HACKER Q&A
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Are card payment fees so high outside the US?


I was surprised to learn that US merchants pay a baseline of 2.8% interchange + markup on debit card transactions, where the merchant accepts all risk if there's a chargeback.

Is this the case in other countries? My friend is Danish and he says most use MobilePay—which seems to charge per transaction rather than as a % of value (it's hard to tell).

  👤 Someone Accepted Answer ✓
The fee certainly is lower in the EU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee#European_Union:

“In March 2015, the European Parliament voted to cap interchange fees to 0.3% for credit cards and to 0.2% for debit cards, which was subsequently enacted under Regulation (EU) 2015/751 with effect from 8 June 2015. The caps apply only to personal cards where there is an intermediary, not to cards issued to businesses or to cards issued by American Express.”