Payment Processing · Buyer guide
For most of the last decade the question of what American Express costs a small business had a neat answer: if you did under $1 million a year on Amex cards, your processor set the rate under a programme called OptBlue, and if you did more, Amex signed you directly and set the rate itself. That ceiling moved in April. Amex's OptBlue page now says US businesses 'that have American Express Estimated Annual Charge Volume (ECV) of less than $3MM per year may be eligible', and two consultancies that audit Amex statements for a living both date the change to 17 April 2026; one of them, Merchant Cost Consulting, says it is the first time the threshold has moved since the programme launched in 2014 with a $1 million ceiling. A business doing $2 million a year on Amex, which was forced into a direct agreement, can now put those sales through the same account as its Visa and Mastercard volume.
Whether it should is a different question, and answering it means knowing what Amex actually costs at each layer: what Amex charges the processor, what the processor adds, and how that surfaces on the rate you are quoted. This piece walks through all three, using rate tables published in September 2026 by processors the site has reviewed. If you want to find these fees on your own statement first, see how to read a merchant processing statement.
Amex's own description is brief and worth quoting, because it settles who is responsible for the number on your quote: 'With OptBlue, your provider sets your American Express rate just like they do for the other card brands you accept.' Amex sells the acceptance to your processor at a wholesale rate, adds its own network fees, and leaves the retail price to the processor. You get, in Amex's words, 'one statement, one deposit and one servicing contact for all the major card brands you accept'. The processor is also your point of contact for disputes and for the Amex funds, which is the practical change from the old arrangement, where Amex paid and billed you separately from everything else.
The eligibility rule is volume, with exceptions. Eight categories — charity, education, government, healthcare, insurance, online gambling and games of value, residential rent and utilities — have no volume ceiling at all, and games of value has a $1 million minimum instead. Everyone else is eligible below $3 million of Amex charge volume a year. Dharma Merchant Services adds one detail that catches multi-location businesses: 'if you have multiple locations that all roll up under the same Tax ID / EIN, then the $3MM annual limit is across all locations. American Express goes by Tax ID, not Merchant ID.'
Amex does not publish its OptBlue wholesale rates on its merchant site, but the interchange-plus processors that pass them through do. Helcim keeps a full table on a public page. The rates are set by industry and by transaction size, and both matter more than they do for Visa and Mastercard, because the bands are wide and the steps between them are large. Some of the table, as Helcim publishes it:
For comparison, Visa's interchange table effective 18 April 2026 prices a basic consumer credit card presented in a shop at 1.51% plus 10 cents, and a Signature Preferred card at 2.10% plus 10 cents. So an Amex card on a $60 retail sale is slightly cheaper at wholesale than a basic Visa credit card, before network fees; on a $1,200 sale it is not, and on a $200 restaurant bill it costs 2.85% plus 10 cents against 2.10% under Visa's own restaurant programme for a basic card. The ticket-size banding is the thing to check before assuming Amex is dear or cheap for your business.
Three fees sit on top of the wholesale rate. Helcim lists an 'Amex Network Fee' of 0.165% on every transaction and a 'Keyed Fee' of 0.30% on manually keyed ones; Dharma describes the second as a card-not-present surcharge of 0.30% 'to all Card-Not-Present transactions', which is the broader and, for an online business, the relevant reading. Both pass these through at cost. On foreign-issued cards the two disagree: Helcim's fee disclosure, in force since 1 April 2026, lists an American Express international fee of 1.00%, while Dharma's page says Amex 'will add 0.40% to all international sales'. We could not find a figure on Amex's own site, so treat the cross-border cost as somewhere between the two and ask your processor which it bills. Dharma also passes through a 0.75% non-compliance fee on sales not settled within seven days of authorisation, which a normally configured terminal should never trigger. For what foreign cards cost across the other networks, see our piece on foreign-card fees.
This is where quotes diverge, and the divergence is the whole story. Three pricing models produce three different Amex bills from the same wholesale table.
Helcim's fee disclosure applies one margin to every card brand — 0.40% plus 8 cents in person and 0.50% plus 25 cents card-not-present on the first $50,000 a month, falling with volume — and states that 'all card association fees, network fees and interchange rates are passed onto the merchant directly'. An Amex retail sale of $60 in a Helcim shop therefore costs 1.45% plus 10 cents wholesale, plus the 0.165% network fee, plus a 0.03% and 3 cent fee Helcim says its acquiring bank charges to reach the Amex network, plus 0.40% and 8 cents: about $1.44, or 2.4%. The same sale on a basic Visa credit card, at 1.51% plus 10 cents interchange with roughly 0.14% and 2 cents of assessments, comes to about $1.43. On a small retail ticket the two cards cost the same to within a cent; it is the larger tickets and the restaurant and travel categories where Amex pulls ahead.
Dharma prices Amex a tenth of a point above its other cards: its margin is 0.15% plus 8 cents in person and 0.20% plus 11 cents online for Visa, Mastercard and Discover, and 'fixed at 0.25% + $0.08 for card present transactions and 0.30% + $0.11 for card not present transactions' for Amex. Unusually, Dharma publishes the all-in Amex rate you will actually pay, network fee and margin included: retail 2.00% plus 18 cents under $75, 2.35% under $1,000, 2.80% above; restaurant 2.25% plus 18 cents under $25, 2.85% under $150, 3.30% above $150. If you want to know what an Amex sale costs before you sign, that page is the most direct answer any processor we reviewed gives.
The flat-rate processors absorb the difference. Amex's own list of participating OptBlue providers names Square, Stripe, PayPal and Intuit, among others, and none of the four prices Amex separately. Square's fee page says it plainly: 'You can accept every major card — Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover — all for the same processing fees', which on the free plan means 2.6% plus 15 cents in person, 3.3% plus 30 cents online and 3.5% plus 15 cents keyed. Stripe's pricing page prices 'widely used credit and debit cards' at 2.9% plus 30 cents online and 2.7% plus 5 cents on Terminal, and lists no separate Amex line. PayPal's merchant fee page, last updated 1 September 2026, does not mention American Express anywhere: standard card payments are 2.99% plus 49 cents, advanced card payments 2.89% plus 29 cents, and in-person 2.29% plus 9 cents, whatever the brand. QuickBooks Payments lists American Express by name alongside Visa, Mastercard and Discover at its single 2.99% online rate and 2.5% in-person rate, accurate as of 30 April 2026.
The arithmetic behind this is the same as for rewards cards: the processor's flat rate is set high enough to cover the dearest cards and profit on the cheapest, so a merchant whose customers mostly pay with regulated debit subsidises one whose customers mostly pay with Amex Platinum. If a large share of your sales are on Amex — and for travel, dining and business-to-business sellers it often is — flat rate is a better deal than it looks, because the 2.85% restaurant band and the 3.00% travel band are being sold to you at 2.6%.
Two platform processors have quietly moved Amex out of the standard rate. Shopify Payments now prices US online sales by card type. Its help centre defines the tiers: 'Standard: includes domestic consumer cards issued by Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and Diners Club. Premium: includes domestic commercial, corporate, or business-tier cards, such as Visa Business, and all domestic American Express cards.' On the pricing page that is 2.9% plus 30 cents standard against 3.5% plus 30 cents premium on the Basic plan, 2.7% against 3.3% on Grow, 2.5% against 3.1% on Advanced and 2.25% against 2.95% on Plus — six to seven tenths of a point more for every Amex sale online. Squarespace Payments does the same with a flatter step: its fee page, updated 3 August 2026, says 'premium card rates apply to American Express and select business, commercial, and corporate cards', at 3.2% plus 30 cents on every plan against 2.9%, 2.9%, 2.7% and 2.5% for standard cards on Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced.
Note what is bundled into 'premium' in both cases: not just Amex but commercial and business cards from Visa and Mastercard too, which carry higher interchange of their own. If you sell to businesses on Shopify, the premium rate is what you pay on most of your card volume, and the Amex share is only part of it.
Processors that quote rates per merchant rather than publishing them are where Amex markups hide. Toast is a useful example because its support page is explicit about the mechanism and silent about the price: an OptBlue-eligible restaurant that is 'estimated to process under $3MM in annual American Express Charge Volume' has Amex enabled automatically and 'you will no longer need an Amex account', while a restaurant that keeps a direct relationship with Amex supplies its existing Amex merchant ID so Toast can run the cards under that agreement. What Toast charges for the Amex sale is in your quote, not on the page. The same goes for any bank-referred or ISO account. The question to put in writing before signing is whether the Amex markup matches the markup on your other cards, and whether any line item on the statement is Amex-branded — a consultancy that audits statements lists 'Amex Access Fee' and 'Amex Support Fee' among the processor-invented charges it sees.
The businesses the April change actually affects are the ones between $1 million and $3 million of Amex volume that signed a direct agreement because the old rule made them. Nothing forces them to move: Amex's page describes eligibility, not obligation, and an existing direct agreement stays valid. But they can now choose, and the choice is not automatically OptBlue. A direct agreement is a single rate Amex quotes you, close to what you pay and roughly flat across ticket sizes. OptBlue is a wholesale rate banded by industry and ticket, plus 0.165%, plus whatever your processor decides. Whether the second beats the first depends on where your average ticket lands in the bands and on the markup, and both of those are knowable before you move.
The mechanics of moving are less tidy than a switch. According to Merchant Cost Consulting, which published the first detailed account of the change in September, your processor re-registers you with Amex under OptBlue, but your direct account has to stay open until every sales channel is settling through the processor, and Amex keeps the account reachable afterwards for disputes on transactions it processed. The one lever worth pulling is negotiation: adding $2 million of Amex volume to a processor's account is worth real revenue to it, and the right ask is not what it will charge for Amex, but what your markup on all four brands will be once the volume moves.
Amex has spent a decade making itself easier for small businesses to accept, and the April change is the biggest step in that direction since OptBlue began. Whether the saving reaches you is decided by your processor, not by Amex, and the processors that publish their tables are the ones that make it possible to check.
