Credit Card Processing Fee Calculator
Calculate the fee on any payment from your rate, or audit a monthly statement: your true effective rate and how it compares with Stripe, Square, and PayPal on the same volume.
Merchants above roughly 3% effective all-in are usually leaving money on the table — interchange-plus pricing or routing across processors typically lands lower.
Frequently asked questions
How do I calculate credit card processing fees?
Multiply the payment amount by your percentage rate and add the fixed per-transaction fee. A $100 payment at 2.9% + 30¢ costs $3.20. Your real cost across a month — total fees ÷ total volume — is your effective rate, and it is the number that matters.
What is a normal effective rate?
Flat-rate processors (Stripe, Square, PayPal) land around 2.9–3.5% all-in for online card volume. Interchange-plus setups with your own merchant account commonly run 2.2–2.7% depending on card mix. Above roughly 3.5% effective, something is usually wrong — surcharges, expensive card mix, or a bad contract.
What is the difference between flat-rate and interchange-plus pricing?
Flat rate charges the same on every card, so cheap debit transactions subsidize expensive rewards cards. Interchange-plus passes through the true network cost plus a fixed markup, so you pay what each card actually costs — usually less overall, at the price of more variable statements.
How can I lower my processing fees?
In order of impact: move B2B volume to ACH or bank debits, get an interchange-plus quote once you pass ~$20k/month, pass Level 2/3 data on B2B card transactions, and at higher volume route payments across multiple processors and your own merchant accounts.