Surcharging

Surcharging moves the cost of credit-card acceptance from the merchant’s margin to the cardholder’s total, as a separate line item at checkout. A customer paying with a credit card sees the surcharge disclosed before paying; a customer paying with debit, ACH, or cash pays no surcharge. Done within the rules, it takes card processing close to a zero-cost line for the merchant, which is why adoption has grown fastest in thin-margin verticals and B2B invoicing.

The rules are specific. Surcharges apply to credit cards only: debit and prepaid cards can never be surcharged anywhere in the US, under federal law and card-network rules, even when a debit card is run as signature debit. The networks cap the surcharge at 3% (Visa lowered its cap from 4% in 2023), and it may never exceed the merchant’s actual cost of acceptance. Disclosure is required at the point of entry, at the point of sale, and as a line item on the receipt, and the networks require roughly 30 days’ advance notice before a merchant begins surcharging. State law adds a second layer: as of 2026, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, and Puerto Rico prohibit surcharging outright, and several states impose their own disclosure requirements.

When evaluating a surcharging program, the platform question matters more than the paperwork: the processor must detect card type at authorization so debit is never surcharged, apply the cap automatically, and produce receipts with the required line item. A program that leaves those checks to the cashier is a compliance incident waiting for an audit.

QorPay supports compliant surcharging as one of three merchant pricing models, alongside interchange-plus and flat rate, with card-type detection and cap enforcement handled in the QorCommerce platform.