A Surcharge With No Ceiling: How HB 1260 Leaves Oklahoma Shoppers Exposed

House Bill 1260 arrives wearing the costume of consumer transparency. It requires that any fee a seller adds for paying with a card show up as a separate line on your receipt — and who could argue with seeing what you're charged? But transparency is about what a bill requires you to see. The more important question is what it forgets to limit. And on that score, HB 1260 has a hole you could drive a truck through.

Read the operative language and you'll find what isn't there: a cap. The bill lets a seller "pass on the processing fee or impose a surcharge" on any customer who reaches for a card — but nowhere does it tie that surcharge to what processing actually costs. The only cost-tethered language in the entire act applies to schools, city halls, and public trusts. For the retailer down the street, the ceiling is whatever the traffic will bear. The receipt simply records the damage.

Consider how far outside the norm that is. The card networks, the supposed villains here, cap surcharges themselves — Visa at 3% and Mastercard at 4%, and neither may exceed the merchant's actual cost of acceptance. A typical in-person acceptance cost runs around 2.6% per transaction. Even Oklahoma's own enacted surcharge law, SB 677, tethered the charge to the lesser of 2% or the seller's actual cost. HB 1260, as introduced, abandons that guardrail entirely. It blesses the surcharge and waves off the ceiling.

A line item is not a choice, either. The disclosure lands at the register — after you've selected your groceries, after you've decided to buy, when comparison shopping is over and walking out means leaving a full cart behind. Reporters who actually tracked these fees found shoppers are rarely warned before they reach the counter. "Just pay cash to avoid it" is not a protection; it's a toll booth.

And here's the irony Oklahoma lawmakers should sit with: the surcharge punishes the customer who walked in ready to buy, using the payment method that carries her fraud protection and her dispute rights. HB 1260 taxes that choice and nudges her toward payment with fewer safeguards — all so a seller can recover a cost the bill never bothered to measure.

A receipt line is a record of the bill, not a limit on it. Until HB 1260 caps the charge at a seller's true cost, it isn't transparency. It's a blank check, written in the customer's checkbook.