Pay by bank vs. credit cards: which costs merchants less?
Payments
October 13, 2026
|
Aeropay Team
This article was written by the payments nerds at Aeropay. Our goal is to provide you with solid insights to help your business operationalize more efficient, value-focused payments.
Every card payment hands part of the sale to the card networks and the customer's card issuer. That share grows with every dollar of the order, which is why the biggest tickets carry the biggest fees.
Yes, for most US merchants. A credit card payment carries interchange, a percentage of each sale that averaged 2.36% on Visa and Mastercard credit cards in 2025. A pay by bank payment moves over ACH or real-time bank rails, which charge no card interchange. Pay by bank through Aeropay costs up to 50% less to process than cards.
The fees add up at scale. US merchants paid a record $198.25 billion in credit and debit card processing fees in 2025, more than triple the 2009 total.
Pay by bank and credit cards differ most in who sets the price and how a failed payment comes back. Cards price each sale as a percentage set by the networks and issuers. Pay by bank moves money between bank accounts, so the merchant's cost is the provider's fee.
An online credit card payment costs a US merchant about 2.31% of the sale plus $0.25, based on Helcim's 2026 interchange-plus averages for Visa, Mastercard and Discover. In-person payments run lower, at about 1.79% plus $0.08, because card-present fraud risk is lower.
That fee stacks three charges. Interchange goes to the customer's card issuer and is the largest share. Assessment fees go to the card network. The processor adds its own markup on top. Merchants can negotiate the markup but not the first two.
Premium rewards cards push the rate higher. The average Visa and Mastercard credit card interchange rate rose from 2.02% in 2010 to 2.36% in 2025, as more customers moved to rewards cards that carry higher interchange.
Because most of the fee is a percentage, cost rises with every dollar of the order.
A merchant that processes $10 million a year in online card sales, at an average order of $100, runs 100,000 transactions. At 2.31% plus $0.25, the percentage fee comes to $231,000 and the per-transaction fee to $25,000. The merchant pays $256,000 a year to accept cards, an effective rate of 2.56%.
Rates from Helcim's 2026 data and the Merchants Payments Coalition, via The Motley Fool.
A pay by bank payment costs the merchant the provider's processing fee, with no card interchange or card network assessment on top. Pay by bank through Aeropay costs up to 50% less to process than cards.
Applied to the $10 million merchant above, moving all of that volume to pay by bank through Aeropay would cut the $256,000 card bill by up to $128,000 a year. Actual savings track the share of customers who choose pay by bank at checkout, so adoption decides how much of that figure a merchant keeps.
The cost a merchant does need to model is returns. A pay by bank payment fails as an ACH return, and the customer's bank sends the funds back after settlement. Returns for closed or mistyped accounts and for insufficient funds come back within 2 banking days, while a consumer has 60 days to dispute a debit as unauthorized. Our guide to pay by bank security covers each return type and the checks that prevent it.
We built Guaranteed ACH to take covered returns off the merchant's books. Aeropay Guaranteed ACH covers eligible bank-initiated returns, across 50+ return types including insufficient funds, up to the merchant's agreed coverage limit. With Guaranteed ACH, merchants credit customers right away instead of waiting days for ACH to settle.
Return windows from EPCOR's Return Reason Code Resource.
Pay by bank settles on the bank rail the payment uses, and bank payments through Aeropay settle the same day or faster. Card sales reach the merchant's bank only after the processor batches and funds them, on a schedule the processor sets.
Each bank rail has its own clock. Same Day ACH payments settle in one of three daily windows and fund the same business day, up to $1 million per payment. Nacha's members have approved raising that limit to $10 million, effective September 17, 2027. Standard ACH settles on a later business day.
Real-time rails move money in seconds, 24/7. The RTP network reaches more than 74% of US demand deposit accounts through more than 1,200 participating financial institutions, and it processed $481 billion in payments in Q1 2026.
Speed matters most when money flows back out to customers, as withdrawals, refunds or seller payouts. We route payouts over RTP or FedNow first and fall back to ACH when the recipient's bank can't receive a real-time payment.
Same Day ACH limits from Nacha and Nacha's April 2026 announcement; RTP figures from Mastercard.
Pay by bank holds up better for subscriptions because linked bank accounts don't expire or get reissued like cards, so recurring payments keep running without new payment details. A card on file goes stale whenever the issuer replaces it after an expiry date, a lost card or a fraud alert. The next renewal then declines until the customer updates it.
The failure that bank payments face instead is an account that's short on billing day. A balance check right before each scheduled debit catches it, and a debit timed to land just after the customer's payday has funds to clear.
A merchant should keep accepting cards for customers who want to pay on credit, earn card rewards, or pay from outside the US. Pay by bank draws on money already in a US bank account, so it serves none of those three. Offering both lets a merchant steer the payments with the widest fee gap toward bank payments.
Aeropay sits alongside cards and wallets at checkout, so merchants add pay by bank without replacing their provider or checkout flow. We work alongside card processors, including Worldpay.
Bank payments are the cheapest method for most US merchants because they carry no card interchange, which averaged 2.36% on Visa and Mastercard credit cards in 2025. Debit cards from large banks cost less than credit, with regulated interchange averaging $0.22 to $0.24 per transaction in 2023, plus processor fees.
Pay by bank through Aeropay costs up to 50% less to process than cards, and the dollar saving grows with order size because card fees are mostly a percentage. At the full saving, that’s about 40 cents on a $25 online order and about $12 on a $1,000 order. Only volume customers move to pay by bank saves anything.
It eliminates card chargebacks, because a bank payment never runs through a card network. Disputes still exist as ACH returns. A consumer's bank has 60 days from settlement to return a debit the consumer says they didn't authorize, and that money comes back out of the merchant's account.
Shift part of its card volume to bank payments and lower the rate on what stays. Pay by bank takes those sales off interchange entirely. On the remaining card volume, interchange-plus pricing shows each fee as its own line, and the processor markup is the only part a merchant can negotiate.
Debit interchange figures from the Federal Reserve Board's 2023 Interchange Fee Revenue Report, via The Motley Fool.
Pay by bank costs less, and the bigger the order, the more you save. Through Aeropay, it costs up to 50% less to process than cards. Keep cards for customers who want them, and move large and recurring payments to pay by bank.
See how much you could save with our savings calculator.