In this article, we'll cover:

  • What the Visa and Mastercard settlement actually permits on surcharging, and what is still not in force
  • The real math on a $795 registration, including the registrations you lose
  • Why paid conference and association registration is the worst possible place to try a surcharge
  • The state laws and network rules that turn a good idea into a compliance problem
  • What to do instead when your CFO asks you to recover processing costs

Your finance team read about the swipe fee settlement and came to you with a question that sounds reasonable: can we just pass the card fees to registrants? The answer is that you probably can, in most states, under most circumstances, starting at some point in the future. And you still should not.

A credit card surcharge on event registration is one of those decisions that looks like found money on a spreadsheet and behaves like a yield problem in production. The settlement did expand what merchants are allowed to do. It did not change the thing that makes surcharging expensive for paid events, which is that a high-ticket registration checkout is the single worst place in commerce to surprise someone with a fee. If you're already thinking carefully about how you build payment forms, this is the next decision in that same chain.

What the swipe fee settlement actually allows

The Visa and Mastercard interchange settlement is the third attempt to resolve litigation that started in 2005, after courts rejected deals in 2016 and 2024. Judge Brian Cogan granted preliminary approval on June 9, 2026, calling the terms fair, reasonable and adequate.

Here is what the deal contains for merchants:

  • Surcharging rights on credit cards. Merchants can surcharge up to the lesser of 3% or their Visa credit cost of acceptance. Credit only. Not debit.
  • The end of "honor all cards." Within 90 days of final approval, merchants can decline entire card categories, including premium rewards and commercial credit products, with 30 days' notice to their processor.
  • An interchange cap. Standard consumer credit interchange capped at 125 basis points for five years. That works out to roughly $1,000 in savings per $1 million in card volume.

Now the part that matters most for planning purposes. None of it is in force yet. These provisions take effect on the Settlement Approval Date, which follows final court approval, and final approval has not happened. As of late September 2026, nearly 1,000 merchants and trade associations had filed objections, including small shops, grocers, restaurants and fuel retailers from every state. The Merchant Payments Coalition's argument is that a one-tenth-of-a-point reduction for five years merely restores rates to 2023 levels. Consumer and small business groups including Consumer Reports and Small Business Majority filed their own objections in September, and the National Association of Convenience Stores has said it will appeal to the Second Circuit if final approval is granted.

Fun fact: the average merchant's effective card rate was around 2.35% in 2024, up from 2.26% in 2023. The settlement's 10 basis point reduction is smaller than a single year of recent increases.

So any vendor or processor selling you surcharging this quarter as a settled matter is selling you rules that a federal judge has not finalized and that at least one major trade group intends to appeal.

The math on a real registration, including the part everyone skips

Take an association conference at $795 per registrant and a program that does 500 paid registrations. That's $397,500 in card volume.

A compliant 3% surcharge recovers $23.85 per registrant, or $11,925 across the program. On a spreadsheet, that's the whole story, and it's a very good-looking story.

Here's the part that never makes it into the spreadsheet. Baymard Institute's aggregate of 50 studies puts average cart abandonment at 70.22%, and among people who abandon for reasons other than idle browsing, the single largest cause is extra costs being too high at 40%. Shipping, tax, fees. A surcharge is definitionally an extra cost revealed at the payment step.

You do not need a large effect for this to go underwater:

  • Lose 1.5% of your registrations to the surcharge, about 7 or 8 people, and you've given up roughly $5,963 in registration revenue to recover $11,925. You're up about $6,000 and you've added a compliance program.
  • Lose 3%, about 15 people, and you've given up $11,925 to recover $11,925. You did all of that work to break even.

And registration revenue is not the only thing those 15 people were worth. They were also sponsor-facing headcount, exhibit hall traffic, session attendance numbers you report to your board, and renewals. A registrant who bails at checkout costs you considerably more than their registration fee.

💡 Pro tip: Before you model a surcharge, model the breakeven attrition. Divide the surcharge revenue by your average registration price. That's the number of registrations you can afford to lose before the whole exercise is free labor. For most paid conferences it lands somewhere between 10 and 20 people, which is well inside the range a new checkout fee can move.

Why paid registration is the worst candidate for surcharging

Retail surcharging works, when it works, because transactions are small, frequent, and the buyer has already decided. Paid event registration has none of those properties.

The transaction is large and singular. A $23.85 line item is invisible on a $12 lunch and very visible on a $795 registration, because it appears as a discrete new number at the exact moment the registrant is confirming a total they had already mentally accepted.

Your registrant is usually expensing it. Corporate attendees need a clean receipt that matches an approved amount. When the total on the invoice does not match the total in the approval, the expense report bounces and someone emails your registration inbox. You have converted a payment decision into an administrative ticket, and you are the one staffing it.

It reopens the approval chain. For corporate and association programs, registration is frequently pre-approved at a specific figure by a manager or a budget owner. Changing the total sends the registrant back to that person. Some of them do not come back.

Your checkout has no competitive alternative, so all the friction lands on your yield. A shopper who dislikes a surcharge at a convenience store walks to a different store, and the store learns nothing. A registrant who dislikes a surcharge on your conference registration form does not go register for a different association's conference. They just do not register. The cost shows up in your numbers with no signal attached, which is why organizations that try this often cannot tell it is happening.

Group and team registrations amplify everything. A five-person team block at $795 each carries a $119 surcharge. That is no longer a rounding error to a departmental budget owner. That is a conversation.

The compliance surface nobody budgets for

Suppose you've run the math and you still want to do it. Surcharging is a regulated activity in two independent directions, and both of them are yours to manage.

State law. This is not uniform and it is not optional:

  • Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts prohibit credit card surcharges outright.
  • California effectively prohibits them. Under SB 478, the listed price has to include every mandatory fee a customer will pay, with tax as the only exception, and disclosing a fee later does not cure it. Violations carry $1,000 per violation.
  • Colorado caps surcharges at 2%. South Dakota caps at 4%. Minnesota at 5%.
  • New York, New Jersey, Nevada and Georgia limit the surcharge to your actual cost of acceptance, and New York additionally requires the total price to be displayed conspicuously.

Registration is sold nationally. Your registrant's state, not your office's state, is frequently what governs. A single national conference form can put you under several of these regimes at once, and "we'll just exclude those states" means building and maintaining geographic logic in your checkout.

Network rules. Visa enforces surcharging with mystery shopping, and fines run from $50,000 to $1,000,000. The disclosure requirements are strict and they are cumulative: the surcharge has to be disclosed at the point of entry, at the point of sale, and on the receipt. In practice that means your registration page, your confirmation email, your invoice, and your refund policy all have to state the same thing in the same way, and they have to stay in agreement every time someone edits one of them.

⚡ Practical Advice: If you cannot name the person on your team who owns surcharge disclosure across the registration page, the confirmation email, the invoice template and the refund flow, you do not have a surcharge program. You have an exposure.

What to do instead

The underlying problem is real. Card acceptance costs money, and on paid registration it is a meaningful line. There are three better responses, and none of them put a fee in front of your registrant.

Price acceptance into the rate. This is the same money with none of the friction. A $795 rate that already absorbs cost of acceptance and an $795 rate plus a $23.85 surcharge are not the same product to a registrant, even though they are nearly the same number. One is a price. The other is a price and an argument. If your margin is thin, raise the rate by what you need and put the increase to work through your event registration pricing structure, where early bird pricing and member rates give registrants a way to pay less by acting earlier rather than by paying differently.

Move corporate and group registrations off cards entirely. This is where the savings are actually large, and it is completely uncontroversial with your audience. Offer ACH or invoicing above a threshold, say group blocks and any registration over a set dollar amount. Corporate finance teams frequently prefer an invoice anyway, because it fits their AP process better than a card. Setting up invoice payments for event registration removes card cost from your highest-value transactions without touching your self-serve checkout.

Negotiate the part of the stack you actually control. You do not control interchange. You control your platform fee. Most organizers have never audited what their registration platform adds on top of processing, and that number is frequently larger than the interchange they're trying to surcharge away. Ask your vendor for the all-in number: platform fee, processing markup, per-registrant charge, and anything charged for refunds or payouts. If they cannot give you one figure, that is your answer.

For reference on what a legible number looks like: Regform charges 1.99% plus $0.99 per paid registrant, which on that $795 registration is $16.81, and Stripe payments to your registration form run on your own Stripe Connect account, so processing is between you and Stripe with no markup in between. Find out more »

✨ Expert Advice: Bring finance a two-column comparison, not an opinion. Column one is the surcharge: revenue recovered, breakeven attrition, states excluded, disclosure owner, fine exposure. Column two is the rate increase plus an ACH option for groups: same revenue, no new compliance surface. The comparison makes the decision for you, and it makes it durable when the question comes back next budget cycle.

The decision checklist to bring your finance team

Run these five questions before anyone builds anything. If you answer no to any of them, stop.

  1. Is the settlement final? Not preliminarily approved. Finally approved, with the appeal window resolved. If not, surcharging today runs on network and state rules independent of the settlement, which is a narrower and more dangerous footing.
  2. What is our breakeven attrition? Surcharge revenue divided by average registration price. Say the number out loud in the meeting.
  3. Which states are our registrants in? If Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts or California show up in your registration history in any volume, your national form has a problem.
  4. Who owns disclosure? One named person, across page, email, invoice and refund policy.
  5. Have we audited our platform fee first? If you haven't, do this before you touch the registrant-facing price. It is the cheaper lever and it is entirely within your control.

Final Takeaway

A credit card surcharge on event registration is legal in most states, will be broader once the settlement is final, and is still the wrong move for paid corporate and association programs. You are asking a registrant to absorb a visible new fee at the exact moment they are confirming a four-figure total they already got approved, in exchange for recovering about 3% that a dozen lost registrations will erase. Price acceptance into your rate, push group and corporate registrations to ACH or invoice where the savings are real, and audit the platform fee you actually control before you touch the one your registrant sees. The organizations that surcharge paid registration this cycle will be quietly removing it by the next one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a credit card surcharge on event registration legal?

In most states, yes, within limits. Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts prohibit credit card surcharges outright, and California's SB 478 requires all mandatory fees to be included in the listed price, which effectively rules it out. Several other states cap the amount or limit it to your actual cost of acceptance. Because registration is sold nationally, your registrant's state is usually what governs, not yours.

How much can I surcharge under the new settlement?

The settlement permits up to the lesser of 3% or your Visa credit cost of acceptance, on credit cards only, not debit. Those provisions take effect on the Settlement Approval Date following final court approval, which had not occurred as of late September 2026. State caps apply on top of that and are sometimes lower, such as Colorado's 2%.

What are typical event registration processing fees?

Expect card processing in the range of 2.3% to 3% plus a fixed per-transaction amount, and then whatever your registration platform adds on top. The platform layer is the part worth auditing, because it varies enormously and it is negotiable. Regform's is 1.99% plus $0.99 per paid registrant with processing running through your own Stripe account.

Can I offer a discount for paying by ACH instead of surcharging cards?

Yes, and it is a materially better position than surcharging, both legally and practically. Cash and ACH discounting is permitted more broadly than credit surcharging, and it frames the choice as a reward rather than a penalty. It works especially well for group blocks and corporate registrations, where the absolute savings are largest and finance teams often prefer an invoice anyway.

Will passing credit card fees to registrants hurt my registration numbers?

Plan on it. Extra costs at checkout are the leading non-browsing cause of cart abandonment, at 40% in Baymard Institute's aggregated research, and a surcharge is exactly that. On a typical paid conference, losing 10 to 20 registrations is enough to erase everything the surcharge recovered, and the lost registrant also costs you sponsor-facing headcount and renewal probability.

Should I wait for final settlement approval before changing anything?

For surcharging, yes. But the other two moves in this article, pricing acceptance into your rate and adding an ACH or invoice option for group and corporate registrations, do not depend on the settlement at all. You can do both now, and they are where most of the savings actually live for paid programs. Start with an audit of your own payment forms and the all-in fee your current platform charges.

This article was written with the help of AI and edited by humans. Graphics were generated with the assistance of AI.