Payment Processing · Buyer guide
A bank payment is the cheapest way to collect money in the US. An ACH debit typically costs between 0.5% and 1%, often capped at a few dollars, against about 3% for a card. The catch is what happens when one fails. An ACH debit can bounce for insufficient funds days after you thought you were paid, and a consumer can reverse it as unauthorised for about two months. Each failure carries a fee, and on a small payment that fee can be bigger than months of processing costs.
This guide sets out what a failed or disputed ACH payment costs at the processors that publish the number, read from their own fee pages on 11 October 2026, and explains which failures you can retry, which you can contest, and which you simply absorb.
The first is an ordinary return. The customer's bank sends the debit back because the account has insufficient funds (return code R01), is closed (R02) or cannot be found (R03), or because the account number is invalid (R04). Nacha's rules give the bank until the opening of business on the second banking day after settlement to do that. Because processors usually wait a few days before paying out an ACH payment, many of these returns arrive before the money reaches you, though a processor that pays out sooner takes a late return back from a later payout. Stripe, for example, says it can take up to four business days to learn whether an ACH debit succeeded.
The second is an unauthorised return, the ACH equivalent of a chargeback. Nacha counts return codes R05, R07, R10, R11, R29 and R51 as unauthorised. For a consumer account the window is long: the bank may return the debit until the opening of business on the banking day after the 60th calendar day from settlement. For a business account (code R29) it is the same two banking days as an ordinary return. Those 60 days are why a payment that cleared weeks ago can still come back, after the money has reached your bank.
As of 11 October 2026, from the processors' published fee pages:
Several processors that sell ACH do not publish a return fee at all. Stax and Payment Depot list ACH at 1% capped at $10, and QuickBooks Payments at 1% with a $1 minimum, but none of the three prints a return or dispute fee on its pricing page. Dwolla, Payabli and Aeropay publish no ACH prices at all. If you are quoted by one of them, ask for the return and unauthorised-return fees in writing alongside the transaction price.
Take a $150 monthly payment, the size of a gym membership, a service plan or a small retainer. At the published rates it costs $1.20 to collect at Stripe, 80 cents at GoCardless, about $1.13 at Braintree or Authorize.net, $1 at Helcim and $1.50 on a Square invoice.
One failure changes that. A single bounced payment costs $4 at Stripe, which is more than three months of the processing fee on that customer, and $5 at GoCardless, which is more than six. At Paystand one ACH chargeback costs $35, on PaySimple's Direct Pricing schedule an unauthorised return costs $35, and at Authorize.net an eCheck chargeback costs $25. Those fees come on top of the payment itself, which you did not receive.
So the real cost of ACH depends less on the headline rate than on how often your payments fail. For a business with steady customers who pay from accounts they keep funded, ACH stays far cheaper than cards even after the occasional $5 fee. For one whose customers often run their accounts close to empty, the failure fees and the work of chasing each one can erase much of the saving. Our guide to collecting gym dues by card and bank debit runs the same comparison for a monthly membership.
A card chargeback can be fought: you send evidence, and the issuing bank decides. An unauthorised ACH return mostly cannot. Square, Braintree, Paystand and Authorize.net all say so in their own documentation, in slightly different words. The customer's bank returns the debit on the strength of the customer's statement that it was not authorised, and the money comes back out of your account. Stripe's documentation describes ACH disputes inside the return window as final, although it also offers a way to respond to some disputes. Our comparison of chargeback and dispute fees covers how card disputes differ.
That leaves two defences, and both happen before the payment. The first is the authorisation itself: a clear record of what the customer agreed to, when, for how much and how often, kept where you can find it. Nacha's code R11 covers a debit the customer did authorise but which did not match the terms, such as a wrong amount or an early date, and the rules let you correct the error and send a new entry within 60 days without a fresh authorisation. The second is knowing your customer well enough to collect directly if the bank sides with them, which is the only route Authorize.net's documentation offers.
A debit returned for insufficient funds (R01) or uncollected funds (R09) can be sent again. Bank guides to the Nacha rules allow up to two further attempts within 180 days of the original settlement date, and Nacha requires each retry to carry the description RETRY PYMT and the same company name, company ID and amount as the original.
What you cannot retry is a debit returned as unauthorised (R05, R07, R10, R29 or R51) or one stopped by the customer (R08). Sending it again without a new authorisation is itself a breach of the rules.
Nacha's rules allow one return fee per payment returned for insufficient or uncollected funds, collected as its own entry described as RETURN FEE, provided the customer was told about it in advance, as bank guides to the rules describe; where the fee is authorised by notice, it must be collected within 45 days of the return. Nacha sets no maximum, but most states cap returned-payment fees by law, at different levels. If your agreement with the customer mentions a returned-payment fee, check it against your state's cap and make sure the notice is in the authorisation, not only in your terms.
Every return also counts against you. Nacha's rules set three return-rate levels: 0.5% of debits returned as unauthorised, 3% returned for administrative reasons such as a closed or invalid account, and 15% returned for any reason. Above 0.5% unauthorised, your bank must act to bring the rate down; above the 3% and 15% levels, Nacha can open an inquiry into your activity. A processor may hold your funds or close your account well before either happens. Our explainer on the 2026 ACH fraud-monitoring rules covers those thresholds and what your bank now has to monitor.
Most administrative returns are avoidable. Verifying the bank account when the customer first enters it, which Stripe prices at $1.50 for instant verification, catches mistyped and closed accounts before the first debit rather than after it.
