What card payments really cost a UK or Spanish venue

Interchange is capped for consumer cards in both the UK and Spain, but your bill is interchange plus scheme fees plus your provider's margin. Here is how the pieces fit, where the caps stop, and what to ask for when you compare quotes.

By Carlos Butler

Co-founder, engineering

Monday, 17 August 2026 6 min read

Illustration of a card terminal on a counter beside stacks of coins, with a wedge cut out of one coin

Most venue owners I talk to can tell me their headline card rate. Far fewer can tell me what it is made of. That matters, because the pieces are set by different people, capped by different rules, and only one of them is really negotiable. This post walks through what is regulated, what is not, and how the UK and Spain differ. It is about running a venue, not about any one provider.

The three layers of a card fee

Every card payment you accept carries three costs.

Interchange goes from your provider (the acquirer) to the bank that issued the customer’s card. Scheme and processing fees go to Visa or Mastercard. The acquirer’s margin is what your provider adds on top.

Spain’s Banco de España describes the same split in its rules on fee reporting. Its circular defines the merchant discount rate (the tasa de descuento) as the interchange fee, plus the processing and payment-system charge, plus the acquirer’s margin (Circular 1/2015, BOE). The UK is the same in substance, even if the paperwork differs.

What the caps actually say

In both countries, interchange on consumer cards is capped at 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit. The UK Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) summarises it plainly: before Brexit, UK and EEA transactions were capped at 0.2% for consumer debit and 0.3% for consumer credit, and UK domestic consumer transactions remain capped at those levels under the UK’s version of the rules (PSR, December 2024 final report). The UK credit-card cap is written into law as “a per transaction interchange fee of more than 0.3% of the value of the transaction” (The Interchange Fee (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019).

Spain goes a little further. The Banco de España states that its national limits are 0.2% for debit cards (with a maximum of 7 cents) and 0.3% for credit, and for payments of up to 20 euros the maximums drop to 0.1% and 0.2% (Banco de España). For a bar that sells a lot of coffees and small rounds, that lower band matters.

Two caveats apply to both countries. The caps are for consumer cards, and the Banco de España notes they do not apply to corporate cards. And the Spanish national rule applies where both the payer’s provider and the merchant’s provider are established in Spain.

Where the caps stop: tourists and online payments

This is where hospitality gets caught out, because venues in tourist areas see a lot of cards issued abroad.

After Brexit, the EU cap stopped applying to UK-EEA cross-border payments. The PSR found that Mastercard and Visa then raised interchange on card-not-present payments (online, phone) between the UK and the EEA fivefold, from 0.2% and 0.3% to 1.15% and 1.5% for debit and credit. For EEA cards used online at UK merchants, that is uncapped (PSR, December 2024). The PSR estimated the increases cost UK businesses roughly 150 to 200 million pounds a year. It concluded a price cap was needed, but in October 2025 it decided not to proceed with an interim cap, because Mastercard, Visa and Revolut were seeking judicial review, and said it would act only once it had a robust methodology for setting the level (PSR statement of reasons). So if you take online deposits or takeaway orders from European customers, that is a real line on your statement.

For Spanish venues, the mirror image: Spanish cards used in Spain are capped, and so are cards from elsewhere in the EEA, according to Mastercard’s own Spanish page, which says the regulation limits interchange on domestic and cross-border EEA consumer transactions, while the UK version limits only UK domestic ones (Mastercard Spain). By that reading, a British tourist paying in a Spanish restaurant is no longer covered by the EEA cap. Ask your provider how they price non-EEA and UK cards, because I could not find a single published number to quote you.

Scheme fees: the bit nobody can negotiate

The scheme and processing layer has been rising, and the PSR has been looking at it. Its review of Visa and Mastercard fees estimated that UK businesses pay at least 170 million pounds more each year than they did seven years earlier (PSR final report). The regulator’s page shows it has issued final directions on pricing transparency and governance, and is consulting on a third remedy (PSR market review page). That is progress on transparency. It does not yet mean lower fees, so I would not budget as though it does.

Blended or interchange plus

Providers quote in two broad ways. Blended means one headline rate for everything. Interchange plus (IC+) means interchange passes through at cost and the provider adds a stated margin. The PSR’s remedies treat both as normal and even mention IC++ (where scheme fees also pass through) (PSR PS22/2).

Neither is automatically cheaper. Blended is simple and can be good value if your mix is mostly capped consumer cards and the rate is low. IC+ is more transparent and tends to win when you have a lot of small payments, because the capped rate passes straight through. If a quote only gives you a single percentage, ask what is inside it.

What to ask for

A written breakdown of interchange, scheme fees and margin, for UK and non-UK cards separately.
The terminal contract length. In the UK, the PSR now requires the fourteen directed providers to limit terminal lease and rental contracts to 18 months, rolling monthly after that, for merchants with up to 10 million pounds of card turnover (PSR PS22/2).
The summary box. Those providers must send each merchant one, and an online quotation tool, so you can compare like with like.
In Spain, the published averages. The Banco de España publishes quarterly interchange and discount rates by provider and by merchant activity, so you can see what the market is charging before you negotiate.

What ORDR does about this

Not much, and I would rather be straight about that: fees are set by your payment provider, not by your till. What a till can do is show the tip on the payment screen and give you sales reporting that makes your card share visible, so you know how much of your turnover those fees apply to. The rest is between you and your provider’s quote.