The Most Expensive Word in HB 3041 Is "Greater"

Every so often a bill comes along that hopes you'll read the number and skip the verb. House Bill 3041 is counting on it.

Here's the whole trick, and it really is the whole trick. Oklahoma's surcharge law — the one the Legislature passed just last year, after a decade of false starts — says a store that adds a fee for paying by credit card may charge you the lesser of 2% or what the card actually cost the merchant to process. That little word, lesser, is the part that's working for you. It means you're protected coming and going: never more than two percent, and never more than the real cost. Whichever figure is smaller is the one that lands on your receipt.

HB 3041 leaves the 2% sitting right where it is — reassuring, familiar, unchanged — and strikes a single word four lines down. It crosses out lesser and writes greater.

Read it again with the new word in place: you now pay the greater of 2% or actual cost. The ceiling has become a floor. If a merchant's true processing cost comes in under two percent, they no longer have to pass along that lower number — they're guaranteed the full 2%, every time, and they pocket the difference between what the card cost them and what they charged you. And if their cost runs higher than 2%? Then the higher number is the one you pay, because this bill contains no documentation requirement, no audit, no Attorney General review — nothing to make a seller prove that "actual cost" is actual at all. The two percent that used to be your protection is now merely the merchant's opening bid.

This is not a rounding error or a cleanup of stale language. It is the single most consequential one-word edit in the consumer-credit code this session, dressed up as housekeeping. The author kept the number you'd recognize and changed the word you wouldn't think to check.

We'd gently remind the Legislature what the 2024 status quo already accomplished, because it was a fair bargain and it's worth keeping. A merchant in Muskogee whose card costs run a penny and a half on the dollar charges you a penny and a half. A merchant whose costs run higher is capped at two. Nobody profits off the surcharge; it does what a surcharge is supposed to do and no more. The card networks themselves never permit a surcharge to exceed a merchant's actual cost of acceptance — which is the one guardrail HB 3041 proposes to remove.

If the goal is to let Oklahoma sellers recover what cards genuinely cost them, current law already does that, to the penny. HB 3041 does something else. It changes one word so that the customer always pays the higher figure — and hopes nobody reads past the two percent to find out.