The part of your card bill nobody can explain rose 25% in real terms, and the fix just slipped to 2029

If you take cards, a slice of every sale leaves the business before you ever see it, and it comes straight off gross profit rather than out of a budget you review once a year. The regulator has just finished nearly four years of investigating the fastest growing part of that slice, and the honest summary is this: nothing was capped, nothing on your statement changes, and the one piece that would let anyone check a card bill line by line was quietly pushed back to 2029 three weeks after it was announced. The money you can actually get back this month comes from a different set of rules that has been sitting there since 2023.

What you are actually paying when you take a card

Your card cost has three parts, and only one of them belongs to the company that sends you the bill.

Interchange. Goes to the bank that issued your customer's card. On UK domestic consumer cards it is capped, and it has not been the growth story for years.

Scheme and processing fees. Go to Mastercard and Visa for running the network and switching the payment. There is no cap on these. This is the part that has been growing.

Your acquirer's margin. Goes to Worldpay, Barclays, Lloyds, Square, SumUp, Stripe or whoever supplied your terminal.

If you are on one blended rate, all three arrive as a single number and you cannot tell them apart. That is not an accident, and it is the whole subject of this page.

The growing part, in the regulator's own numbers

The Payment Systems Regulator spent from October 2022 to March 2025 taking Mastercard's and Visa's fee data apart. Its final report found three things worth writing down.

• Average core scheme and processing fees, measured as a share of transaction value, rose by at least 25% in real terms between 2017 and 2023. Real terms means after inflation, so that is a genuine increase in what you hand over per pound of sales.
• UK businesses pay at least £170 million a year more in scheme and processing fees than they did seven years earlier.
• The PSR found little evidence that the increases were linked to cost, competition or innovation, and said the schemes' UK margins looked higher than a competitive market would produce.

Note what is not in that list. The PSR did not cap these fees. Its remedies are about information, not price.

What landed on 30 July, and what happened three weeks later

On 30 July 2026 the PSR gave Mastercard and Visa two binding directions under section 54 of the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Act 2013.

Specific Direction 23, pricing governance. Fee decisions now have to be taken through a documented process the regulator can inspect. It came into force on publication, and the schemes had four months to have the machinery in place, so from around the end of November 2026.

Specific Direction 22, information, transparency and complexity. The schemes have to give acquirers enough information to understand each fee, what triggers it, and how it is calculated. Twelve months to comply, so 30 July 2027.

Then, on 21 August 2026, the PSR published a two page decision that got almost no coverage.

Mastercard and Visa had each applied for more time on one piece of it, ITC Standard B. That is the requirement to give acquirers the "fee logic" needed to reconcile the fees on an invoice back to the transactions that caused them. It is the piece that turns a scheme bill from a total into something a human can check.

The PSR granted the extension. For any fee that generated £850,000 or less of UK gross revenue in the previous full financial year, ITC Standard B now arrives on the third anniversary of the direction rather than the first. That is 2029.

The regulator's own description of what falls under that threshold is the part to sit with. Those fees, it says, "represent a small proportion of total gross fee-related revenue, but comprise a much larger number of fees or billing lines".

Read that twice. The small, numerous, awkward lines, the ones nobody can reconcile precisely because there are so many of them, are the ones that got three years instead of one.

One condition came with it, and it is more useful than the delay is damaging. Between year one and year three, if an acquirer asks for that information, the schemes have to hand it over "within a reasonable period", and they cannot charge for it or raise an existing fee to cover it. Nobody will ask on your behalf unless you make it their problem.

Why none of this reaches your statement

There is one sentence in the PSR's decision that should decide how you read everything above.

Merchants on interchange-plus-plus contracts, where every fee is passed straight through at cost with the acquirer's margin added on top, account for 77% of transaction value. Merchants on standard blended contracts account for the other 23% of transactions, and 95% of all merchants.

And from the market review itself: merchants on interchange-plus-plus pricing "are typically the largest merchants, generally with an annual turnover above £50 million".

So the mechanics are these. On interchange-plus-plus, a scheme fee change reaches the merchant automatically and next month, because the contract passes it through. On a blended rate, the acquirer takes the change and decides what, if anything, to do about it. The PSR expects "at least some" of the benefit to reach blended merchants "over time", and points to its earlier finding that around three-quarters of blended merchants saw pass-through when interchange changed.

Three-quarters of them, eventually, of a benefit nobody has put a number on. That is the offer if you are on a blended rate, which almost every cafe, salon and gym in the country is.

Three rules you can use this month, all of them three years old

While the scheme fee story runs to 2029, a completely separate set of PSR directions has been in force since 2023 and applies directly to your acquirer rather than to Visa. Fourteen providers are named in them, and they are the ones you have heard of: Adyen, Barclays, Chase Paymentech, Elavon, EVO, First Data, First Merchant Processing, GPUK, Lloyds, PayPal, Square, Stripe, SumUp and Worldpay.

Your summary box. Under Specific Direction 14, in force since 6 July 2023, your provider must give you a bespoke summary box of your key price and non-price information, in the regulator's prescribed format, at the head of your monthly bill and displayed prominently in your online account. They may not charge you for it. Most owners have never opened it, because it looks like more statement.

Your trigger message. Under Specific Direction 15, same date, your provider must prompt you to shop around. If your contract has a minimum term, the prompt has to land with the invoice closest to 31 days before that term ends, and it must tell you the date the term ends, that you can shop around, and where the provider's online quotation tool is. If your contract has no minimum term, or the term has already run out, the prompt has to come with every monthly invoice. Both directions apply to merchants with annual card turnover up to £50 million, so you are covered.

Your terminal contract. Under Specific Direction 16, in force since 6 January 2023, for merchants with annual card turnover up to £10 million, a point of sale terminal contract can have an initial minimum term of no more than 18 months, and once that initial term is done the contract drops to a rolling one month term with one month's notice on your side. That applies to contracts you signed before the direction as well as after it, and it reaches third party leasing companies through your acquirer. If you believe you are locked into a four year terminal lease, check the date the initial term ended, because you may have been free to walk for years.

Do the sum on your own statement first

None of this is worth anything until you know your real rate, and your headline rate is not it.

Take last month. Add up every card fee line, not just the percentage: the transaction charges, the authorisation fees, the minimum monthly charge, the terminal rental, the PCI compliance fee, the "non-secure" surcharges. Divide by your card takings for the month.

Say the takings were £22,000 and the fees came to £396. Your real all-in rate is 1.8%, whatever the rate on your contract says. Annualise it and cards cost you about £4,750 a year on £264,000 of card sales.

Now move it. Getting that 1.8% down to 1.55%, which is a negotiation rather than a miracle, is £660 a year. It arrives as pure net margin, because there is no extra cost attached to it and nobody works an extra hour for it. Put it the other way round: if ten pence in every pound you take ends up as profit, that £660 is £6,600 of coffee you did not have to sell.

Do it in that order. Rate first, then the quotation tools, then the conversation with your current provider, who would rather cut your rate than lose the account. Our guide on improving profit margins has the wider version of this exercise.

The line a buyer normalises

Card fees are one of the few costs that a buyer will not let you explain away.

Wages get adjusted for the owner's own hours. Rent gets checked against market. Marketing gets argued about. Card fees are a fixed percentage of revenue that transfers with the business exactly as it is, so they sit in the profit figure the buyer multiplies, unchanged, forever.

Which cuts the useful way round. A permanent £660 a year off your card costs is £660 that stays in EBITDA every year, and whatever multiple your trade actually sells on, that is the number it gets multiplied by. It is one of the cheapest pieces of value creation available to an owner-operated business, and it takes an afternoon.

There is a second, quieter version of the same point. An owner who cannot say what their all-in card rate is usually cannot say what their gross margin is either, and a buyer reads that as a business run on gut feel. Getting the books clean enough to answer in one sentence is worth more than the £660.

The calendar

• 6 January 2023. Terminal contract limits in force. Initial term capped at 18 months, then one month rolling, for merchants up to £10 million of card turnover.
• 6 July 2023. Summary boxes, online quotation tools and trigger messages in force, for merchants up to £50 million of card turnover.
• 30 July 2026. Pricing governance direction in force. Transparency direction published, twelve month clock starts.
• Around end November 2026. Schemes must have their pricing governance compliance processes in place.
• 21 August 2026. ITC Standard B extended to 2029 for fees under £850,000 of UK gross revenue, subject to acquirers being able to request the information in the meantime, free.
• 30 July 2027. The transparency direction bites for everything not covered by the extension.
• 30 July 2029. ITC Standard B for the long tail of smaller fees.

Nothing on that list changes a price. Every date on it changes who is allowed to see one.