September 1, 2026
It is the first question almost everyone asks, and the honest answer is that the rate on its own does not tell you much. What matters is the total cost of accepting a dollar, and two businesses with identical rates can pay very different amounts.
What you pay depends on things specific to you: what you sell, your average ticket size, whether cards are present or keyed, how much volume you run, what kind of cards your customers carry, and your industry's risk profile. A quiet service business taking large keyed payments and a busy shop taking small tapped ones are not comparable.
So when someone quotes a headline rate before seeing a statement, they are quoting the best case for somebody, not a price for you.
Your effective rate is every fee on the statement divided by everything you ran. It rolls the rate, the monthly fees, the per-transaction charges and everything else into one percentage.
It is the only figure that lets you put two offers side by side, because it cannot be gamed by moving costs from one line to another.
Flat rate means one advertised percentage for most transactions. It is simple and predictable, and the simplicity is paid for in the margin built into it.
Tiered pricing sorts transactions into buckets, often labelled qualified, mid qualified and non qualified. The trouble is that who decides which bucket a transaction lands in, and on what basis, is not always visible to you.
Interchange plus separates the cost the card networks charge, which nobody can change, from the provider's markup, which is the part that is actually negotiable. It produces a longer statement and a clearer one.
Which model suits you depends on volume and on how much complexity you want to deal with. Simple is worth something. So is being able to see what you are paying for.
What is the total monthly cost at my actual volume, not the rate. Is there a monthly minimum. What is the term, and what does it cost to leave early. Is the equipment purchased or leased, and if leased, for how long and at what total. What happens to my rate at the end of the first year. Who do I call when something breaks, and are they in this country.
A provider who answers all of those plainly is telling you something useful about how they will behave later.
We are not going to promise you a number in an article. What we will do is read your current statement with you, tell you what you are actually paying, and be straight about whether it is worth moving. Sometimes it is not, and that is a perfectly good outcome to hear.
It is the portion of the fee that goes to the bank that issued your customer's card. It is set by the card networks, it is the same for every provider, and nobody can discount it. Any real difference between providers sits in the markup on top of it.
Not automatically, but it is the most transparent, because it separates the fixed cost from the provider's margin. Whether it beats a flat rate for you depends on your volume and your card mix.
Read the total cost of the lease over its full term before deciding, and check whether it can be cancelled. Equipment leases are frequently separate agreements from the processing agreement and often outlast them.
Bring last month's statement. We will go through it line by line and tell you what it is actually costing you, in plain language. No cost to ask, and no obligation.
Starting Business Solutions