Payment Processing · Buyer guide
Nobody regulates what a Hong Kong merchant pays to take a card. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority caps no interchange fee, no law forbids or permits a card surcharge, and no law makes a shop accept cash. What you pay is whatever your provider charges, and most of the providers a Hong Kong shop is likely to meet do not print a price.
Here is what the ones that do print a price charge, read from their Hong Kong pages on 28 October 2026, along with what FPS, Octopus and the QR wallets cost and the few rules that apply.
The Code of Practice for Payment Card Scheme Operators, drawn up by the schemes and published by the HKMA, is in its own words non-statutory and not legally binding. It asks the card schemes to document their fees and explain clearly how they set them, and goes no further. There is no Hong Kong equivalent of the European cap of 0.2% on consumer debit cards, or of the caps in Australia or New Zealand. We could not find a published Visa or Mastercard schedule of Hong Kong domestic interchange either, so the part of your fee that goes to the card issuer is not something you can check.
That makes the published price lists below the only fixed reference point a small business has. Anything else is a negotiated rate, and the best evidence of a good one is that it beats these.
Rates are for a payment on a Hong Kong-issued card unless stated. Every provider below except Yedpay adds a fixed HK$2.35 a payment, which matters as much as the percentage on a small order.
Larger merchants can negotiate interchange-plus pricing from Adyen (A-), whose global price list charges Visa and Mastercard at interchange plus 0.60%, plus US$0.13 a payment. Checkout.com (C+) quotes individually, and we found no published Hong Kong price list for 2C2P. HitPay (B) says it supports Hong Kong cards, but the pricing page we reached shows only Singapore rates, so we could not confirm what it charges in Hong Kong dollars.
On a HK$300 order paid with a Hong Kong card, on the published rates: Yedpay HK$8.70; Shopline Payments HK$11.32; Airwallex HK$12.25; Stripe and PayPal's card processing HK$12.55 each; PayPal checkout HK$14.05. The fixed HK$2.35 is most of the gap between Yedpay and Shopline, Airwallex or Stripe: on a HK$50 order it turns Stripe's 3.4% into an effective 8.1%, against Yedpay's 2.9%.
Fewer providers publish an in-store rate than an online one. The two we found:
KPay advertises rebates and next-day settlement but publishes no card rate. BBMSL publishes no card rate either, though its FAQ lists a HK$1 bank settlement charge per settlement day and a HK$1 service fee on each Visa or Mastercard payment of HK$100 or less, which adds up on a shop with small tickets. Airwallex sells a terminal and a Tap to Pay app without a published in-store rate, and the banks quote individually. SumUp does not operate in Hong Kong: its Hong Kong address redirects to its US site.
The Faster Payment System is Hong Kong's instant bank transfer, run by Hong Kong Interbank Clearing (HKICL). Customers pay by scanning an FPS QR code or sending to a phone number or FPS ID. It is heavily used: HKICL's figures show 84.6 million Hong Kong dollar FPS payments in September 2026, worth about HK$831 billion, and 22.0 million registrations at the end of that month, about 293,000 of them by companies.
HKICL's merchant FAQ says the system does not charge merchants, and that any fee is set by the bank or stored-value provider. Hang Seng Bank's commercial tariff, effective 1 April 2026, lists incoming FPS payments and FPS registration as waived; sending an FPS payment to another bank or wallet costs HK$5 for amounts up to HK$100,000. We could not find current merchant FPS collection fees on HSBC's or Bank of China (Hong Kong)'s own pages.
Collecting FPS through a payment provider, which gives you a checkout button and automatic matching of payments to orders, is not free. Yedpay charges 0.8% online and Shopline Payments 1.5%. Stripe's Hong Kong payment methods do not include FPS at all. If most of your customers already pay by FPS, a bank account that receives it free may be worth more than a lower card rate.
No Hong Kong statute bans card surcharges. The card schemes do: in 2008 Visa, Mastercard and American Express assured the Consumer Council that surcharging breaches their operating rules, and the Council said the same rules forbid a minimum spend on card payments. Octopus's terms forbid taxi drivers from adding a fee. A surcharge puts you in breach of your merchant agreement rather than of a statute.
Answering a Legislative Council question in December 2023, the government said the legal tender ordinances do not give it power to make businesses accept cash, that accepting it is a purely commercial decision, and that it had no plans to change the law. The HKMA had received 12 complaints about businesses refusing cash between 2021 and November 2023.
Since 1 April 2026 Hong Kong taxis must offer at least two electronic payment methods, one QR code method and one that is not. It is the only sector-wide acceptance duty we found, and both Octopus and WeChat Pay HK have waived their fees for taxi drivers.
Cards carry far more retail spending than the wallets. HKMA figures for the second quarter of 2026 show 403.9 million credit card transactions worth HK$286.5 billion, of which HK$186.7 billion was retail spending in Hong Kong, and 55.4 million debit card retail and bill payments worth HK$61.1 billion. Stored-value wallets, Octopus among them, handled about 2.2 billion transactions worth HK$264.7 billion in the same quarter, but only HK$47.7 billion of that was at the point of sale. For most shops, card fees are therefore likely to be the largest payment cost, while FPS and the wallets are where the cheaper options are.
Elsewhere in Asia the rules are tighter; see our guides to Singapore, Malaysia and Japan.
