Interchange fees and merchant service charges

This section covers the information on interchange fees and merchant service charges received by payment service providers in card payments transactions carried out at point of sale (POS) terminals in Spain, when the payment service provider of the payer and the payee are located in Spain. This information is published in compliance with Article 13 of Law 18/2014Opens in new window and its implementing Circulars 1/2015, of 24 MarchOpens in new window and 1/2016, of 29 JanuaryOpens in new window .

Law 18/2014 stipulates that this information must be made available on the websites of the Banco de España and the payment service provider. The data which will be published as from today cover the period from September 2014 to the third quarter of 2015 and will be updated quarterly taking into account the payment transactions which have been done in the calendar quarter.

The September 2014 data only include the transactions made in that month; they do not include the transactions of all the third quarter of 2014.

The group of payment service providers bound by the circulars is composed of credit institutions, specialised lending institutions, payment institutions, electronic money institutions and branch offices in Spain belonging to any of the aforementioned foreign institutions. It should be taken into account that the data published only came from those payment service providers that, in each period have made payment transactions that are bound by the circulars previously mentioned.

The information on merchant service charges and interchange fees is broken down by the nature of the cardholder (firm or individual), by the type of card used for the payment (debit or credit) and by the activity of the payee. Moreover, the interchange fees are broken down by the amount of the transactions (from 20 euro and over 20 euro).

For each payment service provider, the information given comprises the average fees in each quarter and, in the case of interchange fees on transactions with individuals, the maximum fees. The weighted average is the average fee calculated dividing the amount received by the fees between the total amount of payment transactions during the period.

The maximum limits of interchange fees are not applied to payment transactions made with firm cards. The limits of the interchange fees for transactions made with individual cards are set at 0.2 % of the amount of the transaction for debit cards (up to a maximum of 7 cents) and at 0.3 % for credit cards. For payments not exceeding 20 euro, the upper limits are 0.1 % and 0.2 %, respectively.

The information on the fees received individually by each provider is supplemented by aggregate information on transactions carried out by all providers in total. Specifically, the data furnished comprise the number and total amount of payment transactions during the period, the total amount of the fees received, average fees and maximum fees.

Data is published in the following links. In the first two ones, the information published is organized around the reporting period. In the third one, recently included in this website, below the name of “temporary series”, would be published four files in Excel format, dividing the payment transactions between individuals and firms for each type of fee. The files show for all activities of the payee, the aggregated fee and the individual ones reported by every institution in all the available periods (filters are included for each activity/ institution/period).