What Are These Fees on My Merchant Statement?

The fees on your merchant statement come in two kinds: costs the card networks set, which you cannot change, and fees your processor adds, which you can question, negotiate and sometimes get refunded. Almost every new line owners are asking about in 2026, from "Annual Service and Maintenance" to "Infrastructure Upgrade Fee" to "Debit Enablement Quarterly", is the second kind. Most were added by a sentence in your statement's message section, and your contract probably gives you only 30 to 45 days to object in writing.

That is why a restaurant owner can open a July bill and find a $2,000 charge nobody mentioned. In an r/restaurateur thread titled "check you bill", the owner listed a $2,000 annual service and maintenance fee on equipment they owned outright, $60 a month in EMV maintenance for six readers when they had four, and a $35 "incoming chargeback fee" on a $6 chargeback. One phone call reversed the $2,000. Most of the rest stayed.

This guide decodes the lines, shows you why they count as "agreed", and gives you the dispute clock. If you want to compare what providers publish, our processing fee tables list the rates side by side.

What are the four kinds of fees on a merchant statement?

Every line on a merchant statement falls into one of four buckets, and only the first two are outside your control. Sorting each line into a bucket is the fastest way to find what you can challenge.

Visa's small business fees page makes the split plain: merchants do not pay interchange directly, they "negotiate and pay a 'merchant discount' to their financial institution." Everything in the bottom two rows is that negotiated price. It can go up.

The quotable version: interchange is the cost of accepting a card, and everything else on the statement is what your processor charges for handling it. When your costs jump, look in the bottom two rows first.

The new fee lines owners are finding in 2026

Most "what is this fee" questions this year are about processor fees with vague names, added mid-contract. Here are the lines owners have posted from their own statements, what each one says it is for, and what to check.

The Shift4 figures come from the r/restaurateur thread and the Regulatory Assurance Fee from Shift4's own help article. The Global Payments lines come from two r/PaymentProcessing threads, one about costs rising from 3.5% to nearly 12% and one warning of hidden fees. All are owner or agent anecdotes, not published price lists, and yours may differ. The line names are what matter: if you see one, you know what to ask.

The damage adds up fast. The owner in the second Global thread said PCI and miscellaneous fees crept up by about $500 a month over 15 years, then Data Sec and Amort fees added another $1,000 a month. Their statement reached $2,500 a month. At a new processor, with the same transactions, it was $600.

Restaurants run on Toast get a different set of line names; our guide to Toast processing fees covers them.

Why a fee you never agreed to is "in your contract"

Most merchant agreements let the processor change fees by written notice, and the notice is usually a line in your statement. When support tells you a fee is "in your contract", this is what they mean.

The opening page of Shift4's November 2023 merchant processing agreement says it in capitals: the bank or company may "change fees and charges or otherwise amend these terms upon 30 days' written notice, which will usually appear in your monthly statement message. Please review your statement each month."

Shift4's help article on its Regulatory Assurance Fee shows how that plays out. It says merchants who signed before December 1, 2023 "have agreed to this annual fee price of $129.99 by continuing to use Shift4 services following 30 days after the October Merchant Notification." The same article includes a script for agents to read when a merchant disputes the fee.

Heartland's older terms work the same way. A Heartland terms document (revised March 2016, still on its site) says amended fees take effect on a date "not fewer than fifteen (15) days after the date of notice." Its term is 36 months, renewing for 12 more unless you give 60 days' written notice.

The wording of the notice matters. One owner in the Global thread noticed the previous month's statement said they "may" be assessed a $499 infrastructure fee, not "will", and was arguing that was not adequate notice. Another commenter's advice was blunter: the rate increase is probably disclosed on the statement, and "if you do nothing, it constitutes you accept them."

This tactic is now being tested in court. In August 2026, Venable's advertising law blog reported a proposed class action in North Carolina by dental practices and other small businesses. They allege processors charged "PCI DSS Compliance," "Non-PCI Charge," "Safe-T SMB Fee" and "Other Fees" totalling almost $100 a month, disclosed in small print in a statement section titled "News for You." It is an allegation, not a ruling, but it shows where the argument is going.

How long do you have to dispute a fee?

Usually 30 to 45 days from the statement, in writing, and after that the processor can refuse to look. This is the part most owners find out too late.

Shift4's agreement says you must "promptly examine all statements" and notify it in writing of any error. The notice "must be received by Bank or Company within 30 calendar days after Merchant receives the periodic statement containing the asserted error," and failing to do so "constitutes a waiver of any claim." Your notice must include:

1. Your business name and merchant account number.
2. The dollar amount you are disputing.
3. A description of the charge.
4. Why you believe it is wrong, and the cause if you know it.

The processor then gets 60 days to investigate before you can bring a claim.

Heartland's older terms give 45 days in writing. After that, Heartland "may, in its discretion, assist Merchant, at Merchant's expense," but has no obligation to investigate or adjust anything.

So a phone call is a good start, but it is not a dispute. Follow every call with an email or letter to the notice address in your agreement, with those four items, the same day. The same discipline applies to customer disputes; see our guide to handling a chargeback, where the clock is even shorter.

PCI fees, in one paragraph

A PCI fee pays for the processor's compliance program; a PCI non-compliance fee is a penalty for not finishing your annual self-assessment. The first is a normal (if often inflated) charge. The second you can usually stop by logging in to the processor's compliance portal and completing the questionnaire. One self-described former Global Payments employee listed a $250 non-PCI compliance fee among the fees former customers were getting hit with. If you see both a compliance fee and a non-compliance fee in the same month, ask why you are paying for the program and the penalty at once.

How to check your own statement in 20 minutes

Pull three months of statements, sort every line into its bucket, and flag anything new, changed or unused. You do not need to understand interchange to do this.

1. Get three statements side by side. This month, last month and the same month last year. New lines are easier to see in a row.
2. Read the message section first. On most statements it is a box called Notices, Messages or something like "News for You." A video walkthrough by former attorney Robert Fojo calls the adjustments and notes section the place "where they quietly announce fee increases." Note any fee or rate change and its effective date.
3. List every line that is not interchange or an assessment. Monthly, annual, quarterly, per-device, portal, statement, PCI, technology, infrastructure, "other".
4. Match each to something you use. No online ordering? No leased equipment? Four readers, not six? Those are your first disputes.
5. Flag anything charged as a percentage that should be flat. A statement fee or "funding fee" as a percent of volume grows with your sales.
6. Compare total fees to total sales. One retailer in the Global thread said they do "some quick math" every month and stay at 1.8% to 1.9% on about $750,000 a year. The step-by-step version is in our guide to calculating your effective rate, but the rough check is enough here: if the number jumped since last year and your card mix did not, a fee or rate changed.
7. Write down the dispute deadline. Your agreement's notice section tells you where to send it.

If your business runs on Toast, the checklist in how to audit a Toast statement goes line by line for that format. For a wider sweep beyond payments, our list of where small businesses lose money covers subscriptions, contracts and insurance too.

What actually got fees reversed

Owners report the best results from calling about one specific large charge, then escalating to the person paid on your account. The small recurring lines are harder.

In the Shift4 thread, the pattern was consistent. One owner "was able to get the $2000 reversed and the $35 online ordering fee removed" with one call. The original poster found Shift4's AI phone assistant would credit the annual service and maintenance fee if you asked for it by name, while a human agent could only remove the online ordering enablement fee and "couldn't help me with the month end billing, incoming chargeback, or debit quarterly enablement fees."

In the Global threads, the advice was to skip customer service: "Speak with your rep to lower rates. If the rep is gone... talk to the manager of the office. There is usually someone getting a commission from your business." A self-described Global sales agent said he got rates lowered for some customers by at least 6%, and added that reps "can't do anything about the fees." Refunds of past months were thin: one owner charged "north of $50k" in extra fees was offered "a one-time courtesy credit of $500."

What that suggests, from owner accounts only:

• Big, named, one-off charges (annual fees, upgrade fees): call and ask for the reversal by the fee's exact name.
• Rate increases: go to your rep or their manager, not support.
• Recurring small fees: put them in a written dispute inside the window, or use them as leverage to leave.
• Unauthorized debits: one owner filed with their bank over a $1,200 Shift4 charge. That is a last resort, since your agreement likely authorizes fee debits.

For the negotiation side, the scripts in negotiating Toast processing rates work with most processors.

Should you leave or stay? The break-even

If 12 months of the new fees is more than your early termination fee, leaving is usually cheaper. A competitor in the Global thread put it plainly: "Sometimes paying the cancellation fee is cheaper then waiting it out."

Early termination fees vary widely. Heartland's older terms set it at $295 per location. Owners report Shift4 quoting $10,000 to terminate, and a competitor mentioned Global cancellation fees around $5,000. The FTC's 2022 case against First American Payment Systems involved a three-year term with a $495 cancellation fee, sold to owners who were told they could cancel any time. That case ended with $4.9 million returned, and in 2025 the FTC sent more than $2.6 million in refunds to 5,588 small businesses.

Here is the arithmetic, using figures from the sources above:

Before you pay anything, read three things in your agreement: whether a fee increase gives you a window to cancel free (one Global customer mentioned a 120-day window), the auto-renewal notice date, and any equipment lease, which is often a separate contract. Our guide to a merchant processor holding funds covers equipment leases and switching without getting frozen.

In Tennessee, the law adds leverage. The amendment that became Tennessee Code 47-22-402 requires processors to give merchants an itemized list of all fees each period, the total value processed and, for non-bank-holding companies, an aggregate fee percentage. If they fail to, the merchant may terminate after written notice and a 30-day cure period.

Can someone just do this for me?

You can do most of it yourself in an afternoon, and you should do the first pass yourself. The 20-minute check above finds the obvious lines: fees for services you do not use, device counts that are wrong, charges added last month. A phone call and a written notice handle most of those.

It stops being worth your time when you run several locations or processors, when the contract and the statements disagree, or when the problem is a rate increase buried in the markup rather than a named fee. That is also where free "statement reviews" from sales agents come in. They can be useful, but remember the agent's goal is to move you, not to fix your current account. If you compare offers, our payment processor comparison shows how to read flat rate against interchange-plus.

Restaurant owners have more fee sources than most: delivery apps, gift card platforms and equipment rentals as well as processing. The restaurant money recovery hub and the restaurant profit leak audit cover the rest. And if you want the check to happen every month without you, a monthly statement review is one of the simpler jobs in our list of what you can automate.

The one habit that would have saved most of the owners in these threads: read the message box on every statement, the month it arrives.