What SB 351 Used to Say
Six weeks ago we praised Senate Bill 351 for doing one simple thing: keeping surcharges off Oklahoma receipts, so the price you're quoted is the price you pay. The committee substitute now moving through the House does the opposite thing. The bill that prohibited surcharges has been rewritten to permit them — and you can read the reversal in the title alone, which no longer speaks of barring the practice but of "requiring certain actions from sellers when imposing a surcharge." The shield became a permission slip.
We won't pretend to be thrilled. The clean version protected every cardholder from a checkout surprise, full stop. This one accepts the surprise and merely regulates it. That is a step backward for the Oklahoman standing at the register, and it's worth saying so plainly before anyone calls the rewrite a consumer-protection bill. It is a consumer-permission bill with guardrails.
But credit where it's due, because the guardrails are the real kind. Unlike some of the surcharge proposals floating around the Capitol this session, the substitute doesn't invent a fat percentage ceiling and dare merchants to charge up to it. It ties the charge to a hard, itemized list of what processing actually costs — bank fees, transaction fees, secure-processing and portal costs — and says the surcharge shall not exceed that total. No markup. No profit center. The fee can recover a cost; it cannot become one. That single discipline is the difference between an honest pass-through and a hidden tax, and this version lands on the right side of it. The card networks themselves never allow a surcharge to climb above a merchant's true cost of acceptance; the substitute holds Oklahoma sellers to the same standard, and pairs it with a line-item-disclosure rule so the number can't hide.
If the bill must permit surcharging, this is close to the least harmful way to do it. A surcharge bounded strictly by cost — on a service that runs most merchants around 2.6% — won't become the open-ended grab that looser proposals would invite. So we can live with the framework, even as we mourn the bill it replaced.
One thing we'd still fix before this goes much further. The cost cap has no backstop. It ties the surcharge to "actual cost" but sets no absolute ceiling above it — which means a premium rewards card with a high acceptance cost could carry a surcharge well north of two percent, and the customer holding that card eats the spread. A companion measure this session pairs the same cost tether with a firm 2% lid. SB 351 would be the better bill for borrowing that lid. Cost recovery deserves a floor of honesty and a ceiling of reason; right now the substitute has only the first.
The bill that was filed in February said the price is the price. The bill that's moving in March says the price, plus your share of the wires — but no more than that, and printed where you can see it. It's a worse deal for cardholders than the original. It is, at least, a fair one.