Payment Processing · Industry
A card processor's fee schedule is not a price list you agreed to. It is a starting point the contract lets the processor move. That is not a scandal in itself — interchange changes twice a year and every acquirer passes it through — but it means the question that matters when a fee notice arrives is not whether the processor may charge it. It almost always may. The question is what the agreement lets you do about it.
This autumn is a good moment to ask, because the notices are arriving. Merchant Cost Consulting, a firm that audits processing statements for merchants, reported on 1 August 2026 that its clients using Global Payments had received notice of a new $529 'Annual System Enhancement Fee' to be applied on October 2026 statements, following a $499 'Infrastructure Upgrade' fee applied in June and a discount-rate increase on 1 August. In June it reported that Shift4 clients had been notified of a new 'Annual Service and Maintenance Fee', effective 1 July and billed each August, with notices ranging from $1,500 to $2,000 a year. Those figures are that firm's account of its own clients' notices, and we could not independently confirm the Global Payments amounts; a Florida reseller's press release in February had separately described a new $499 annual fee on Global Payments accounts. What we can confirm is what the contracts say. We read five of them — the current agreements published by Shift4 and Elavon, the Fiserv (First Data) Program Guide, and the Heartland and Global Payments Direct terms as published — and set out below what each allows, as of September 2026.
Start with the one processor whose fee is written into its published agreement. Shift4's Merchant Processing Agreement, in the version marked S173 and dated 2026, lists three annual charges in section 5.4. The Regulatory Assurance Fee (5.4.1) is 'an annual $189.99 regulatory compliance fee' charged 'each January per Device'. The Annual Program Fee (5.4.2) is '$250.00 per Device annually', and the agreement adds that it 'cannot be waived'. The Annual Service and Maintenance Fee (5.4.3) 'may be charged in lieu of both' — 'in an amount substantially close (higher or lower) to the total of the individual calculation of those respective fees' but on 'a tiered format'. The same section adds an inactivity fee of $150 per device for each month an account goes 30 days without processing, and section 8.5.4 reserves $79 per merchant ID per year on 'free' terminals.
Two of Shift4's own documents disagree about the first figure. The agreement says $189.99 per device; Shift4's knowledge base, in an article updated on 27 May 2026, says merchants 'are billed $325.00 per device (up to a maximum of 3 for $975.00) annually'. The likely explanation is that the fee schedule on a given merchant's application overrides the template, which is also why one merchant's consolidated fee is $1,500 and another's $2,000. Whichever figure applies to you, the point is that the consolidation notice was not a change to the contract. The contract already allowed it.
Every one of the five agreements contains a clause permitting fee changes. They differ in how much warning you get.
The Fiserv Merchant Services Program Guide — the contract behind Clover and Fiserv accounts sold through banks and resellers; we read the version coded 11.06.24 with Wells Fargo Bank as the member bank — is the most structured. Section 26 allows fees to be adjusted for 'increases, or new fees imposed by Payments Networks' with no notice period, and separately allows, 'upon 30 days' notice to you and no more than once per calendar year', an increase equal to the change in the Consumer Price Index. Then it adds the sentence that makes the rest moot: 'we may also increase our fees or add new fees for Services for any reason at any time, by notifying you thirty (30) days' prior to the effective date of any such change or addition.'
Shift4's agreement is blunter. Section 12.7: 'Bank or Company may amend this Agreement, including by adding new terms or fees or increasing fees, at any time.' Section 12.15 goes further than any other document we read, giving Shift4, from the first anniversary of the agreement, 'a right to increase the aggregate fees payable by Merchant by an amount equal to the greater of (i) the average annual change ... in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers ... plus 1%, or (ii) 7%'. That is a contractual entitlement to raise your total fees by at least 7 percent a year, every year, before any new fee is added. 'Merchants continued use 30 days after notice ... constitutes acceptance.'
Heartland's Merchant Terms and Conditions, as published on its InfoCentral portal in the revision dated 11 March 2016, give the shortest notice: section 6.2 lets Heartland 'amend the Schedule of Fees', effective on a date 'not fewer than fifteen (15) days after the date of notice', and section 6.6 adds that the merchant 'shall pay such fees and charges as may be set by HPS for any requested system enhancements or services'. Heartland is a Global Payments company, and a 'system enhancement' fee is, as it happens, what its parent's clients are now being billed.
Global Payments Direct's Card Services Terms and Conditions, in the 2018 revision distributed through one of its resellers, give no notice at all: under section 18, 'any and all fees, charges, and/or discounts ... may be changed immediately', and a notice of new fees 'will be binding upon Merchant if it deposits sales or credit slips after the effective date'. Elavon's Terms of Service dated November 2025 say in section 17.12 that a merchant 'will be deemed to have agreed to the change if Company continues to present Transactions ... after 30 days following the issuance of the notice', and that 'changes to fees authorized by the Agreement will be effective upon notice to Company, unless a later effective date is provided'.
Read together, the pattern is that the notice period exists to establish acceptance, not to give you time to leave. Continuing to run cards is consent. That makes the next clause the one that matters.
Fiserv's Program Guide is the one document of the five that pairs the right to raise fees with a right to walk away. Section 32, which sets the three-year initial term, says: 'In the event we provide notice to you of any new fees or increases in existing fees for Services ... you may terminate this Agreement without further cause or penalty by notifying us that you are terminating this Agreement prior to the effective date of such new fees or increases.' The sentence after it closes the window: 'maintaining your merchant account, or your continued use of the Services after the effective date of any such fee changes shall be deemed your acceptance of such fee changes ... throughout the term of this Agreement.' So a Clover merchant on a Fiserv contract who receives a 30-day notice has 30 days to send a termination notice, and a merchant who processes on day 31 has accepted the fee for the rest of the term.
Elavon's terms contain the same right — for Canada only. Schedule A, section 2.3, allows a Canadian merchant to terminate 'without penalty if Elavon notifies Company of a fee increase, the introduction of a new fee, or a reduction in applicable interchange rates', within 90 days of the notice. That clause is there because Canada's Code of Conduct for the Payment Card Industry requires it: acquirers must give 90 days' notice of fee increases and merchants may cancel without penalty within 90 days of receiving one. No US rule requires anything similar, and Elavon's US terms do not volunteer it. The same company gives merchants on one side of the border a right it gives no one on the other, which tells you the right is a product of regulation rather than goodwill.
Shift4, Heartland and Global Payments Direct contain no fee-change exit at all. Global Direct's terms do include a 45-day cooling-off period after signing, during which a merchant may terminate without the liquidated damages described below, but that is a right to change your mind about the contract, not about a fee notice two years in. The Global Payments agreement negotiated by the Illinois State Treasurer's office, which is public, does include a right to terminate on 30 days' notice if Global changes the terms — evidence that the clause is available when the customer has the leverage to ask for it, and absent from the standard form because most customers do not.
Without a fee-change exit, a merchant who wants out mid-term pays the termination clause, and the five documents price that very differently.
That last qualification is why the same Program Guide produces contracts with no exit fee and contracts with a $500 one. Wells Fargo Merchant Services, which operates on it, says on its pricing page that 'no early termination fees or long-term contracts apply to card processing services'; a reseller writing its own fee schedule on the same guide can fill the box in. The guide is the contract. The application is the price. Read both. And remember that a leased terminal is a third document, with a leasing company that is not party to either — we set out why the lease outlives the processing agreement and what the law says about it.
None of this applies to a merchant with no term to serve. Square and Stripe are month to month with no early termination fee under standard pricing; Helcim publishes a $0 termination fee and no long-term contract; Dharma Merchant Services has no term and charges a $49 account closure fee. These processors change their published rates too — Square repriced its plans in January 2026 — but a merchant who dislikes a change stops using the account, owing nothing, and the processor's only protection against that is the quality of its service. A three-year term with a liquidated-damages clause protects the processor from exactly that discipline, which is worth remembering when a sales representative describes the term as standard.
It is also why a lower headline rate on a term contract is not automatically the better deal. A processor that can raise your fees on 15 or 30 days' notice, add annual fees the contract already names, and hold you to the term if you object, has quoted you a starting price. The flat-rate processors have quoted you a price.
The broader lesson is the one our guide to reading a processing statement keeps coming back to: the effective rate you pay is set by the contract's mechanics as much as by the rate on the quote. A fee notice is the mechanics in action. Whether it costs you $529 or the rest of a three-year term depends on a clause most merchants find out about the day they need it.
