01 · The room
One sale, three owners.
A card payment leaves your till whole and reaches your account short. Three companies take a piece on the way, and only one of them sold you the terminal.
Scroll, and the board fills up. Ten notes, one for each part of the bill, and each note opens the page behind it.
A card payment leaves your till whole and reaches your account short. Three companies take a piece on the way, and only one of them sold you the terminal.
Interchange, scheme and processing fees, and your provider’s markup. They are added together and shown to you as a single percentage.
0.2% of the transaction on UK consumer debit cards, 0.3% on consumer credit. In force since 9 December 2015, so nobody can quote you more and call it their price.
Core scheme and processing fees charged to acquirers rose at least 25% in real terms between 2017 and 2023. The regulator put the extra cost to UK business at at least 170 million pounds a year.
Whatever is left after interchange and scheme fees is your provider. Under blended pricing you cannot see where one ends and the next begins.
An initial minimum term cannot exceed 18 months, and after it the contract must roll on terms no longer than 31 calendar days, for merchants with card turnover up to ten million pounds.
After the acquiring market review, providers have to give merchants a summary box and run an online quotation tool. Both exist to be used, and both are free.
Add every card charge for the month, rental and minimums included, and divide by that month’s card turnover. The calculator does it with the caps already in place.
The cheat sheet holds the caps, the limits and the deadlines on one page, each one with the paper it comes from and the date we checked it.
A card machine can be bought outright, rented by the month, or leased on a separate finance agreement. The hardware is rarely what the deal costs you: the term, the rental and the exit fee are.
We teach from the regulator’s own documents, we name them, and we say when we last read them.
Where does the money go between the card in your customer’s hand and your bank account. Every note on this board opens the page behind it.
Four figures off last month’s statement. The board fills with your own notes: the rate you really paid, what the fixed charges cost you, the price of a single payment and the year at this pace. The notes appear straight away. Leave an address to download the board as an image.
Worked from your own figures in your browser. We keep the address, the four numbers, the page and a one-way hash of your IP address, to filter spam. This is arithmetic, not advice on your contract.
The two conversations every card-taking shop has, answered on paper before they start: why a small contactless tap can ask for a PIN, and whether there is a charge for paying by card. Plus a staff card with the one surcharge rule that trips people up.
Opens a print-ready page in a new tab. The staff card reflects regulations 6A and 6B of the Consumer Rights (Payment Surcharges) Regulations 2012, read 5 September 2026. Put only the second sign up if you do not charge a card fee.
In 2023 cards were 61% of all UK payments and carried nearly 86% of the value of retail transactions. The bill for that arrives once a month as a single percentage, and most owners have never been shown how to open it.
Each note opens a page of its own: what we are counting, the numbers with their source, a worked example and a task you can finish before opening time. These six take the bill apart; the terminal, the calculator, the numbers and who we are sit on the board beside them.
Before you compare quotes, learn the three parts every card payment is built from. Two of them are not set by your pro…
INTERCHANGEInterchange is the fee your customer's bank keeps. For consumer cards inside the UK it is capped, which means nobody c…
SCHEME FEESScheme and processing fees go to Visa and Mastercard for running the rails. They are not capped, and the regulator has…
The same provider can quote you the same business three ways. Only one of them lets you see what changed when your bil…
THE CONTRACTTerminal rental is where a cheap headline rate quietly becomes expensive. There are hard limits on how long that contr…
THE STATEMENTSince the acquiring market review, providers have to hand you a summary box and run an online quotation tool. Both exi…
Start with what you pay, or jump straight to the calculator with your statement in hand.
Open the calculator