Card payments and what they cost you

The homeowner is standing in the driveway with a card in her hand, and the job came to $8,500. Take the card and roughly $255 of that is gone before it reaches your account. Ask for a check and you are waiting on the mail, or on her getting to the bank, or on a reminder in three weeks.

It is worth knowing what that $255 actually is before deciding which payments to accept.

Your rate changes by payment channel

Flat-rate processors quote a headline number, but they charge differently depending on how the card reached you. Read the current schedule for the account you actually use; published rates and add-on fees change.

Every processor prices those channels differently. The usual pattern is that card-not-present payments cost more, reflecting a different fraud-risk profile.

The alternative model is interchange-plus. Interchange is what the card networks charge, and it varies by card. On interchange-plus you pay that cost plus a disclosed markup; on flat rate you pay the same headline rate either way. Ask whether interchange-plus fits your mix once card volume is meaningful, and compare your own statements instead of assuming which card type is cheapest.

Your effective rate is a division problem

The number that matters is not on the rate card. It is total fees divided by total card volume, from your own statement. A plausible month for a two-truck shop:

$558 ÷ $18,400 = 3.03%. The headline rate was 2.6%.

The gap is where the money hides. Fees that do not scale with volume — gateway, PCI, monthly minimums, terminal hardware or its lease — hurt most in a slow month. Run this division twice a year; a processor that reprices you shows up here.

What the 3 percent is buying

Cards can be worth the fee when they turn a payment into cleared money before it becomes a collection problem. Compare the fee with your own time, risk, and payment history rather than with a universal rule of thumb.

Cards also move the moment of payment. Money lands while the customer is standing in front of finished work and feeling good about it, not weeks later when the invoice has become an abstraction and she has noticed a scuff on the baseboard. For a residential service call, that timing is worth more than the percentage.

Where the argument flips is size. The fee is a percentage and the risk is not, so on a $45,000 job you are paying over a thousand dollars to remove a risk a deposit and progress billing would have handled.

Passing the fee on is a state-by-state question

Whether you can add a credit-card surcharge depends on current network, processor, and state rules.

Card-network and acquirer rules set conditions on a surcharge, including required notices and disclosures. Do not surcharge debit or prepaid cards, even when the customer selects "credit." Confirm the current rules with your processor before setting one up.

State law then sits on top. A small number of states and territories restrict or prohibit credit card surcharging outright; others regulate how the price must be displayed, or cap the amount below the network ceiling. Several of those statutes have been through litigation, so the live answer in your state can differ from what a processor's sales rep told you last year. Check with your state attorney general or consumer protection agency, or ask your own attorney, before you add a fee line. Do not take a national payment vendor's word for your state.

A cash discount means posting a price and reducing it for cash or check. Do not relabel a percentage added at checkout as a "discount"; ask your processor and a local adviser how your intended pricing is treated. A convenience fee is a separate, narrower arrangement that needs the same care.

Absorb it, price it in, or steer it

Three defensible approaches, and most shops use more than one:

Absorb it on small work. Under a couple of thousand dollars, the fee is smaller than one reminder cycle. Take the card, take the money, move on.

Price it in on residential. If cards are half your revenue at an effective 3%, that is about 1.5% of total revenue. Add 2% to your price list and the fee disappears into a number nobody questions, instead of a checkout line item that makes a good customer feel nickeled. Usually the cleanest answer for repeat homeowner work.

Steer the big jobs. Card for the deposit, check or ACH for progress payments and the balance — written into the estimate so it is a term, not a refusal at the door. Commercial customers mostly pay by ACH or check anyway, and asking costs nothing.

Keeping the adjustment where you can see it

If you price the fee in, the increase has to reach every job, not the ones you happen to remember. In DoneQuote your services and prices live in one catalog, so a 2% adjustment is one edit and the new number is the one that goes out — on an estimate, an invoice, or whatever document that customer actually sees. The alternative is carrying the markup in your head, where it survives about a week.

Your effective rate is total fees divided by card volume. If you plan to pass a cost to customers, confirm the current rule in your state and with your processor before you publish it.