Can a Minnesota Business Charge You Extra for Paying by Card?

Yes. A Minnesota business may charge you extra for paying with a credit card. One statute says so in as many words, and it has said so since 1987.

The permission comes with conditions. Minn. Stat. § 325G.051 attaches four of them, three about what the business had to tell you before you paid and one about size. Miss one and the surcharge sits outside the statute, however ordinary the sign at the register looked.

Below are the conditions in the statute’s own words, so you can run them against what you actually saw.

What the statute permits

Subdivision 1(a):

(a) A seller or lessor of goods or services doing business in Minnesota may impose a surcharge on transactions in Minnesota with a customer who elects to use a credit or charge card in lieu of payment by cash, check, or similar means, provided:

(1) if the sale or lease of goods or services is processed in person, the seller or lessor informs the customer of the surcharge both orally at the time of sale and by a sign conspicuously posted on the seller’s or lessor’s premises;

(2) if the sale or lease of goods or services is processed through a website or mobile device, the seller or lessor informs the customer of the surcharge by conspicuously posting a surcharge notice during the sale, at the point of sale, on the customer order summary, or on the checkout page of the website;

(3) if the sale or lease of services is processed over the telephone, the seller or lessor informs the customer of the surcharge orally; and

(4) the surcharge does not exceed five percent of the purchase price.

Read that as a checklist. The first three clauses are keyed to how the sale happened. The fourth applies no matter how it happened.

The notice depends on how you paid

In person: both the sign and the words. Clause (1) says the seller informs you of the surcharge “both orally at the time of sale and by a sign conspicuously posted” on the premises. Both. A placard at the register and a clerk who says nothing does not satisfy that clause. Neither does a line printed on the receipt, because the receipt comes after the sale rather than at it, and the clause says “at the time of sale”.

Online or in an app: any one of four places. Clause (2) is the easier one to satisfy. The notice can appear during the sale, at the point of sale, on the customer order summary, or on the checkout page. One of the four is enough.

By telephone: spoken. Clause (3) requires oral notice, and by its terms it describes a sale or lease “of services” processed over the telephone. Goods ordered over the telephone are not described in clause (3) at all.

Five percent, and it is five percent of the purchase price

Clause (4) is arithmetic, and it is the condition almost nobody checks. Five percent is a ceiling, not a target.

Made-up numbers, because the arithmetic is the point: on a $58 restaurant check, five percent is $2.90. A $3.50 card fee on that check is 6.03 percent of the purchase price. That fee is outside the statute no matter how well it was disclosed, and no matter what the business pays its processor — clause (4) asks only what share of the purchase price the surcharge came to.

Divide the fee by the price of the goods, not by the bottom-line total. A fee computed on a taxed total is a larger share of the purchase price than the posted rate suggests, which is how a surcharge advertised just under the cap ends up over it. Section 325G.051 does not define “purchase price”, and I have not found a Minnesota decision telling anyone whether the cap runs against the pre-tax figure or the taxed total.

Subdivision 1(d) is one sentence: “This subdivision applies to an agent of a seller or lessor.” I read that to reach the company that installed the terminal, set the percentage and supplied the sign — the conditions in subdivision 1 run to it as well as to the store.

The store’s own card: a bar with no compliance path

Subdivision 1(b) is a flat bar with no compliance path attached:

(b) A seller or lessor of goods or services that establishes and is responsible for the seller or lessor’s own customer credit or charge card may not impose a surcharge on a customer who elects to use that credit or charge card in lieu of payment by cash, check, or similar means.

That is the store’s own card — the branded account a retailer issues, underwrites, or stands behind. The permission in paragraph (a), with its notice clauses and its cap, does not extend to paragraph (b)’s situation. If a business issued you its own card and then charged you extra for using it, no sign cures that and no percentage saves it.

This is also the easiest of these to answer from paperwork, because it turns on one question — whose card is it — rather than on what somebody said at a counter months ago.

When a “cash discount” is really a surcharge

Calling a program a discount does not make it one. Subdivision 1(c) gives the definition and the carve-out in a single paragraph:

(c) For purposes of this section “surcharge” means a fee or charge imposed by a seller or lessor upon a customer that increases the price of goods or services to the customer because the customer uses a credit or charge card to purchase or lease the goods or services. The term does not include a discount offered by a seller or lessor to a customer who makes payment for goods or services by cash, check, or similar means not involving a credit or charge card if the discount is offered to all prospective customers and its availability is clearly and conspicuously disclosed to all prospective customers.

The carve-out has two parts and a business has to meet both. The discount has to be offered to all prospective customers, and its availability has to be clearly and conspicuously disclosed to all prospective customers.

So a program where the shelf price, the menu price and the website price are all the card price, and you find out at the register that cash is cheaper, fails the second part on the statute’s own words. It is a surcharge, whatever it is called — which means it then has to clear the notice clause and the five percent cap like any other surcharge.

What the penalty subdivision says, and what it does not

Subdivision 2 is one sentence, and it is the whole remedy section:

A seller who violates this section is subject to a civil penalty of not more than $500 and shall refund the surcharge to each buyer.

A civil penalty and a refund. The subdivision does not say who may sue, it does not name a plaintiff, and it contains no attorney-fee provision. On the face of the statute I do not read § 325G.051 as a section a consumer sues on for damages. I am telling you that so the five percent number does not get read as more than it is.

Where I think it does work is as a measuring stick. An unlawful surcharge is conduct that can be tested against Minnesota’s general consumer statutes — § 8.31 and the Consumer Fraud Act at § 325F.69 and § 325F.70 — each of which carries conditions of its own that this section does not supply. That analysis is longer than this page, and I work through it in the practitioner version linked at the end.

Where cash is accepted, the surcharge is not part of the advertised price

Here is the concession, and it is the one most likely to mean the business did nothing wrong.

Minnesota’s price-display rule, Minn. Stat. § 325D.44, subd. 1a(a), says this:

A person engages in a deceptive trade practice when, in the course of business, vocation, or occupation, the person advertises, displays, or offers a price for goods or services that does not include all mandatory fees or surcharges.

The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office has answered the card-surcharge question under that rule in print. From its Frequently Asked Questions About Minnesota’s New Price Transparency Law, revised April 2025, which I retrieved from the attorney general’s own website on September 19, 2026:

This law does not govern what fees or surcharges a business can charge. It governs how those fees or surcharges are disclosed to consumers. If the credit card surcharge is an optional charge, meaning a consumer could reasonably avoid the surcharge by paying with cash, then this credit card surcharge is not a “mandatory fee” under the law and the surcharge would not need to be included in the total price that is advertised, displayed, or offered. Businesses should be aware, however, of other consumer protection provisions that still apply to such surcharges. So to the extent a business decides to impose such surcharges or fees, its communication of such surcharges or fees must comply with other state consumer protection laws.

That tracks the statute, and I have no quarrel with it. Where a business takes cash, you can avoid the card fee by paying cash, so the fee is not a mandatory fee and it did not have to be inside the menu price or the shelf price. The surcharge still has to satisfy § 325G.051 — that is what the attorney general’s last sentence is pointing at — but the advertised price is not the problem.

I want to emphasize the condition in that answer. It is expressly about a consumer who “could reasonably avoid the surcharge by paying with cash”. It is not a blanket exemption for card surcharges.

The cashless counter: my reading, not a holding

A business that takes no cash at all is a different fact, and this is where I part company with the easy answer.

Subdivision 1a(b) defines the term the display rule turns on:

(b) For purposes of this subdivision, “mandatory fee” includes but is not limited to a fee or surcharge that:

(1) must be paid in order to purchase the goods or services being advertised;

(2) is not reasonably avoidable by the consumer; or

(3) a reasonable person would expect to be included in the purchase of the goods or services being advertised.

Note the “or” at the end of clause (2). The three prongs are disjunctive — any one of them is enough. (The attorney general’s FAQ joins the same three prongs with “and” in its summary of the definition. The statute says “or”, and the statute governs.)

Take cash off the table and there is nothing left for the customer to avoid. At a card-only counter the surcharge must be paid in order to buy anything, which is prong (1), and there is no avenue of avoidance left, which is prong (2). Made-up numbers again: a cashless counter posts a sandwich at $18.00 and runs a 3.5 percent card fee, announced by the clerk and posted on a sign exactly as clause (a)(1) requires. You pay $18.63. Every condition § 325G.051 attaches to the surcharge is met. The price the business displayed, as I read subdivision 1a(a), should have been $18.63, because that is what every customer must pay.

The honest limits on that reading, all three of them:

• It is my reading of a statute that took effect at the start of 2025, not a court’s holding. I searched for Minnesota decisions construing either § 325G.051 or § 325D.44, subd. 1a on September 19, 2026, in one free case-law database covering the Minnesota Supreme Court and the Minnesota Court of Appeals, and found none — while a control search on section 325D.44 generally, run in the same session on the same database, returned 34. So the absence is real and not a broken search. But that database does not carry every unpublished Minnesota decision, and finding nothing is not the same as knowing nothing exists.
• The attorney general’s published answer addresses the case where cash is accepted. It does not address a business that refuses cash, in either direction.
• A business will argue the opposite from the same words, and the argument is not frivolous.

Two provisions come up in this corner of the statute, and neither changes the answer. Subdivision 1b exempts three categories from the display rule — fees authorized by law related to the purchase or lease of a motor vehicle charged by a motor vehicle dealer, businesses regulated by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission and their affiliates, and settlement services under the federal Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act. A card surcharge at a restaurant, a salon, a clinic or a parking ramp is in none of them. And subdivision 3 of the same section says the display rule “does not affect unfair, deceptive, or misleading trade practices otherwise actionable at common law or under other statutes of this state”, so the two statutes stack rather than cancel.

Two dates to check against your receipt

January 1, 2025 for the price-display rule. Laws 2024, chapter 111, sections 1 and 2 added subdivisions 1a and 1b to § 325D.44, and both sections carry the same clause: “This section is effective January 1, 2025, except that this section is effective June 1, 2025, for industries where the prices are regulated by the Metropolitan Airports Commission.” Conduct before those dates is not a violation of the display rule. I take that statute apart gate by gate, including all of its safe harbors, in Is This Fee Legal in Minnesota?.

July 1, 2023 for two of the notice clauses. Section 325G.051 was enacted in 1987, and the legislature left it alone until 2023, when Laws 2023, chapter 57, article 4, section 19 rewrote subdivision 1. The website-and-mobile clause and the telephone clause are new in that rewrite; the in-person clause and the five percent cap are not. Section 19 carries no effective-date clause of its own — it is the last section of an article whose four effective-date clauses all attach to earlier sections — so the default in Minn. Stat. § 645.02 governs. Chapter 57 is a budget act with appropriation items, and for such an act § 645.02 sets the effective date at “the first day of July next following its final enactment”. The governor signed it May 24, 2023. I read the amendments as effective July 1, 2023.

The penalty subdivision was not touched in 2023. It is still the 1987 sentence.

What to keep

The posted price, before the fee. The display question is decided by what was advertised, displayed or offered — the menu board, the shelf tag, the ramp sign, the checkout screen before the fee line appears. Photograph it. It is gone the next time the price changes, and the receipt does not preserve it.

The receipt, and whether anyone said anything. The in-person clause requires spoken notice at the time of sale. If the first you learned of the fee was when you read the printed slip, that clause was not met, whatever the sign said.

Whether cash was accepted. “Cards only,” a cashless facility and a taped-over cash drawer are all the same fact, and it is the fact that decides whether the surcharge belonged inside the advertised price.

Whose card it was. If the card carrying the fee was the business’s own, subdivision 1(b) applies and none of the notice analysis matters.

The arithmetic. Fee divided by the price of the goods. If that is over five percent, clause (4) is the end of the inquiry — unless the cap runs against the taxed total, which is an open question below.

A card surcharge on a gym membership sits in the same statute, alongside the club-contract rules that govern annual fees and getting out of the contract — those are in Annual Fees, Card Surcharges, and Getting Out of a Gym Contract in Minnesota. A mandatory fee at an online checkout that you could not avoid at all is a different question, taken up in “Convenience Fee,” “Processing Fee”: When a Checkout Fee Had to Be in the Price.

What this guide does not decide

Everything above is a reading of two statutes and one published agency answer, quoted from the Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes and from the attorney general’s office and checked on September 19, 2026. It describes the machinery. It is not advice about your receipt, your charge or your business, and nobody here has looked at your documents.

Three questions on this page have no Minnesota answer that I could find: whether the five percent cap runs against the pre-tax price or the taxed total; what “clearly and conspicuously disclosed to all prospective customers” requires of a cash-discount program; and whether a surcharge at a business that refuses cash belongs inside the advertised price. The third is the one I have taken a position on, and it is a position, not a holding.

The practitioner-length version of this analysis, with the case law and the remedies worked through, is at Minnesota Lets a Business Surcharge Your Credit Card — Until It Stops Taking Cash.