Accepting cards costs a small business in France more than the rate on the offer. You pay a percentage on every sale, a few fixed costs around it, and your own time. EU law caps one small part of that percentage: the fee your provider passes to the customer's bank, 0.2% of a consumer debit card payment and 0.3% of a consumer credit card payment. Your contract sets everything else.
The number on the offer
Every offer has one number on it. Every month-end statement has another.
When I ran my own e-commerce brand, I learnt that a sale and the money from it arrive on different days, and not for the same amount.
Nine years in payments later, I still see it. Merchants compare the rate because the rate is what they're shown. The cost sits in the lines they aren't shown.
What is inside one card payment
Cards carry most of France's payments: 62.7% of 35.6 billion in 2025, says the Banque de France, cash withdrawals aside.
Take a €100 sale in a café in Toulouse, paid by card. The café is invented. The rules are real.
The fee you pay on it is the merchant service charge. The European Commission splits it into three parts: interchange, scheme fees and the margin of your acquirer, the provider that accepts cards for you.
Interchange. Your provider pays it to the customer's bank, on every payment. It is the only part EU law caps. Regulation (EU) 2015/751 caps the interchange fee at 0.2% of the payment for consumer debit cards and 0.3% for consumer credit cards. The caps cover cards issued in the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, taken by a provider based there.
Business cards are not capped (Article 1(3)). Cards issued outside that area fall outside the law too, but Visa and Mastercard have committed to the European Commission to cap them in shops at 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit, until November 2029. Online, their caps are higher: 1.15% for debit cards and 1.5% for credit cards.
The French scheme shows the gap. Cartes Bancaires publishes what its banks charge each other, in force since 1 January 2021: 0.2% on a debit card, 0.3% on a credit card and 0.9% on a business card. Same €100. Four and a half times the interchange.
Scheme fees. The card network (CB, Visa or Mastercard) takes its own fee for carrying the payment: the scheme fee. No law caps it. After the caps, the Commission found the international schemes' fees crept up a little, while domestic schemes like CB stayed "low and stable". In Germany in 2018, Visa and Mastercard's came to roughly 0.15% to 0.24% of sales.
Many French cards carry CB alongside Visa or Mastercard, and you have a say in which one a payment takes. More in five countries, five payment cultures.
The provider's margin. Everything left over: processing, support, risk, profit. On a single-rate contract, it also covers averaging the cheap cards with the expensive ones.
That last part is where small merchants lose. The Commission pointed to "the inability of many (small) merchants to switch acquirers and their limited bargaining power". It also noted that small merchants may prefer one simple rate, because they lack the capacity to process long, complex fee lists.
Where the fee on a €100 card sale could go
Illustrative: 1.5% is an example rate, not an average.
Total fee at an example rate of 1.5%
€1.50
1.5%
Interchange at the EU consumer debit cap
€0.20
0.2%
Scheme fees, a value inside the EU-sourced range
€0.15
0.15%
The rest: margin and averaging, set by your contract
€1.15
1.15%
€0
€0.75
€1.50
Illustrative. Total: an example rate; no EU or French public source gives a small-merchant average, and the rest varies by contract. Interchange: Article 3 of Regulation (EU) 2015/751. Scheme fees: inside roughly 0.15% to 0.24% (Visa and Mastercard in Germany, 2018, Commission SWD(2020) 118, Figure 9; domestic scheme fees stayed low).
Note. The EU caps what your provider pays the customer's bank. It does not cap what you pay your provider. And you cannot pass the fee on. In France the law bars any extra charge for paying with a given payment instrument, business cards included (Code monétaire et financier, article L112-12). EU law sets the floor: no surcharge on capped consumer cards anywhere (PSD2, Article 62(4)).
Three ways to be charged
Providers price that bundle in one of three ways.
Flat rate. One percentage for every card, often with no fixed fee per payment and sometimes no subscription. It is the easiest bill to read: sales times the rate. The catch is that the same rate applies to a capped debit card and an uncapped business card. The provider cannot know your mix in advance, so it prices in an average.
The UK regulator, in one of the few detailed public studies of small-merchant pricing, put the logic plainly: a provider sets its headline rate at a level that recovers interchange "across the mix of transactions that the merchant accepts". The provider prices in an average mix, so if your customers mostly use French debit cards, your flat rate may be paying for a mix that isn't yours. If many of your customers pay with business or foreign cards, a flat rate can work in your favour.
It suits a new or small business with low volumes and no time to read statements.
Blended. A few rates instead of one: say one for consumer cards and another for business and foreign cards, sometimes with a fixed fee per payment. Blended pricing follows your real costs a little more closely and stays easy to read. A legal detail: in the EU, an itemised bill is the default. A single rate, or a few, is something you agree to in writing (Article 9). Flat rates included.
It suits a business with a steady card mix that wants a short statement.
IC++. IC++ passes the interchange and the scheme fees through at cost, then adds the provider's own fee on a separate line. You see every cost, and your bill moves with every card. The Commission found that merchants with this kind of itemised pricing saw their credit card fees fall faster after the caps, and cited evidence that large merchants gained the most.
It suits bigger merchants with real volume and someone who reads the statement every month.
Whichever you have, the law lets you see it. Article 12 requires your provider to show the merchant service charge and the interchange fee separately for your card payments.
The costs that are not a percentage
Some of the bill arrives whether you sell or not.
The device. You can buy a terminal, rent one, or use your phone with Tap to Pay. Renting spreads the cost. Check how long it runs.
Subscriptions and minimums. Look for a monthly service fee, a separate fee for online payments, and any minimum monthly charge.
Three questions cover most of it. What do I pay in a month with no sales? How long am I committed? What does leaving cost?
Your time is on the bill
Two costs never appear on a fee statement: the days your money spends travelling, and the hours spent making the numbers agree.
Back to the café, with my assumptions. Swap in yours.
- It takes €12,000 a month on cards, about €400 a day, open every day.
- Offer A pays out three days after the sale. Offer B pays out the next day.
- Offer A's payouts land away from its sales reports, so matching takes two hours a week. Offer B's arrive next to the sales they cover: 30 minutes a week.
- Offer A's rate is 0.2 points lower.
- The rate. 0.2 points on €144,000 of card sales a year saves €288 with offer A.
- The delay. Two extra days means about €800 always on its way to you. At roughly what money earns on deposit today (the ECB's deposit rate, 2.50% since 16 September 2026), that is about €20 a year. The interest is small. The real cost is €800 missing on the morning a supplier's invoice is due.
- The hours. Two hours a week is 104 hours a year; 30 minutes is 26. The difference is 78 hours. Eurostat puts the average employer cost of an hour of work in France in 2025 at €44.3. At that price, the extra matching costs about €3,450 a year.
The hours cost about twelve times the rate difference. If your accounting software already imports the payout file, the hours shrink and the rate may win. Either way, put your hours on the comparison.
Reconciliation is where the gap between the sale and the bank account becomes work, and where the payout lands decides how wide it is. More on that in card acceptance is a system, not a device.
One example: acceptance inside the business account
A disclosure first: I work at Qonto. This is one public example, described from qonto.com as of 14 October 2026. Prices change, and pages can differ by country.
On its pricing and in-person pages, Qonto publishes a standard per-transaction rate for EU consumer cards and a higher one, 2.6%, for business and non-EU cards. Its in-person page says "No fixed fees, and no monthly rental fees for terminals (Qonto plan fees apply)". Tap to Pay needs no device to buy ("Free" in its device table), and payouts arrive the next business day. Check the live page for the current EU consumer-card rate.
Against the three models: two published rates, split by card type. The fixed cost sits in the account plan, and the plan fee is part of the price. Run it through the list below like any other offer.
Before you sign or renew
Price five lines:
- Your effective rate last month: total fees divided by total card sales.
- Your card mix: how much comes from business cards and from cards issued outside the EU and EEA.
- Every fixed fee: device, subscriptions, minimum charge, and the cost of leaving.
- The payout calendar: which day you are paid, and for which sales.
- The hours each month spent reconciling, and what an hour of your time is worth.
Add them up over a year. The cheapest rate is rarely the cheapest system.
