What Washington businesses really pay to accept cards

Northwest Payment Brokers helps Washington businesses set up and manage card processing. We wrote this report as a neutral reference, using published industry data and Washington law, not our own client numbers. Nothing here is a quote or an offer.

Every card transaction fee is made of three layers stacked together: interchange (paid to the card-issuing bank), assessments (paid to the card network, such as Visa or Mastercard), and markup (kept by your payment processor). Interchange is by far the largest piece.

Interchangeis the fee set by Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express and paid to the bank that issued the customer's card. It is not negotiable by your processor. It varies by card type, by whether the card was physically present, and by your business's merchant category code. Industry data for 2026 puts average interchange around 2.2% to 2.3% for credit cards and roughly 1.2% to 1.8% for debit cards. Interchange alone typically makes up around 70% of the total fee a business pays.

Assessments are smaller fees the card networks charge on top of interchange, usually a fraction of a percent of the transaction, to fund network operations, fraud tools, and brand costs. Assessments are also non-negotiable and are the same for every processor. They generally account for around 10% of the total fee.

Processor markup is the only layer a business can actually negotiate. This is what your payment processor or independent sales organization adds on top of interchange and assessments to cover its own service, support, equipment, and profit. It typically makes up the remaining 20% or so of the total cost. This is where pricing models, contract terms, and shopping around actually matter, because interchange and assessments are the same no matter who processes your payments.

A useful shorthand: interchange and assessments are the wholesale cost of accepting a card, set by the networks and banks. Markup is the retail markup your processor adds. Comparing processors is really comparing markups, not comparing the whole rate. Interchange-plus pricing is the model that shows that markup as its own disclosed line.

Two businesses with the same sales volume can pay noticeably different effective rates because of four factors: how their processor prices the account (flat-rate vs. interchange-plus), what mix of debit, credit, and premium cards their customers use, their average transaction size, and which industry risk category they fall into.

Pricing model.Flat-rate pricing (a single rate for every transaction, common with app-based processors) is simple to understand but usually costs more for an established business, because the flat rate has to cover the processor's risk on every card type, including the expensive ones. Interchange-plus pricing passes through the real interchange cost and adds a fixed, disclosed markup on top. It is more transparent and often cheaper for a business with steady, predictable volume, but it takes more effort to read and compare.

Card mix. A business whose customers pay mostly with basic debit cards will have a lower blended rate than one whose customers pay with rewards or corporate cards, because issuing banks charge more interchange on premium and business cards to fund their rewards programs.

Ticket size. Most card fees have a percentage component plus a small flat fee per transaction (commonly 10 to 30 cents). A business with a low average ticket, like a coffee shop, feels that flat fee much more as a percentage of the sale than a business with a high average ticket, like a contractor or a furniture store. This is also why very low-ticket businesses often see a higher effective rate even with the same pricing plan.

Industry and risk category. Card networks assign merchant category codes that affect which interchange tiers apply. Certain categories (travel, some retail, card-not-present businesses) are priced differently than others, and higher-risk categories can also carry higher processor markup to offset chargeback risk.

Yes. Washington does not have a state law banning credit card surcharges, so surcharging, cash discounting, and dual pricing are all legal here as long as a business follows the card networks' rules and discloses the fee clearly. The one hard federal line is that debit and prepaid cards can never be surcharged, only credit cards.

This is the section worth getting right, because the rules are set by several different authorities at once: federal law, the card networks, and general Washington consumer protection law. Here is how they stack.

Washington has no state statute specifically restricting surcharging. A number of states passed laws banning or capping surcharges over the past decade; Washington is not one of them. That means Washington merchants default to whatever the card networks and federal law allow, without an extra state-level restriction on top. General deceptive-practices rules under the Washington Consumer Protection Act (RCW 19.86) still apply, which in practice means the fee has to be disclosed honestly and cannot be presented in a way that misleads the customer about the final price.

Surcharging (adding a fee for using a credit card) is capped by the card networks, not by Washington law.Visa caps surcharges at 3% of the transaction, and Mastercard caps them at 4%, in each case no higher than the merchant's actual cost of accepting that card. Because almost every business accepts both networks, the lower 3% Visa cap is the practical ceiling for a Washington merchant. A business cannot set the surcharge higher than what it actually pays to accept the card, and it cannot use surcharging to turn a profit on card acceptance.

Debit and prepaid cards cannot be surcharged, anywhere in the country.This comes from federal rules tied to the Durbin Amendment (part of the Dodd-Frank Act) and is reinforced independently by Visa and Mastercard's own network rules. A Washington business that wants to add a fee for card use has to apply it to credit cards only, and its point-of-sale system has to be able to tell the difference at checkout.

Disclosure is mandatory and specific. To surcharge legally, a business generally must: notify its card processor and acquiring bank at least 30 days before starting (a network requirement, not something the business handles alone), post clear signage at the point of entry and at checkout, disclose the surcharge before the customer pays, and show it as its own line item on the receipt, separate from the price of the item. A surcharge added quietly at checkout with no advance notice is the kind of practice that invites a Consumer Protection Act complaint, even though surcharging itself is legal.

Surcharges are subject to Washington sales tax. A surcharge cannot be carved out of the taxable sale amount just because it is itemized separately.

Cash discounting and dual pricing work differently and avoid some of these restrictions.Instead of adding a fee for credit cards, a cash discount program sets a higher posted “credit” price and gives a discount for cash or debit. Dual pricing displays both a cash price and a card price side by side. Handled correctly, these programs are also legal in Washington and are not subject to the same 3% network cap that applies to a true surcharge, though the same disclosure principle applies: customers need to clearly see both prices before they pay. The distinction between a “surcharge” and a “cash discount” is mostly about how the price is presented and documented, and getting it wrong (for example, advertising a cash price that almost nobody actually gets) can itself be a deceptive practice.

What's changing in 2026.In June 2026 a federal judge granted preliminary approval to a roughly $38 billion Visa and Mastercard settlement over swipe fees. Its headline terms lower average credit interchange by about 0.1% over five years, cap fee increases for about eight years, end the “honor all cards” rule, and expand merchants' ability to surcharge. It does not erase processing costs, but it modestly widens the room a business has to steer customers toward lower-cost payment methods.

Practical bottom line for a Washington business owner: surcharging and cash discounting are real, legal options here in 2026, but the compliance details (the 30-day network notice, the 3% cap, debit exclusion, receipt formatting, and honest signage) are what separate a program that holds up from one that draws a complaint or a card network penalty. Our guides to credit card surcharging, dual pricing, and the Washington surcharge rules go deeper on each.

A merchant statement can look like a wall of numbers, but almost every processor's statement breaks down into the same handful of sections: sales volume, interchange passthrough, assessments, processor fees, and any extra charges. Reading it means matching each line to one of those five buckets.

Below is a generic, scrubbed example of the kind of line items a Washington business typically sees. These are illustrative categories, not real figures from any specific business or processor.

A useful exercise is to add up every percentage-based line, divide by gross sales volume, and compare that to the advertised rate the business was originally quoted. The gap between the quoted rate and the real effective rate is usually where junk fees live. Our guide to reading a merchant statement walks through it line by line.

The junk fees that inflate a merchant account the most are usually not hidden on the rate itself, they are added as extra line items or built into a pricing structure that is hard to compare. The most common ones to check for are PCI non-compliance fees, unnecessary monthly and statement fees, batch fees, and tiered pricing that quietly reclassifies transactions into a more expensive tier.

None of these fees are illegal on their own. The issue is when they are not disclosed clearly, or when they are combined in a way that makes a processing account much more expensive than the headline rate suggested at signup. Reading the full statement, not just the quoted rate, is the best protection against all of them. If you would rather have someone do it for you, a free rate analysis turns one recent statement into a plain-English review. Our guide to lowering your processing fees covers the levers in order of how much they matter.

This report uses publicly available industry data on card processing costs and current Washington and federal law on surcharging. No figures here represent a specific NWPB client's actual rate. Effective-rate and interchange figures are industry averages from payment-industry publishers and should be treated as general ranges, not guarantees for any individual business.

This report was written by the NWPB team as an independent, educational reference. It does not represent an offer, a quote, or the specific rates of any NWPB client, and it is not legal or tax advice. Card network rules and interchange rates change periodically; confirm current terms with your processor or acquiring bank, and consult an attorney before implementing a surcharge or dual-pricing program.