Industry · Payment Processing
Since 28 June 2026, an Italian shop that refuses to let a customer pay electronically can be fined for refusing an e-money payment, not only a card. A law passed in June widened a duty businesses and professionals have had since 2014, and that has been enforced with fines since 30 June 2022: accept at least one debit card and one credit card, and now e-money instruments too, such as app-based wallets. The fine is €30 plus 4% of the payment refused. Since January, every card terminal also has to be linked to the shop's electronic cash register, so the tax authority can match card takings against receipts.
So almost every Italian business now takes cards and pays to do it. As read on 15 October 2026, the card reader and online providers that publish a price charge an Italian business between 0.8% (Revolut Business, on a €10-a-month plan) and 1.95% (SumUp, with no monthly fee) on a European consumer card taken in person. This guide sets out what each provider charges, what a coffee-sized and a €100 sale cost at each, what PagoBANCOMAT and the banks cost, the tax credit that refunds part of the fee, and the rules every Italian business has to follow.
Interchange is the part of every card fee that goes to the customer's bank. The EU's Interchange Fee Regulation caps it at 0.2% of the payment on consumer debit cards and 0.3% on consumer credit cards. Italy has not set lower percentage caps, but it has added two rules of its own. On domestic consumer debit cards, schemes may charge interchange as a fixed amount of up to 5 cents per payment, as long as the yearly total stays within 0.2%. And on payments under €5, interchange must be lower than on larger ones. Business cards fall outside the caps, and so do three-party schemes such as American Express.
PagoBANCOMAT, the domestic debit scheme behind most Italian bank cards, publishes its own interchange: 0.20% on consumer cards, falling to 0.10% under €5, and the same for its BANCOMAT Pay app. So on a €100 PagoBANCOMAT payment the customer's bank takes 20 cents. Most of what a small merchant pays above that is the provider's margin and the schemes' own fees.
Banca d'Italia publishes no average of what Italian merchants pay. Its annual report for 2025 says only that payment and e-money institutions, rather than banks, now hold 63.6% of the business of signing merchants up to accept cards.
All rates below are for European consumer cards, taken in person unless stated, and were read on each provider's Italian pricing page on 15 October 2026. Payment fees are generally exempt from VAT (IVA).
Teya sells in Italy but publishes no price list; it quotes each business individually. Adyen has no Italian pricing page; its euro price list elsewhere starts at €0.11 plus interchange and scheme fees plus 0.60%, with a minimum invoice that depends on the sector, and it suits larger businesses. Square does not operate in Italy.
Paid in person with an Italian consumer card, a €100 sale costs 82 cents at Revolut, 89 cents on Worldline TECH, 90 cents on Nexi Piccoli Importi, 95 cents on Mollie Pro, myPOS Plus and SumUp Pagamenti Plus, 99 cents on Worldline PRO, €1.20 on Mollie's and myPOS's free plans, €1.25 on Worldline START, €1.50 at Stripe, €1.69 at Viva (€1.09 on PagoBANCOMAT), €1.79 at PayPal POS, €1.89 on Nexi Welcome and €1.95 at SumUp.
Paying a monthly fee to cut the rate pays off at different volumes. SumUp's Pagamenti Plus saves a full point, so its €19 fee is covered at about €1,900 a month of in-person takings on European personal cards; SumUp's own pages put the break-even at €2,250 or €2,400. Nexi's Piccoli Importi saves about a point on Welcome and pays off at a similar level, before IVA on its monthly fee. Worldline's PRO plan pays off over START from about €3,800 a month. myPOS Plus saves only a quarter of a point and needs about €7,200 a month to cover its fee.
Online, a €100 payment on an Italian consumer card costs €1.20 at Revolut, €1.30 at myPOS, €1.45 at Mollie, €1.55 on a PayPal guest checkout, €1.68 on Worldline's online plan, €1.75 at Stripe, €2.43 at Viva, €2.50 at SumUp, and €3.75 if the customer pays from a PayPal wallet.
Italy's card fight has always been about the espresso. A new voluntary protocol between banks, payment providers and merchant associations, signed at the Treasury on 15 June 2026, asks providers to offer small merchants promotions on payments up to €30 that are "significantly competitive" up to at least €10. Providers that join must publish their offers on a standard comparison sheet and send them to CNEL, the state economic council, which will publish them. When we checked on 15 October, CNEL's pages for the offers and the list of members still said they were being updated.
On an €8 sale the difference between a percentage-only price and one with a fixed fee is stark. It costs about 8 cents at Revolut, 14 cents at Viva and PayPal POS, 15 cents on Nexi Welcome, 16 cents at SumUp and 17 cents on Mollie Pro, but 21 cents at Stripe, whose 10-cent fixed fee alone is more than 1% of the sale. A café whose average ticket is under €10 should compare providers on its own ticket size, not on the headline percentage.
On 8 October 2026 Intesa Sanpaolo announced it would scrap its fees on payments of up to €20 on physical terminals, as part of a package agreed with the main associations of shopkeepers and artisans. The announcement is aimed at Intesa's own small-business customers, about 800,000 of them, but gave no start date, detailed eligibility rules or rates above €20, so it is a commitment rather than a price list. If you bank with Intesa, ask whether it applies to you.
Most Italian debit cards run on PagoBANCOMAT, often co-badged with Visa or Mastercard. Some providers price it below the international schemes: Viva charges 1.09% against 1.69%, and UniCredit's 2026 promotion 0.75% against 0.90%. Nexi charges the same rate on all three. BANCOMAT Pay, the banks' payment app, costs 1.50% + €0.25 online at Mollie. On 30 September 2026 BANCOMAT, Spain's Bizum, the Wero operator EPI, Portugal's SIBS and the Nordic Vipps MobilePay announced a company to connect their services across Europe.
Satispay, an Italian app-based e-money wallet that we have not reviewed, charges shops that signed up from September 2026 nothing on payments under €10 and 0.95% on €10 or more, with no monthly fee. It is one way to meet the new e-money duty, though not the only one. Mollie and Stripe also take Satispay online, at 1.50% + €0.25 and 1.8% + €0.25.
Unlike in France, several Italian banks publish a price. None is a provider we have reviewed, so treat these as benchmarks:
An Italian business with revenue of €400,000 or less in the previous tax year can claim a tax credit of 30% of the fees it pays on card and other traceable electronic payments from consumers, under article 22 of decree-law 124/2019. The law sets no end date, so it applies to 2026 fees, within EU state-aid limits. In practice it turns SumUp's 1.95% into about 1.37% and Revolut's 0.8% into 0.56%. It relies on your provider reporting your fees to the Agenzia delle Entrate; ask your accountant how to claim it.
Since 1 January 2026, every terminal that takes electronic payments must be linked to the electronic cash register (registratore telematico) that records the shop's takings. The link is not a cable. It is made free of charge online, in the Fatture e Corrispettivi area of the Agenzia delle Entrate's website, by matching the register's serial number to the payment devices that providers have already reported. Devices in use in January 2026 had to be linked by 20 April. A new device must be linked from the sixth day of the second month after it becomes available, and by the last working day of that month.
Failing to link a terminal carries a fine of €1,000 to €4,000. Failing to record or send the electronic payment data costs €100 per transmission, up to €1,000 a quarter, but since 12 August 2026 that fine does not apply where the number of electronic payments recorded on the register differs from the number accepted by 5% or less. SumUp says its Solo reader, used with its app, sends transactions to the Agenzia delle Entrate itself, so a SumUp merchant does not need a separate register, though the device still has to be registered with the Agenzia; check how any other provider handles it before you buy.
Article 3(4) of legislative decree 11/2010, which put the EU's payment services rules into Italian law, says a payee may not charge the payer for using a payment instrument. It covers every instrument, not only consumer cards, and a business customer cannot agree to waive it. So an Italian shop cannot add a fee for Amex, a European business card or anything else; only business cards issued outside the EU fall outside the rule. Cash remains legal for payments up to €4,999.99: a cash payment of €5,000 or more between different parties is banned, with a narrow exception, subject to paperwork, for tourists resident outside the EU.
For comparison, see what card payments cost in Spain, Germany and the UK.
