PSR: Protect European citizens instead of non-EU payment providers

A complete surcharging ban for payments - as proposed by the European Parliament – will increase costs for merchants and therefore consumers.  

It will only serve the interest of more expensive non-EU payment methods, whose costs are not regulated. 

Our call to MEPs: 

To protect EU citizens from increasing prices instead of the profits of non-EU payment providers, such as Mastercard, Visa, Paypal, American Express, MEPs should agree with the Commission and Council position, which is maintaining the status quo: only surcharging bans for payment methods of which the cost is regulated.  

Keeping the 1:1 relationship between surcharging bans and regulating payment costs ensures:  

1. a) a harmonised approach across the single market,  
2. b)more negotiation power for merchants, benefiting consumers and  
3. c) less profits for non-EU providers.

For a level playing field, respecting the link between surcharging and regulating cost and promoting further harmonisation, the member state option of a complete surcharging ban should be removed. 

Complete surcharging bans force merchants to apply a weighted average of payment costs to their sales prices. This means that consumers using a cheaper (= regulated) payment method are subsidising those that use a more expensive (non-regulated) payment method. 

The EU consumer federation BEUC supports the same approach: 

https://www.beuc.eu/sites/default/files/publications/BEUC-X-2025-072_key_points_on_Payment_Services_Regulation.pdf 

We endorse the PSR proposal in Art 28.5 that any surcharges must not exceed the direct cost to merchants of a particular payment method.