Every time a customer taps a credit card, you pay a percentage of the sale you will never see again. Most Canadian small businesses accept that as a fixed cost of doing business and never look closely. That is a mistake — because the number is bigger than most owners think, and part of it has been quietly negotiable since 2024.
Across Canada, the blended cost to accept a card generally runs between 1.5% and 3.5% of the transaction, with most small merchants sitting around 2% or higher. On $500,000 a year in card sales, the gap between a 1.9% effective rate and a 2.6% one is $3,500 a year — real margin, for the identical transactions.
#What you are actually paying for
A card fee is not one charge; it is three stacked on top of each other.
- Interchange — paid to the bank that issued your customer's card. It is the biggest slice, set by Visa and Mastercard, and it is the same for every processor.
- Assessment / network fees — a smaller cut paid to Visa or Mastercard themselves.
- Processor markup — your processor's margin. This is the only layer that is actually negotiable, and it is where good and bad deals diverge.
Interchange is the same no matter who you process with. The only thing a processor really competes on is their markup — so that is the only number worth negotiating.The one lever you control
#The 2024 change most merchants missed
In October 2024, after years of CFIB advocacy, the federal government and the card networks reduced domestic consumer-credit interchange for eligible small merchants to roughly 0.95%. Eligibility is generous — broadly, up to about $300,000 in annual Visa volume and $175,000 in Mastercard volume — so most genuinely small businesses qualify, and new businesses generally qualify automatically. Visa cut its small-merchant rate again in October 2025, from 0.81% to 0.77%.
#Why "cheap" processors often are not
The most common pricing model — flat-rate, one simple percentage plus a few cents — is popular because it is easy to read. But simple is not the same as cheap. A flat rate has to cover the processor's risk across every card type, so it is usually padded above what you would pay on interchange-plus pricing, where you pay true interchange plus a fixed, visible markup. The flat rate wins on predictability and loses on price, especially once your volume grows.
Then there are the fees that do not show up in the headline rate at all: monthly account fees, PCI-compliance fees, gateway fees, terminal rental, and per-transaction charges that quietly stack up.
#How to actually pay less
You cannot tell whether you are overpaying from an advertised rate — only from a real statement.
Pull one recent statement and work out three numbers: your effective rate (total fees divided by total card sales), your markup over interchange, and any fixed monthly fees that do not scale with sales. That is usually enough to see whether you are getting the small-merchant interchange you are entitled to and whether the markup is competitive.
This is the work we do in a processing-fee audit. As a Paystone partner, Telebridge helps Alberta and B.C. businesses read their current statement, confirm they are getting the reduced interchange they qualify for, and compare it against interchange-plus pricing — with no obligation to switch. Often the finding is simple: you are eligible for a rate you are not being charged.
