggest development since I first wrote about this is the Visa and Mastercard interchange settlement, announced in November 2025 and given preliminary approval by U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan on June 9, 2026. It covers roughly 12 million merchants and is meant to end litigation that began in 2005.
The honor all cards rule is breaking up. For decades, accepting any Visa card meant accepting every Visa card, including the premium rewards cards carrying the highest interchange. Under the settlement, merchants gain the ability to accept selectively by card type, separating commercial, premium consumer, and standard consumer cards.
Surcharging gets more granular. Within 90 days of approval, merchants may surcharge at either the brand level or the product level, though not both for the same network. In plain English, you could surcharge only the expensive rewards cards instead of every credit card you take. The 3% ceiling still applies, the cost of acceptance limit still applies, and the 30-day written notice to your acquirer still applies.
What is actually driving up your fees
Here is the kicker. If your merchant fees are climbing, it is usually not because the networks raised interchange. Interchange has barely budged in fifteen years. Something else is happening on your statement.
Inflated fees
The processor bills you above the actual cost. You are charged 2.95% when the real cost is 2.25%. Reuters documented this pattern in its reporting on charges disclosed in fine print.
Invented fees
Official sounding line items that no card network has ever heard of. Credit card processing is a non-regulated industry, and nothing stops a processor from naming a fee whatever it likes and putting it on page six.
Markup buried in the discount rate
Your markup over interchange should be fully disclosed and broken out as its own line. The larger your volume, the tighter that number should be. If nobody can show you the markup separately, that is the finding.
Kept rebates on returns
Most businesses have no idea they should get processing fees back on returned or voided sales. The processor pockets those refunds instead. For a merchant with heavy returns, this adds up fast, and almost nobody checks.
Every one of those is fixable without asking a single customer to pay more. That is the whole argument against surcharging in one sentence: most merchants are trying to pass along a cost they were never supposed to be paying in the first place.
What smart operators do instead
If you still want to surcharge, do it in this order
I have spent this whole article arguing against surcharging, and I stand behind every word of it. But some merchants are going to do it anyway, and a few of them have good reasons. So here is the version that actually works, and the sequence is the entire point.
1. You are cheaper than the competitor down the street
They are adding 3%. You are adding 2%. On a $5,000 order that is a $50 difference, sitting in plain view at checkout, in your favor. Surcharging turns your processing costs into a published price, and a published price is something customers compare.
2. You are actually in compliance
This is the part most merchants miss entirely. If your true cost is 2% and you are surcharging 3%, you are not merely being aggressive. You are in violation, because the surcharge may never exceed your cost of acceptance. Charging your real cost is not just cheaper for the customer, it is the thing that keeps you out of the fine schedule.
3. The risk moves off your desk
A specialty firm that absorbs compliance risk is the only real answer to the indemnity problem described earlier. Get the commitment in writing, and specifically confirm it covers network assessments and survives your processor’s own pass-through language. If they will not put it in writing, they are not absorbing anything.
4. You can look your clients in the eye
This one matters more than the money. You are not slapping 3% on the bill as an afterthought and hoping nobody asks. You did the work, you drove your own costs down first, and you are passing along only what it genuinely costs you. That is a very different conversation, and it is a defensible one.
Do it in the other order and every advantage inverts. Surcharge first and you overcharge your customers, expose yourself to the fine schedule, keep the liability, and tell the people who pay you that they are a cost to be recovered.
Same decision. Opposite outcome. The difference is whether you audited first.
And plenty of merchants who complete step one never get to step two, because once the statement is cleaned up the problem they were trying to solve turns out to be a good deal smaller than it looked.
Frequently asked questions about credit card surcharging
Is credit card surcharging legal in my state?
In most states, yes, with conditions. Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, and Puerto Rico ban it outright. California, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas have bans that federal courts have ruled unconstitutional, leaving genuine ambiguity. Several other states cap the amount below the network maximum. Because published guides openly disagree on some states, confirm with an attorney licensed where you operate before you start.
How much can I legally surcharge?
Whichever is lowest of three numbers: your actual cost of acceptance, the network cap of 3% for Visa and 4% for Mastercard, and your state’s cap. If you accept both major networks, 3% is your practical ceiling. Colorado caps at 2%. Several states limit you to your true cost, which for most merchants is under 3% anyway.
What are the fines for surcharging incorrectly?
Visa’s schedule starts with an immediate $1,000 assessment and a demand for a remediation plan, compounds toward $150,000 if the violation continues past 150 days, and adds $25,000 a month after 180 days. Processors have warned their sales channels that non-compliant merchants could face $50,000 to $1 million. Repeat violations can cost you the ability to accept Visa entirely.
If my processor told me to surcharge and it was wrong, are they liable?
Almost certainly not. Merchant agreements contain indemnity language that shields the processor from responsibility for the guidance it gives, and it typically allows them to pass their own fine through to you. I have never seen a processor agree to remove that clause. Read yours before you take anyone’s advice on this, and understand that the person advising you usually earns more when you say yes.
What is the right way to surcharge if I decide to do it?
Audit first, surcharge second. Get your actual cost of acceptance down to pure interchange with optimized qualification and no inflated or invented fees, then use a specialty compliance firm that absorbs the risk and charges only that true cost. For most merchants that is closer to 2% than 3%, which undercuts competitors, keeps you inside the legal cap, and lets you tell clients you passed along only what it genuinely costs you.
Can I surcharge a debit card?
No. Never, in any state, under any circumstances. Running the debit card as credit does not create an exception. This is the violation most likely to be sitting in your terminal configuration right now without your knowledge.
What is the difference between a surcharge and a cash discount?
A surcharge adds to the posted price for card users. A cash discount reduces the posted price for cash users. The economics can look similar, but the legal treatment is not. Cash discounting is permitted in all fifty states, including where surcharging is banned, which is why merchants in Massachusetts and Connecticut use it. Execution decides everything: if the card price is reached by adding a fee at the end, it is treated as a surcharge regardless of the label. Full detail in our guide to cash discount programs.
Do I have to tell anyone before I start surcharging?
Yes. At least 30 days written notice to your acquirer before the first surcharged transaction, stating your business name and address, the surcharge amount, whether you are surcharging at brand or product level, and any processor or payment facilitator involved. Skipping this makes an otherwise compliant program non-compliant.
Does the Visa and Mastercard settlement change the surcharging rules?
If it receives final approval, yes. Merchants would be able to surcharge at the brand or product level, meaning you could target only the expensive premium cards rather than all credit cards. The caps, disclosure, and notice requirements remain. As of August 2026 the settlement has preliminary approval only, appeals are expected, and nothing has taken effect.
Do any major retailers surcharge?
Essentially none of the national ones. In researching my book I could not find a single company among the 500 largest in the country adding a credit card surcharge. They negotiate their acceptance costs down and optimize interchange instead, and several of them objected in court to a settlement that expands surcharging rights. When the companies with the most sophisticated payments teams in America decline a tool, the decision is worth examining before you adopt it.
The part that has nothing to do with the math
When Blockbuster collapsed, most people chalked it up to technology. Netflix arrived with streaming and the rest is history. But that is not really what happened. Blockbuster’s problem was how it made people feel, and the late fee was the center of it. Customers felt like the company was squeezing a few more dollars out of them at the counter. Netflix built its early brand on the opposite promise: no late fees, no due dates.
Think about that. Customers could have walked into Blockbuster and had the movie in their hands that night. With Netflix they had to wait for a DVD in the mail. They waited anyway, because of how it felt.
You have felt the same thing yourself. Excited to get home with the movie you just picked out, and then at the register, oh, by the way, you owe late fees. That moment turns anticipation into resentment in about a second and a half.
Harry Selfridge made “the customer is always right” famous. Every CEO knows it is not literally true, because some customers are unreasonable. But Selfridge was not talking about facts. He was talking about feelings. Does the person leaving your business feel seen, heard, and valued? Or do they feel dismissed and nickel-and-dimed? Maya Angelou put the same idea more memorably when she said people will never forget how you made them feel.
A surcharge tells your customer something you never intended to say: you are a cost, not an asset.
Once someone feels that, the math on your spreadsheet stops mattering. The research says they will not stay.
At Wharton we studied company after company under case analysis, and the pattern repeated: a business solves a margin problem with a short-term financial maneuver and pays for it in customer loyalty for years afterward. The math does not lie. It just does not tell the whole story. Human behavior does.
As a CEO, I hate processing fees as much as anyone, probably more. But we will stay the course, reminding our clients we value them and that they can pay us however they wish. They are the only reason we exist, and the cost of winning a client is far higher than 2%.
So before you ask your customers to cover your processing costs, find out how much of that cost was ever legitimate. In my experience, a meaningful share of it was not.
Want to see the fees on your own statement before deciding anything?
Our decoder walks your merchant statement line by line, so you can tell which charges are real network costs and which ones are not.
The part they leave off the brochure
Your processor has a score. Do you know it?
If your processor is the one encouraging you to surcharge, it is worth knowing their record first. The Processor Scoreboard rates more than two dozen major processors from 0 to 100 on the documented record, sorted worst first, with the evidence behind every point deducted. No processor pays to be listed, and none can pay to be removed.
Before you surcharge, find out what you are really paying
Send us your most recent processing statement. We will show you your true cost of acceptance, which is also the legal ceiling on any surcharge you might impose, and what we can recover. It is free, and it takes about five minutes of your time.
Or call us at 800-672-1292
A necessary note. This article is general information, not legal advice, and I am not an attorney. Surcharging law varies by state, changes frequently, and is currently unsettled in several jurisdictions. Card network rules are updated on their own schedule. Confirm your position with counsel licensed in your state and with your acquirer before implementing any surcharge program. Fine schedules described here are drawn from published summaries of Visa’s Core Rules and from industry reporting, and are current as of August 2026. Consumer research figures are compiled from surveys by J.D. Power, LendingTree, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, USA Today, and Payments.com.
Read More
Check out our other insights here
Do You Have Risk Fees On Your Credit Card Processing Statement?
Want to talk?
- Call us today 800-672-1292
- Book a free consultation
As seen on
