I had assumed the UK surcharge ban was total. Every guide I had read said the same thing, my own lesson on statement lines said it, and I repeated it to shop owners for two years without once opening the statutory instrument. Last week I opened it. The card surcharge rules UK businesses actually live under are narrower than the sentence I had been repeating, and the gap between the two is where a corporate card sits.
This is the corrected version.
The instrument is the Consumer Rights (Payment Surcharges) Regulations 2012, and the part that matters was not in it originally. Regulations 6A and 6B were inserted on 13 January 2018 by Schedule 8, paragraph 12(6) of the Payment Services Regulations 2017. Everything a British shop is told about card fees comes out of those two regulations, and they are 300 words long between them.
Regulation 6A(1) is the ban. It says a payee "must not charge a payer any fee in respect of payment by means of" a card-based payment instrument which "is not a commercial card". The definition of a commercial card is borrowed from Article 2(6) of the interchange regulation, Regulation (EU) 2015/751. So the ban covers consumer debit, consumer credit and consumer prepaid cards, and it stops there.
Then comes 6A(2), which almost nobody quotes. "A payee receiving a payment by means of a payment instrument must not charge the payer, in respect of such payment, a fee which exceeds the costs borne by the payee for the use of that specific payment instrument."
Read the two together and the picture changes. It is not the picture I had in my head. A fee on a consumer card is banned outright. A fee on a commercial card is allowed, and capped at what that card actually costs you. Not the monthly average across every card. The cost of that one instrument on that one sale, which is a number your statement gives you only if the pricing is split, and blended pricing never splits it.
That second sentence undoes most of the advice I have seen. The number it asks for is a number most merchants cannot produce, and I include in that the version of me who was repeating the advice in 2024. Commercial cards sit outside the consumer interchange caps of 0.2 per cent on debit and 0.3 per cent on credit, so their interchange is set by the schemes rather than by regulation. Add scheme fees and your provider's margin and a corporate card can cost you well over 2 per cent. If your pricing is blended, your statement shows one percentage for every card you took, which means you cannot evidence the cost of a single instrument at all. A fee I cannot evidence is a fee I would not charge, and if a trading standards officer asks, the burden of showing the cost is yours. None of this is theoretical for a shop that sells to tradesmen and takes company cards all day, because the difference between a surcharge you can evidence and a surcharge you cannot is the difference between a line on a receipt and a repayment you had not budgeted for.
The border case I had missed
Regulation 6B is 90 words long. It changes who the ban applies to. The heading gives no hint of that. It says regulation 6A applies only if the payment service provider of the payer or of the payee is located in the United Kingdom. Where both providers are in the UK, 6A(1) and 6A(2) both apply. Where only one of them is in the UK, "regulation 6A(2) applies but regulation 6A(1) does not apply".
For a corner shop with a UK terminal and a UK customer this changes nothing at all. For anybody selling online it changes something real. If the card in front of you was issued by a bank outside the UK, the outright ban in 6A(1) is not in play, and what remains is the cost cap in 6A(2). I suspect a fair number of cross-border sellers have been leaving 6A(1) alone out of caution. That is not the worst instinct in the world. It is worth knowing that the caution is theirs and not the law's.
I had missed this since 13 January 2018. It took me most of an afternoon with the amended text, the 6B commencement note and the definitions in Article 2 of the interchange regulation to be sure I was reading it the right way round. The sentence is 46 words long and it turns on one comma.
What happens if you charge it anyway
Regulation 10 runs to 60 words. It is the part with teeth, and the teeth point at you. Where a payee charges a fee in contravention of 6A, the contract provision requiring the fee is "unenforceable", and the contract "is to be treated as providing for the fee to be repaid". So the customer does not need to prove loss or argue about fairness. The money is treated as repayable, and that is the end of it.
Regulation 7 puts the duty to consider complaints on every local weights and measures authority in Great Britain, which in practice means Trading Standards, and on the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment in Northern Ireland. An authority that takes a complaint has to decide whether to apply for an order under regulation 8 and to give reasons for its decision. Since 2024 it may also have regard to enforcement action under Part 3 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which is a route that did not exist when these rules were drafted.
What I did not find in the instrument is a tariff of fines aimed at the trader. The redress mechanism is repayment plus a compliance order, not a penalty schedule. I am not confident enough in the Part 3 route to tell you what a modern enforcement case looks like in practice. I have not found a published surcharge case under the 2024 Act to point at, and there may well be one that I have simply not turned up.
What you are allowed to do instead
A short digression on where these next rules come from. The location of them surprised me. They are not in the surcharge instrument at all, they sit in the interchange regulation, Regulation (EU) 2015/751, retained in UK law after 2020, and they are addressed to the card schemes rather than to you. The effect is the same: they tell Visa and Mastercard what they may not stop you doing. The wording is dry and the effect is not.
Article 10 is the one people know as the honour all cards rule, and it is weaker than its name. Article 10(1) prohibits any scheme rule obliging a payee who accepts a card from one issuer to accept other cards issued under the same scheme. Article 10(2) then carves out consumer cards "of the same brand and of the same category of prepaid card, debit card or credit card". Put those together and you get a practical answer. You cannot refuse Barclays debit while accepting NatWest debit. You can refuse an entire category, so taking Visa debit and declining Visa credit is your call to make. Your machine can be told otherwise.
There is a duty attached to that. Article 10(4) says a payee who decides not to accept all cards must tell consumers "in a clear and unequivocal manner", and that the information "shall be displayed prominently at the entrance of the shop and at the till". For distance selling it goes on the website in good time before the customer enters into the purchase agreement. A sign by the card machine alone does not satisfy that wording, because the article names the entrance as well.
Article 11 is the steering rule. It is the one I would put on a poster in the back office, because it is the only rule in this whole area that hands a small shop something to use rather than something to obey. Article 11(1) prohibits any scheme rule, licensing term or acquirer agreement "preventing payees from steering consumers to the use of any payment instrument preferred by the payee". Article 11(2) prohibits any rule "preventing payees from informing payers about interchange fees and merchant service charges".
So a laminated card by the till that says debit is cheaper for us is protected, and so is telling a customer that his rewards card costs you roughly three times what his debit card costs, because 11(2) removes the scheme rule that used to stop both of those conversations happening at all. I keep thinking about how rarely I see either in a British shop, when the same shopkeepers will happily argue about a 30 pence delivery charge. I find it hard to read Article 11(2) and then walk past a window with a 5 pound card minimum in it and nothing else.
| At the till | Allowed | Where it is written |
|---|---|---|
| A fee for paying by consumer debit, credit or prepaid card | No | Reg 6A(1), Consumer Rights (Payment Surcharges) Regulations 2012 |
| A fee for paying by commercial or corporate card | Yes, capped at your cost for that instrument | Reg 6A(2) |
| A fee where the payer’s bank sits outside the UK | The outright ban does not apply, the cost cap does | Reg 6B(3) |
| Refusing one issuer inside a category you accept | No | Article 10(2), Regulation (EU) 2015/751 |
| Refusing a whole category, for example all credit cards | Yes, with notice | Article 10(1) and 10(4) |
| Steering customers to the card that costs you less | Yes | Article 11(1) |
| Telling a customer what his card costs you | Yes | Article 11(2) |
The minimum spend question I could not close
Half the shops on my high street have a 5 pound minimum on cards. I set out to end this piece by naming the rule that permits it. That did not work. The surcharge regulations do not mention it, because 6A is about a fee charged for using an instrument and a minimum is not a fee. The interchange articles do not mention it either.
What I have not found in the 2015/751 text, or on either scheme's public rules page, is a current quotable rule on minimum transaction values that I would be willing to cite here. My instinct is that the answer sits in individual acquirer agreements rather than in published network rules. That is a guess and I am recording it as one. If you want the real answer for your own shop, it is in your merchant agreement under acceptance rules, and it is two paragraphs long, and it will take you four minutes to find.
Anyway, back to the part that is written down.
The date on this page matters more than usual
When I pulled Article 10, legislation.gov.uk stated it was up to date with all changes known to be in force on or before 5 September 2026, and it listed one change yet to be applied. The regulation is revoked by the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023, Schedule 1, Part 1. Revoked in an Act that has passed, not yet switched on.
That is the sort of line that makes a reference page rot quietly. Nobody sends you a letter about it. The interchange caps, the honour all cards rule and the steering rule are all in the instrument that Schedule 1 lists for revocation, and the plan is that the FCA and the Payment Systems Regulator rebuild those rules in their own handbooks. Until commencement they stand as written. I have not found a commencement date for Schedule 1 anywhere in the 2023 Act, and I would not guess at one.
What I would check on your own till this week
Take last month's statement and find the commercial card line. If your provider does not show one, you are on blended pricing and cannot legally evidence a surcharge on a corporate card, so the question of whether to charge one is already answered.
Now look at what the card machine is set to accept. Most terminals ship with everything switched on. If you have been taking every category out of habit, Article 10(2) says the choice was always yours, and a category you decline is a category whose interchange you stop paying.
Then look at your door and your till point. This one is cheap. If you already refuse a category and the only notice is a handwritten sign by the terminal, Article 10(4) asks for the entrance as well, and that is a five minute job with a printer.
I still do not know what happens to the steering right when Schedule 1 is commenced, and that is the part I find hard to leave alone, because it is the only rule in this whole area that hands a small shop something to use rather than something to comply with.