The board · note 09
The numbers, with the documents behind them
Every cap, limit and deadline a shop runs into, and the date we last read each one.
Card acceptance · UK · checked 16 Sep 2026
The short answer
UK card payment rules for a shop fit on one page
Interchange on UK consumer cards is capped at 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit. Terminal lease and
rental contracts at the largest providers can run 18 months at most, then a month at a time. Merchants
with up to £50m of card turnover are owed a summary box and a quotation tool. The rest of this page is
the detail, each line with the document it came from.
What changed in 2026
The rules that moved this year
- 15 Jan 2026The High Court confirms the Payment Systems Regulator can cap interchange on
UK-EEA online card payments, currently 1.15% on debit and 1.5% on credit. No cap level had been
published when we last checked.
- 19 Mar 2026The fixed £100 contactless limit leaves the FCA rules. The largest banks kept
£100 on the day.
- Jul 2026PSR final decision PS26/1 on Visa and Mastercard scheme fees: pricing governance
from November 2026, and from July 2027 providers must be able to understand new or changed scheme
fees six months before they apply.
0.2% and 0.3%
Interchange caps on UK consumer debit and credit cards, where merchant, acquirer and issuer are all in the UK. In force since 9 December 2015.
Outside the caps
Consumer cross-border payments between the UK and the EU or any third country are no longer capped. Commercial cards are outside the consumer caps too.
9 June 2016
Since this date acquirers must tell merchants what it costs to accept each brand and category of card. Ask for it in writing.
18 months
Longest initial minimum term for a POS terminal lease or rental, for merchants with card turnover up to £10m.
31 days
Longest rolling renewal term once that initial term has expired. Exit fees must be cost based and explained before you sign.
Summary box
Providers must give merchants with card turnover up to £50m a summary box with tailored pricing, service levels and your own usage.
Quotation tool
The same providers must run an online quotation tool, so you can price your business without a sales call.
+25% and £170m
Core scheme and processing fees rose at least a quarter in real terms from 2017 to 2023, costing UK business at least £170m a year.
How to use this page
I built the first version of this sheet out of summaries, and a couple of the
numbers on it were wrong. The surcharge rule turned out to be narrower than I had been
telling people, and the money limits under section 75 are measured on the price of the
item rather than on the amount that went through the card machine. I had that second one
backwards for years.
So this version is built from the documents. I printed the relevant pages,
read them with the definitions open beside them, and it took most of two afternoons to get
sentences I would defend in a renewal call. Where I could not find something I have said so on the page
instead of rounding it into a claim.
What still annoys me is the part nobody publishes. Your own deadline for
answering a dispute is set by your acquirer inside the scheme window, and I have not found
a single provider that puts that number on its public pricing page. My guess is that it
varies between 7 and 14 days. It is a guess, and the only way to replace it is to read your
own agreement.
Where each charge sits on the statement
Open last month's statement next to this. Two providers will call the
same charge by different names, so match each line by what it does. The percentage at
the top is rarely the whole story, because underneath it sit fixed charges that a busy
month hides and a quiet month exposes, and the quiet month is the one that tells you
what your card acceptance actually costs. I got this wrong for a long time by comparing
headline rates. The rate is one line out of seven.
Service charge, MSC
Interchange,
scheme fees and the provider's own margin, added up and shown as one percentage.
Under blended pricing nothing tells you where one ends and the next starts.
Authorisation fee
Per transaction, not per pound. A cafe selling four-pound coffees pays
it hundreds of times to reach the turnover a furniture shop reaches in nine sales,
which is why two businesses on identical paperwork can end the month paying very
different money for the privilege of taking cards at all.
Terminal rental
A separate agreement. It survives a change of rate.
Minimum monthly service charge
A top-up to a floor. In January it can be the biggest line on the page,
and no headline rate anywhere in the offer will mention that it exists.
PCI fee, non-compliance fee
The first pays for the compliance programme. The second is a penalty
for an unfiled questionnaire, and it stops the day you file.
Chargeback fee
Win or lose, the fee stands. Ten disputes, ten fees.
Non-UK, cross-border, commercial
Cards
outside the consumer caps. Your regular trade customer paying on a company card
moves that sale into this row without anyone mentioning it.
What to ask before you sign again
None of this is a negotiating trick. Each question rests on a rule your
provider already follows, which is why the answers come back faster in writing than they
ever do on the phone. Send them by email a week before the renewal call. The call then
turns into a short conversation about numbers you have already read, instead of an
argument you are having for the first time while somebody waits on the line.
Split the rate
Ask for it split. Interchange and scheme fees on one side, the margin on the other.
Acquirers have had to disclose the cost of each brand and category of card since
9 June 2016, so nobody is doing you a favour by answering, and a provider who
hesitates over that split is telling you something about the size of it.
Send the summary box
Tailored pricing, service levels, your own usage. Under fifty million pounds of
card turnover it is yours by right, which means the honest answer to the request is a
document arriving in your inbox rather than a conversation about whether you really
need to see one.
Name the end date
Eighteen months is the ceiling. That is the longest initial terminal term a directed
provider may hold a merchant to where annual card turnover sits under ten million pounds,
and it applies to contracts signed after the implementation deadline rather than to every
agreement in existence. Ask when yours ends, then write that
date on the statement you file, because the month it rolls over is the month your
leverage is at its highest and nobody will remind you.
Price the exit
Read this line first. After the initial
term, a rolling term runs no longer than 31 days. An exit fee has to be cost based
and explained before you sign, not quoted at you on the way out.
What should stop you signing
Any one of these is a reason to slow down. Ask for the detail in
writing, and read the answer before the appointment rather than during it. Where two of
them turn up in the same offer, the price you were quoted is usually not the price you
will pay, and the gap between the two shows up in month four when nobody is watching
the statement any more.
- One blended percentage, no breakdown, offered as the whole answer.
- A terminal tied up for longer than eighteen months while your card turnover
sits under ten million.
- A free terminal next to a minimum monthly charge. You are renting it after all, under a
name that appears on neither the quote nor any comparison site, and the rent is collected
in the months when your takings are lowest.
- A rate that starts with the word "from" and never says which cards it covers.
- A delay when you ask for the summary box. Providers who have it send it.
- An exit fee nobody will explain. Notice that runs past 31 days.
Work out the rate you actually pay
A headline rate describes one category of card on a good day. The number
worth knowing comes off your own statement. It takes 10 minutes, a calculator and two
months of paper, and when it is done the next sales call sounds completely different,
because you are the only person in the conversation holding a figure that came from
your own till rather than from a brochure.
Effective rate
Add every card charge for the month, rental and minimums and
authorisation fees included. Divide by that month's card turnover, multiply by a
hundred, and write the result somewhere you will find it next year.
The floor underneath it
UK consumer
debit is capped at 0.2%, consumer credit at 0.3%, and those two figures have not moved
since 9 December 2015, which makes them the only numbers on this page you can safely
write into a spreadsheet and leave there. Scheme fees and margin sit on
top of that, so the cap is a floor and never a price.
Do it twice
Take a busy month and a dead one. Fixed lines barely move.
The gap between what those months produce is your exposure to a floor.
The calculator runs the same arithmetic
with the caps already in place, on figures from your own statement.
What the documents actually say
Every number on this page comes out of the documents listed beside it. I keep the
sentences themselves here, because a quote settles an argument at a renewal call and a
summary does not. Each one was read on 5 September 2026.
Surcharges
A payee "must not charge a
payer any fee in respect of payment by means of" a card-based instrument which "is not
a commercial card". Where a fee is still allowed, it "must not" exceed "the costs borne
by the payee for the use of that specific payment instrument".
Terminal contracts
Initial minimum terms
"should be no greater than 18 months", and after them contracts which do not end must
move to "rolling renewal terms of no greater than 31 calendar days". That applies to
merchants with "an annual card turnover of up to £10 million".
Refusing a card type
A payee who does not
accept everything must say so "in a clear and unequivocal manner", and the notice
"shall be displayed prominently at the entrance of the shop and at the till".
Telling customers what you pay
Scheme
rules "preventing payees from informing payers about interchange fees and merchant
service charges" are prohibited outright.
Disputes, your customer's clock
A customer
keeps the right to redress only by notifying the bank "without undue delay, and in any
event no later than 13 months after the debit date".
Disputes, the scheme clock
Visa states a
"Dispute Response Time limit: 30 calendar days from the Dispute Processing Date".
Mastercard gives the acquirer a second presentment window of "45-calendar days of the
chargeback settlement date" for most transactions. Both windows belong to your acquirer,
so the deadline you are given is shorter than either.
Section 75
The credit card issuer and you
are "jointly and severally liable", and the protection drops out where the claim relates
to an item with "a cash price not exceeding £100 or more than £30,000". The test is the
price of the item, not the amount that went on the card.
One caveat I am not going to bury. The Visa and Mastercard editions above
are the public United States versions, and I have not found separately published UK
editions of either. Treat 30 and 45 days as the shape of the process rather than as your
own deadline, which lives in your acquirer agreement.
Questions we get
Three questions about the rules
- What are the main UK card payment rules for shops in 2026?
- Interchange caps of 0.2% on debit and 0.3% on credit, an 18-month limit on terminal lease and rental terms, summary boxes and quotation tools for merchants up to £50m, and since March 2026 no fixed regulatory contactless limit.
- How often do these rules change?
- Rarely, and usually after a long review. Every figure on this page carries the date we last read the document behind it.
- Is there still a £100 contactless limit?
- Not in the rules since March 2026. Banks may keep one, and the largest kept £100 when the change came in.