4.5%: The Number That Doesn't Add Up in HB 2971

Give us this much: House Bill 2971 is a more careful piece of work than its predecessor. Where last year's effort blessed surcharges with no ceiling at all, this one keeps a cost tether, defines "actual processing costs" with real rigor, and — credit where due — bars sellers from folding "general overhead, personnel costs... or revenue enhancing markups" into the fee they pass to you. It even hands the Attorney General and the State Auditor the power to demand the receipts. On paper, that's a consumer-protection skeleton.

Then you reach the number, and the skeleton develops a limp. HB 2971 raises the maximum surcharge a seller may levy on your credit card from two percent to four and one-half percent of the entire transaction. The old 2% figure sat roughly where the real world sits: a typical in-person card-acceptance cost runs around 2.6% per transaction. The new 4.5% ceiling floats far above it — above, in fact, the limits the card networks impose on themselves. Visa caps surcharges at 3%, Mastercard at 4%, and neither may exceed a merchant's actual cost of acceptance. Oklahoma's bill would authorize a posted surcharge higher than either.

Defenders will point to the safety valve: the bill says the charge must be the lesser of 4.5% or actual cost, so surely nobody pays the higher number. But ceilings have gravity. The "actual cost" half of that test is the hard one to police — it varies by card, by terminal, by processor contract, by the month — while "4.5%" is a bright, simple figure a register can default to. Set the legal maximum at more than double the real cost and you don't just permit recovery; you create headroom. The compliance review the bill establishes exists precisely because the drafters know the gap between cost and cap is where mischief lives. Why widen it?

Here's the question Oklahoma lawmakers should put to the bill's backers: if a surcharge is meant only to make a seller whole for what the card costs them, and the bill itself estimates that cost in the low single digits, what is the other 1.9 percentage points for? A fee that exceeds its own stated justification isn't cost recovery. It's a markup wearing cost recovery's clothes — and it's your receipt that pays for the costume.

Cap the surcharge at the cost. That was the deal Oklahomans got in 2025. HB 2971 keeps the paperwork and quietly raises the price.