Quick-Service and Fast Casual Payments

At this ticket size the fixed fee is the rate

A quick-service operator quoted a percentage is being told half the story. On a $9 ticket, a $0.10 per-item component is worth 1.11 percent on its own, and on a $5 coffee-and-pastry it is 2 percent. That is why Visa's own schedule carries dedicated small-ticket programs, and why the structure of your provider's per-item charges matters more than the headline rate you negotiated. The table below is the set a counter-service restaurant reaches, effective April 18, 2026. Read the debit rows first: an exempt debit card under CPS/Restaurant costs 1.19% + $0.10 while a regulated debit card costs 0.05% + $0.21, which means that on a $5 ticket the regulated card — the one issued by the larger bank, the one people assume is cheaper — costs more in absolute terms. That is not a pricing error. It is what a cap looks like on a small sale.

The $280,000 table most counter operators have never been shown

Visa's US schedule contains a Small Merchant Fee Program with its own set of rows, and the qualifying criterion is published alongside it: maximum gross Visa consumer credit sales of $280,000, based on 12 months of Visa system activity ending September 30, 2024, with the schedule directing readers to the US Interchange Reimbursement Fee Rate Qualification Guide for complete details. The rows include Small Merchant Restaurant 1 & 2 at 2.10% with a $0.04 minimum for all other products and Traditional Rewards, and Small Merchant Product 2 at 1.29% + $0.10 for all other products against 1.51% + $0.10 on the standard Product 2 row. The schedule also notes that a small merchant transaction that disqualifies for the Small Merchant Fee Program will be assessed at the next applicable rate. Why this matters to a single-site quick-service operator: the threshold is measured on Visa consumer credit sales, not total revenue, so a restaurant with a large cash and debit mix can sit well under it at a turnover that sounds too big to qualify. It is a legitimate question to put to your acquirer in writing — which program rows your transactions are being assessed on, and whether the small merchant rows appear on your account.

Delivery apps and your own app are two different problems

Every counter-service operator now runs at least one off-premise channel, and they do not all cost the same. A third-party marketplace order is generally not a card transaction on your merchant account at all — the platform takes the payment and remits you a net amount, so what you are negotiating there is a commission, not an interchange rate, and the card cost is buried inside it. Your own online ordering, by contrast, does run through your merchant account, and it is a card-not-present transaction: Restaurant 1 at 2.20% with a $0.08 minimum for all other products, against Restaurant 2 at 2.10% with a $0.04 minimum for the same card presented at the counter. Visa's card-not-present incentives can reduce that: the published incentive types are minus 0.05 percent, minus 0.10 percent and minus 0.15 percent, with EMV token transactions qualifying for type 1, Digital Commerce Authentication Program transactions for type 2, and DCAP plus EMV token transactions for type 3. Those require CPS qualification and are subject to change. In practice that is a question for whoever built your ordering flow: are the orders tokenised, and is the authentication programme in use? It is the difference between a channel that costs a little more than the counter and one that costs noticeably more.

Speed, and the settings that quietly cost money

Counter service is measured in seconds, and two of the levers that buy those seconds also touch cost. The first is contactless and mobile wallet acceptance, which removes the slowest part of a chip transaction and keeps the sale inside the card-present programs. The second is the tip prompt. Quick-service tipping at the terminal is now normal, and where a tip is captured at authorisation there is no gap between the authorised and the settled amount at all. Where it is adjusted afterwards, Visa's Table 7-10 permits up to a 30 percent difference for US merchants under MCC 5811, 5812 and 5814 effective February 21, 2026 — but the amounts must match exactly following a partial authorisation response. Capturing the tip up front is both faster and simpler. The third setting is the batch. A batch that closes late ages every authorisation in it and pushes transactions down the qualification ladder towards Non-Qualified Consumer Credit at 3.15% + $0.10. In a business running a thousand transactions a day, a mis-set batch time is one of the few configuration errors that can be seen from the monthly statement.

Debit routing matters more here than almost anywhere

Where the average ticket is small and the transaction count is enormous, the per-item cost is the business. Debit is the only part of the mix with a statutory ceiling: 12 CFR 235.3(b) caps the interchange fee on a covered electronic debit transaction at 21 cents plus 5 basis points of the transaction value, and 12 CFR 235.4 permits up to 1 cent more for issuers meeting the fraud-prevention standards. Those caps apply to issuers above the asset threshold, which is why Visa publishes separate exempt and regulated columns. The right to act on is 12 CFR 235.7: subsection (a) requires issuers to enable at least two unaffiliated payment card networks on every debit card, and subsection (b) prohibits an issuer or a payment card network from inhibiting, by contract, requirement, condition, penalty or otherwise, a merchant's ability to direct the routing of an electronic debit transaction over any network that may process it. Whether your terminals prompt for PIN, and which networks are enabled and in what order, is a configuration decision someone made. Ask who, and ask for the current setting in writing.

What to ask for, in order

Ask which Visa program rows your transactions are actually being assessed on, and whether the Small Merchant rows apply to your account. Ask for the per-item, authorisation and batch charges stated in figures rather than as a percentage, because at this ticket size they are the majority of the bill. Ask which debit networks are enabled on your terminals and who chose the routing order. Ask whether your own online ordering is tokenised and whether the authentication programme is live, since the published card-not-present incentives depend on it. Ask when the batch closes and who can change it. And on compliance, remember that PCI DSS applies to every merchant that accepts payment cards regardless of size — the PCI Security Standards Council publishes merchant guidance and the listings of validated PIN transaction security devices, and a restaurant with an online ordering channel sits in a different self-assessment questionnaire category from a purely card-present one.

About the rate tables on this page: Visa is the only card network that publishes a public US merchant interchange schedule, so the rate tables on this site are Visa-only. Mastercard, American Express and Discover do not publish an equivalent US merchant schedule, and their rates are neither shown above nor implied by these figures. Ask your processor for the rates that apply to each network on your account.