Understand Credit Card Surcharging

Learn how credit card surcharging works in Maxio Payments, including how fees are applied and displayed during checkout. Ensure your setup aligns with compliance obligations before enabling surcharging. To take a surcharged payment for a customer rather than having them pay it themselves, see Collect Payments on Behalf of a Customer with Surcharging.

What is credit card surcharging?

Credit card surcharging is the practice of a merchant adding an extra fee to a customer's transaction when they choose to pay with a credit card, intended to offset the processing costs charged by card networks and payment processors. These fees typically range from about 1% to 4% of the transaction amount and are regulated by a combination of state laws, card network rules (e.g., Visa, Mastercard), and disclosure requirements. Merchants that apply surcharges must notify customers in advance and clearly display the fee at the point of sale and on receipts. Surcharging applies only to credit cards, not debit or prepaid cards.

Maxio Payments includes purpose-built surcharge settings that let merchants configure rates by state and card brand, up to a maximum of 4% per card brand at both the country and state level.

How does it work?

When enabled, surcharging is automatically applied during checkout and payment updates across supported Maxio experiences, including:

• Public sign-up pages
• Invoice pages
• Self-service pages
• Billing Portal invoice page and update payment method page

The system determines whether a surcharge applies based on:

• The payment method (a credit card, or Apple Pay or Google Pay funded by a credit card)
• The buyer's U.S. billing address
• Your configured surcharge settings

If eligible:

• The surcharge is calculated as a percentage of the invoice's balance due
• The surcharge amount is displayed clearly to the buyer during checkout, along with the surcharge disclosure
• The fee is included in the total charged and passed through the payment processor for compliance tracking
• The surcharge fee is displayed on the paid invoice and receipt pages

Surcharging on subscription group invoices

When several Subscriptions are consolidated onto a single invoice through a Subscription Group, surcharging is calculated per member Subscription's segment rather than once for the consolidated invoice as a whole:

• Each segment is surcharged on its own share of the balance due, at the same country, state, and card-brand rate that applies to any other invoice.
• If your site taxes surcharges (see Are taxes applied to the surcharge?), each segment's surcharge tax is calculated against that segment's own Subscription. A member in a different tax jurisdiction, or one that's tax-exempt, can carry a different surcharge tax amount than its groupmates.
• A member Subscription whose product family is exempt from surcharging contributes no surcharge at all; the rest of the group is unaffected. See Exempt Product Families from Surcharging.
• Each segment's own invoice shows its own surcharge row; the consolidated invoice shows the group's combined surcharge total.
• If you record a partial payment against the consolidated invoice, only the settled share of each segment is surcharged.
• If surcharging is turned off for the customer whose card pays the group's invoice, none of the members are surcharged. See Manage Surcharging Preferences per Customer.
• If you refund a member's segment payment in full without a credit note, that segment's surcharge is released and removed from the consolidated invoice's total. The other members' surcharges are not affected. A partial refund does not release the surcharge, and a refund issued with a credit note is offset by the credit note instead.

This applies automatically wherever a Subscription Group is billed: signup, mid-period component allocations, renewals, and product migrations. It applies whether the consolidated invoice is collected automatically or someone pays it by card. Payments you record outside Maxio, such as a check or wire transfer, are not surcharged.

Next steps

Ready to turn on surcharging? See Enable Credit Card Surcharging in Maxio Payments for setup instructions.

Related information

For answers to common surcharging questions, see Credit Card Surcharging FAQ.

For a full list of surcharging setup and reference materials, see Credit Card Surcharging Resources.

To learn how to consolidate several Subscriptions onto one invoice, see Consolidate Subscription Groups.