Corporate cards and foreign cards at the terminal: why these payments cost more

The short answer

Corporate cards and cards from outside the EEA cost you more as a merchant because the EU cap on the interchange fee does not apply to them: Article 1(3) of Regulation (EU) 2015/751 expressly exempts commercial card transactions and three-party systems from Chapter II, and in any case the Regulation only covers transactions where both payment service providers are based in the Union. In published price lists that makes the difference at the terminal between 1.4 and 2.9 per cent — and it hits precisely the payments with the highest amounts.

What the EU capped — and what it did not

What is capped is the interchange fee, that is the part of the merchant service charge which goes to the issuing bank: Article 3(1) sets “no more than 0.2 % of the value of the transaction” for consumer debit cards, Article 4 “no more than 0.3 %” for consumer credit cards (EUR-Lex, full text, retrieved on 15 September 2026).

Article 1(3) exempts three cases from this, verbatim: “Chapter II shall not apply to (a) commercial card transactions, (b) cash withdrawals at automated teller machines or at the counter of a payment service provider, and (c) transactions with payment cards issued by three-party payment card schemes.” On top of that comes Article 1(1): the Regulation applies only where both payment service providers involved are established in the Union. A card issued in the USA, Japan or Switzerland falls outside it.

Two misunderstandings I regularly clear up in this context. First: the cap applies to the interchange fee, not to your merchant service charge — anyone paying 1.39 per cent is not paying “more than allowed”, but interchange plus scheme fee plus margin. Second, the corporate card is defined more narrowly than many think: Article 2(6) requires issuance to an undertaking, a limitation to business expenses and debiting directly from the company account. The private card a field salesperson uses to pay for lunch and claims back later as expenses is not a corporate card.

Economically the surcharge is no accident: miles, cashback and expense reporting are paid out by the card issuer to its customer and refinanced through the higher interchange fee — paid by the merchant, not by the cardholder. With non-EEA cards, cross-border scheme fees and possibly a currency conversion come on top.

What the difference costs in published price lists

Provider (public pricing page, as at 15 September 2026)	EEA consumer card	Corporate or non-EEA card
Stripe Terminal (card present)	1.4 % + €0.10	2.9 % + €0.10
Stripe online	1.5 % + €0.25 (premium 2.8 %)	3.15 % + €0.25 (+ 2 % on currency conversion)
Bezahlexperten (surcharge model)	base rate per quotation	+ 1.59 % commercial cards, + 1.49 % international cards
SumUp (flat rate)	1.39 %	1.39 % — no difference
American Express	1.5 % service fee for small merchants	1.5 %, “uniform for all card types”

Amex advertises the uniform rate but, per its footnote, limits it to 100,000 euros of card turnover in twelve months (hotels: 50,000) and excludes several sectors. And anyone paying a flat rate pays the corporate card surcharge all the same — just priced in and spread across all payments.

Worked example: the same turnover, three card mixes

Model calculation with freely chosen assumptions; the percentages are orders of magnitude from the price lists linked above and are not a commitment on terms: a restaurant with 1,200 card payments a month at 45 euros each, that is 54,000 euros of card turnover, calculated at 0.30 % girocard, 1.40 % EEA consumer credit card, 2.90 % corporate and non-EEA card plus 0.08 euros per transaction.

Card mix (girocard / EEA credit / corporate + non-EEA)	Cost per month	Effective rate
Country inn — 75 / 24 / 1	€414.60	0.77 %
City restaurant — 50 / 40 / 10	€636.00	1.18 %
City centre, trade fairs, lots of business travel — 30 / 40 / 30	€916.80	1.70 %
Flat tariff of 1.39 % on everything	€750.60	1.39 %

The result is uncomfortable for both camps: with itemised terms the country inn pays around 4,030 euros a year less than on the flat rate, while the city-centre restaurant on the same terms pays around 1,990 euros more. At a 50 per cent girocard share, the tipping point in this model is at about 24 per cent corporate and foreign cards. Anyone who does not know their card mix cannot know which model is cheaper for them — and that is exactly why flat rates sell so well.

Why it hits the large bills

The two cost types work in opposite directions — the fixed per-transaction fee hurts on small tickets, the percentage surcharge on large ones:

Ticket size	€0.08 per-transaction fee corresponds to	1.5 points of surcharge correspond to
€8	1.00 %	€0.12
€45	0.18 %	€0.68
€120	0.07 %	€1.80
€1,480	0.01 %	€22.20

A garage bill of 1,480 euros costs 20.72 euros in fees on an EEA consumer credit card at 1.4 per cent, and 42.92 euros on the fleet operator's corporate card at 2.9 per cent. Difference: 22.20 euros on one bill, and with twenty such bills a month 5,328 euros a year. The baker with the three-euro ticket is arguing about cents — garages, hotels and B2B wholesalers structurally see the expensive card type at the terminal more often than average, because that is where the business customers are.

Your rights: itemisation, refusal, surcharge

Itemisation. Article 9(1) obliges every acquirer to offer and invoice “merchant service charges individually specified for different categories and different brands of payment cards with different interchange fee levels” — “unless payees request the acquirer, in writing, to offer blended merchant service charges”. Itemisation is the statutory default, the flat rate is the exception you opted into. In many standard contracts that box has long been ticked — look and see where.

Identifiability. Under Article 10(5), issuers must make their cards electronically identifiable, and newly issued cards visibly identifiable too, so that merchants and payers can identify which “brand and category of prepaid, debit, credit or commercial card” has been chosen. You may demand to find that again in your statement.

Refusal. Article 10(1) prohibits rules forcing you to accept all cards of the same scheme; under paragraph 2 you remain bound only within the same brand and the same category of consumer card. Anyone excluding corporate cards must display that “clearly at the entrance to the premises and at the till” under paragraph 4 — and technically it only works if the terminal and the processor identify the card category before authorisation.

Surcharge. Section 270a sentence 1 BGB declares charges for the use of payment cards ineffective, but sentence 2 limits this verbatim to “payment transactions with consumers where Chapter II of Regulation (EU) 2015/751 … is applicable” — with a corporate card in business dealings, neither is the case. That is the legal position, not a recommendation: whether your acceptance agreement prohibits such a surcharge anyway is in your contract.

What I advise merchants

1. Measure the card mix before you talk about percentages. Pull three monthly statements, count turnover and volume per card type. Without that figure, every tariff comparison is guesswork.
2. Put the ticket size alongside it. Below an average ticket of around 15 euros the per-transaction fee decides, above 100 euros the percentage on the expensive card types.
3. Demand itemised terms under Article 9 — and check the contract to see whether you agreed to blending.
4. Calculate both models on your real mix, with the same turnover figures. That is half an hour of spreadsheet work.
5. Check advertised entry rates against their footnotes, above all turnover limits and sector exclusions.
6. Before refusing a card category, establish whether your terminal identifies it in advance — and plan for the display obligation under Article 10(4).
7. Introduce no surcharge without having checked your contract and your customer structure.