For a global retailer running checkout in both Europe and the United States, the question "what does it cost to accept a card?" has two answers that are now further apart than at any point since the EU Interchange Fee Regulation came in a decade ago. The European number has stayed put — 0.2% on regulated debit, 0.3% on regulated consumer credit, by statute. The American number has drifted in the other direction, and the gap has become large enough that CFOs are routing capital allocation decisions through it.

The widening isn't dramatic in any single year. It's the compounding that has made it conspicuous. And the recent reactivation of the Visa-Mastercard merchant settlement litigation — after the 2024 settlement was rejected by the court and the parties went back to the table — has put the topic back on the agenda for the first time since the original Durbin debates.

The numbers, framed honestly

On regulated debit in the United States, post-Durbin interchange averages 0.20-0.50% plus a fixed fee per transaction, depending on whether the issuing bank is above or below the $10 billion asset threshold the rule cares about. That sounds comparable to the EU. It is not, for two reasons.

First, the US doesn't cap credit card interchange at all. Regulated US credit interchange typically runs 1.5-2.5% on consumer cards, and 2.5-3.5% on premium and rewards cards, which now make up a large and growing share of US credit volume. The EU caps both. The 0.3% regulated credit ceiling in the EU is roughly a fifth of the equivalent US blended rate.

Second, the exempt-from-Durbin debit category — debit cards issued by banks under the $10 billion threshold — runs interchange in the same band as US credit. That category has grown as issuance has shifted. The practical effect is that the "regulated debit" headline number understates what US merchants actually pay on blended debit volume.

Stack it all together and a typical US merchant's blended card acceptance cost sits somewhere in the 1.8-2.8% range, depending heavily on category mix, ticket size, and channel. A typical EU merchant on comparable card volume sits in the 0.5-1.1% range. That's not a rounding error. On a global retailer doing a billion in card volume split evenly across the two regions, the gap is north of $10M a year before any negotiation.

What's pushing the gap wider

Three things.

Premium card share in the US keeps rising. Issuers have continued to push consumers into rewards and premium products with higher interchange. Each tier shift up the ladder is a few basis points of merchant cost. The cumulative drift since the original Durbin rule has been substantial.

The EU caps have not been loosened. Multiple reviews of the Interchange Fee Regulation have come and gone. The caps remain. Commercial cards and three-party schemes (Amex, Diners) remain outside the cap, but their share of EU volume is bounded.

The settlement track in the US is, again, uncertain. The 2024 settlement that would have offered modest interchange reductions and surcharging flexibility was rejected by the court. The parties are back to negotiation. Whatever comes next will likely include some form of surcharging or steering relief, but the timeline is open and the relief is likely to be incremental.

How merchants are responding

The CFO of a global apparel brand we spoke to described the internal conversation as having shifted from "how do we negotiate our acquirer fees down" to "how do we think about payment cost as a structural variable that's different by region." That's a meaningful reframe. It changes the org chart — payments leadership stops reporting through IT and starts reporting through finance — and it changes the discount math when the brand evaluates expansion.

A few specific patterns we're seeing in 2026:

• More US merchants surcharging or cash-discounting. Where state law allows, surcharging is becoming standard practice in categories where the consumer is price-sensitive but not card-loyal — independent restaurants, specialty home, hardware. The big national chains are mostly not surcharging, for brand reasons, but they are pushing harder on debit routing and least-cost-routing under the Federal Reserve's Regulation II amendments.
• EU merchants accelerating account-to-account at checkout. With PSD3 and the instant payments regulation now in effect, A2A rails are starting to land at consumer checkout in Europe at a non-trivial rate. The MDR on A2A is materially below card. For a European merchant, the savings are smaller in absolute terms than for a US merchant — because the card cost was already lower — but the unit economics still favor the shift.
• Global retailers cross-subsidizing more openly. A payments lead at a mid-market specialty retailer told us their internal P&L now allocates card cost by region rather than blended, which has changed which regional GMs get heat for margin compression. Predictable, useful, overdue.

What to watch in the back half of 2026

The settlement track is the obvious one, and the timing is genuinely unknowable. The less obvious watch item is the EU's slow rollout of instant payments at retail checkout. If A2A captures even 10-15% of European card volume over the next 18 months, it changes the negotiation leverage retailers have with the schemes in a way that no court ruling will. The schemes know this, which is why their European posture in 2026 looks notably more accommodating than their US one. The gap is widening, but not in the direction the schemes would prefer.