It is the wrong question, and asking it is how most small businesses end up comparing two quotes on the one number that cannot tell them apart. The effective rate is total fees divided by total card sales, so it moves with your average ticket and your card mix at least as much as it moves with your pricing.
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Take two businesses on identical processor pricing — interchange plus 0.25% plus $0.10 a transaction — running $42,000 of card sales in a month.
| Café | Contractor | |
|---|---|---|
| Average ticket | $10 | $200 |
| Transactions | 4,200 | 210 |
| Per-transaction fees at $0.10 | $420 | $21 |
| Effect on the blended rate | +1.00% | +0.05% |
Nearly a full percentage point of difference, from pricing that is character-for-character the same. Any advice of the form “anything over 2.9% is too high” is, on these two businesses, right once and wrong once by accident.
Interchange is the portion the card-issuing bank keeps. The card networks publish the schedules; they apply identically to every merchant in a category, and no processor sells them to you cheaper.
Assessments are a smaller slice the networks themselves keep — roughly a tenth of a percent plus a couple of cents. Also pass-through, also not negotiable.
Processor markup is everything left over: the percentage and per-transaction fee the processor adds, plus every recurring monthly fee. This is the entire negotiable surface, and on a bundled statement it is the one number nobody prints.
The card processing fee audit does the arithmetic in your browser — nothing is uploaded, which matters here because monthly card volume is effectively your revenue.
There is no single good number, for the reason the table above shows. The comparable figures are the processor’s markup over interchange and the flat monthly fees.
Divide one month’s total fees by that month’s total card sales. $1,300 on $42,000 is 3.10%. Include the flat monthly lines in the fee total — leaving them out is how a rate that looks competitive turns out not to be.
The processor’s markup and the recurring monthly fees. Interchange and assessments are pass-through, collected on behalf of the issuing bank and the network.
Usually, and the gap grows with volume — but not always. Flat-rate charges one number for every card, so a business whose customers mostly pay by debit is subsidising one whose customers mostly pay by rewards card. Price your own statement both ways before switching.
They are processor revenue, and they do not fall when your rate does. At $45 a month they are $540 a year, which is worth pricing as its own line rather than rounding away.