Processing fee analyzer: what you really pay to take cards
Divide last month's total fees by last month's card sales to get your effective rate, then compare it with the interchange cost underneath it.
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Example numbers below. Replace them with last month's processing statement.
Every fee on the statement: discount, per-item, monthly, PCI and other fees.
The rest is debit. Not sure? Leave it.
The rest is online or keyed in.
Your effective rate
3.00%
$1,200 in fees on $40,000 in card sales. Average sale $50.00.
You may be overpaying by
$2,796 to $5,025 a year
About $233 to $419 a month
- Interchange alone (card issuers)
- $507 to $693a month
- Interchange-plus estimate
- $781 to $9671.95% to 2.42%
- What you paid
- $1,200
Your volume and fees carry into the quiz, already filled in.
An estimate from published Visa interchange and one published interchange-plus price, before card-network fees. Ranges run from basic cards to top rewards cards. Not a quote.
How the estimate works
Every card sale carries interchange, a fee set by the card network and paid to the bank that issued the card. Your processor adds its own markup and passes the total to you. The tool splits your sales by credit and debit, and by in person and online, then prices each slice with Visa's published U.S. interchange table, dated April 18, 2026.
- Credit cards in person run from 1.51% + 10 cents on a basic card to 2.30% + 10 cents on Visa's top rewards card. Merchants with $280,000 or less in Visa credit sales a year can qualify for Visa's Small Merchant rates, which start at 1.29% + 10 cents.
- Credit cards online run from 1.89% + 10 cents to 2.60% + 10 cents (Small Merchant rates start at 1.58% + 10 cents).
- Debit cards from large banks cost 0.05% + 21 cents, plus 1 cent for issuers that meet fraud-prevention standards. Debit from small banks costs more, for example 0.80% + 15 cents in a store.
Then we add one processor's published interchange-plus price: 8 cents per in-person sale, 15 cents per online sale, and a monthly fee of $99 up to $150,000 a year in sales, $139 up to $250,000, and from $199 above that (Stax, Oct 2026). That gives the interchange-plus estimate. Anything you pay above it, times 12, is the yearly overpayment range.
The range is wide on purpose. The low end of the overpayment assumes every credit card was a top rewards card, so it is the careful number. Mastercard, Discover and American Express publish their own tables; we use Visa's for every card.
Flat rate vs interchange-plus
A flat-rate price charges the same percentage on every card. Stripe's published standard price, for example, is 2.9% + 30 cents online and 2.7% + 5 cents in person. Interchange-plus passes each card's real interchange through and adds a stated markup. On a flat rate, a debit sale from a large bank costs you the same percentage as a rewards card, even though Visa prices their interchange very differently.
Our take
If your effective rate is far above the estimate, ask your processor for an itemized statement: interchange, network fees and their markup on separate lines. A processor that will not show you its markup is telling you something.
See what you're really paying to take cards.
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Sources
- Visa, Visa USA Interchange Reimbursement Fees (rates effective April 18, 2026), accessed Oct 20, 2026
- Federal Reserve Board, Regulation II (Debit Card Interchange Fees and Routing), accessed Oct 20, 2026
- Stax, Pricing (published interchange-plus subscription price used as the benchmark), accessed Oct 20, 2026
- Stripe, Pricing (published flat-rate price), accessed Oct 20, 2026