The Till School
The terminal · Cheat sheet
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Eight numbers to keep by the till.

Print this, or keep the tab open during the renewal call. Every line is a rule that already exists, with the document it comes from.

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.
PSR, the IFR · checked 2 Sep 2026
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.
PSR, the IFR · checked 2 Sep 2026
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.
PSR, the IFR · checked 2 Sep 2026
18 months
Longest initial minimum term for a POS terminal lease or rental, for merchants with card turnover up to £10m.
PSR, PS22/2 · checked 2 Sep 2026
31 days
Longest rolling renewal term once that initial term has expired. Exit fees must be cost based and explained before you sign.
PSR, PS22/2 · checked 2 Sep 2026
Summary box
Providers must give merchants with card turnover up to £50m a summary box with tailored pricing, service levels and your own usage.
PSR, PS22/2 · checked 2 Sep 2026
Quotation tool
The same providers must run an online quotation tool, so you can price your business without a sales call.
PSR, PS22/2 · checked 2 Sep 2026
+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.
PSR, MR22/1.10 · checked 2 Sep 2026

Bring the cheat sheet and your own numbers to the same table.

Open the calculator

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.
PSR, the IFR · checked 4 Sep 2026

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.
PSR, the IFR · checked 4 Sep 2026
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.
PSR, PS22/2 · checked 4 Sep 2026
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.
PSR, PS22/2 · checked 4 Sep 2026
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.
PSR, PS22/2 · checked 4 Sep 2026

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.

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.
PSR, the IFR · checked 4 Sep 2026
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".
Consumer Rights (Payment Surcharges) Regulations 2012, regulations 6A(1) and 6A(2)
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".
PSR, PS22/2, paragraph 2.60
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".
Regulation (EU) 2015/751, Article 10(4)
Telling customers what you pay
Scheme rules "preventing payees from informing payers about interchange fees and merchant service charges" are prohibited outright.
Regulation (EU) 2015/751, Article 11(2)
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".
Payment Services Regulations 2017, regulation 74(1)
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.
Visa Core Rules, 18 April 2026 · Mastercard Chargeback Guide, 26 April 2022
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.
Consumer Credit Act 1974, section 75(1) and 75(3)(b)

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.