Georgia Credit Card Surcharge Law

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This page is general information, not legal advice. It reflects guidance published by the Georgia Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division as of October 2026. We could not find a Georgia statute that sets a fixed percentage cap for general retail credit card surcharges the way Colorado, New York or New Jersey do; the state's own consumer guidance describes a cost-of-acceptance limit instead. Confirm current rules with your processor and your own counsel before you add a card fee. CELER Merchants is an independent merchant services agent, not a law firm or a processor.

What Georgia's rule actually caps

Georgia's consumer protection guidance is direct: a merchant cannot charge a customer a surcharge fee that exceeds the amount the merchant pays to accept the card. That is a cost-of-acceptance cap, not a flat percentage written into a statute. The Attorney General's office notes surcharges typically land around 2-3% of the purchase price in practice, because that is close to what most merchants actually pay in interchange and processing fees, but the legal ceiling is your real cost, whatever that number is. A business that marks up a surcharge above its true processing cost is charging more than Georgia allows, even if the number looks similar to what Colorado or Florida merchants post.

Disclosure: before the sale and on the receipt

Georgia's guidance requires merchants to give notice of the surcharge before the sale and to disclose the exact amount of the surcharge on the customer's receipt. In practice that means signage or a checkout notice the customer sees before they hand over a card, plus a receipt line that states the surcharge separately from the price of the goods or service, the same two-point pattern (before the sale, on the receipt) that other states write directly into their statutes.

Cartes de débit et prépayées

Georgia's own consumer guidance does not spell out a debit card exception, but it does not need to: Visa and Mastercard rules already bar surcharging debit and prepaid cards everywhere in the US, regardless of state law, and those network rules are part of every merchant agreement. Treat debit and prepaid as never-surcharge categories in Georgia the same as in every other state.

Comment s'articulent les règles des réseaux de cartes

Even where Georgia's cost-of-acceptance rule allows a surcharge, your merchant agreement still requires you to follow Visa and Mastercard rules on top of it. Visa's U.S. Merchant Surcharge Q&A requires 30 days' notice to your acquirer before you start, limits the amount to the lower of your merchant discount rate or 3%, and requires disclosure at the point of entry, at the point of sale and on the receipt. Where Georgia's cost-of-acceptance cap and a card network's percentage cap both apply, use whichever number is lower for that transaction.

If something looks wrong

The Georgia Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division takes complaints about surcharge practices that exceed cost of acceptance or skip the required disclosure. If you are a merchant setting up surcharging, keep the paperwork that shows your actual processing cost so you can show your surcharge did not exceed it.