Chase Said They Eliminated a Fee. Tom’s Bill Went Up $1,170.

Tom Kessler runs a two-operatory dental practice in Fort Worth. Cleanings, crowns, a few implant cases a month. He does about $65,000 in card volume — not because his patients love paying with plastic, but because insurance reimbursements take six weeks and the practice has to float the difference. Credit cards keep the lights on while the claims settle.

Tom has banked with Chase for nine years. When a Chase representative offered him payment processing through Chase Payment Solutions, the pitch was simple: one bank, one relationship, same-day deposits into the same checking account he already had. He signed. It was easy. And for two years, it was fine.

Then he opened his October 2025 statement.

His Chase merchant services fees had shifted. No letter. No email. No phone call. The total charges were $97 higher than August. He pulled up three months of statements side by side and ran the math. His effective rate had climbed 15 basis points — from 2.74% to 2.89%. On $65,000 a month, that is $1,170 a year that appeared without a conversation.

He called Chase. The representative told him there had been a fee adjustment related to Discover transactions. She said it was on the website. She could not explain why his total bill went up when the notice said a fee had been eliminated.

That is because the notice was designed to make it look like good news.

Chase Merchant Services Fees — The Published Rate Structure

Before getting into what changed, here is the published Chase credit card processing rate structure for small businesses on the flat-rate plan. These are the numbers Tom was quoted — and the numbers most Chase merchants assume they are paying.

The line that catches most merchants is the bottom one. Chase merchant services fees for keyed-in and manually entered transactions run 3.5% + $0.10 — nearly a full point above the in-person rate. That keyed-in rate covers more than phone orders: it applies to payment links, virtual terminal charges, and most card-not-present transactions where the card is typed rather than tapped. On a $400 keyed ticket that is $14.10 to Chase versus $10.50 if the same card were tapped in person — the kind of gap Tom never saw until he added up a year of it.

These are flat-rate pricing numbers — the same percentage whether a patient pays with a basic Visa debit card or a premium travel rewards card. For a dental practice where patients frequently pay with rewards cards and corporate health FSA cards, this matters: interchange fees on premium cards run 2.1% or higher before the processor adds any markup. Under flat-rate, Chase pockets the difference on your low-interchange transactions and breaks even on the expensive ones.

Larger businesses can request interchange-plus pricing from Chase, but the markup is not published. You will need to negotiate it directly, and it is typically not offered until you are processing above $10,000–$15,000 per month.

The Itemized Chase Merchant Services Fees Below the Rate

The rate table above is what Chase shows you on its website. The statement shows something different. Below are fees that regularly appear on Chase merchant statements — most never discussed during onboarding.

None of these are hidden — they are in the Schedule A. Most merchants never read the Schedule A before they sign. A dental practice with a high average ticket, multiple payment link transactions, and occasional disputed claims will see several of these on every statement. This is why calculating your effective rate matters more than looking at your published rate: the effective rate captures everything.

Month-to-Month vs. Contract — The Free Equipment Trap

There is also a rate-change cancellation window embedded in most Chase agreements: if Chase raises fees and sends written notice, you typically have 30 days to cancel without penalty. Most merchants miss this window because the notice is buried in a statement footer — the same footer that announced the September 8 changes.

When Chase Issues the Card and Processes the Payment

Chase has a structural pricing advantage it rarely explains clearly. When a customer pays with a Chase-issued card, Chase is simultaneously the issuer and the acquiring processor. The transaction never leaves the house, and Chase passes some of that efficiency back as a lower rate — typically around 2.045% + $0.13 instead of the standard 2.6% + $0.10.

This is genuinely cheaper. But for a dental practice in Fort Worth, the patient base skews toward older adults on Medicare Advantage plans, HSA cards, and non-Chase credit cards. The ChaseNet discount may apply to 20–30% of volume — not the majority. The effective rate on the full statement reflects all cards, not just the Chase-issued ones. Comparing Chase credit card processing costs against a dedicated merchant account on interchange-plus, using your actual card mix, is the only honest comparison.

HIPAA Compliance and InstaMed

Chase is one of the only major processors with a native HIPAA-compliant payment solution. InstaMed handles in-office and online payments for healthcare providers — patient card-on-file for recurring billing, digital statements, and secure patient portals. For a practice managing insurance coordination and patient balance billing at once, that is a real operational advantage most processors cannot match out of the box.

The important distinction: InstaMed’s compliance features govern how patient payment data is stored and transmitted. They do not change the underlying rates. A practice on InstaMed still pays the same Chase merchant services fees on every transaction. Healthcare practices tend to have high average tickets, heavy card-not-present volume from payment links and phone collections, and a rewards-card-heavy patient base — all of which push the effective rate above the published flat rate. The healthcare merchant services page covers what a purpose-built setup looks like.

What Chase Changed on September 8, 2025

Chase sent merchants a notice — most buried in statement footers — announcing changes to Chase merchant services fees related to Discover transactions. The headline item was an elimination: the Conveyed Discover per Transaction Fee of $0.01235 was being removed.

That sounds like a reduction. It is not.

In the same notice, Chase introduced new Discover-related rate adjustments and increased existing assessment fees. The eliminated fee was a fraction of a penny per transaction. The introduced fees were larger. The net effect — confirmed by independent merchant services auditors — was that Chase Paymentech processing rates went up after the change, not down. This is the kind of increase that never appears in a headline but shows up in every affected statement.

How a Fee Elimination Raises Your Bill

This is not a Chase-only tactic. It is an industry pattern. I have seen it from Fiserv, from Global Payments, from Heartland, from mid-tier ISOs, and now from the largest acquirer in the country. The mechanics are always the same.

This is the same pattern described in Your Processor Said It Was Visa. It Wasn’t. — a processor attributes a rate increase to the card brands when the real margin expansion is on the processor’s side. Instead of blaming Visa, the processor takes credit for removing a fee while quietly adding a bigger one.

What This Costs Over a Year

A 15-basis-point increase sounds small. Over twelve months, it is not.

Tom is not unusual. I have reviewed Chase merchant services fees on statements from restaurants, contractors, medical practices, and retail shops, and the pattern holds across every one — a small fee disappears, a larger set appears, and the effective rate climbs 10 to 20 basis points. The merchants who catch it calculate their effective rate every month. The ones who do not — which is most of them — keep paying. Chase does not send a follow-up explaining that the net effect was an increase. No processor does.

If Your Chase Merchant Services Fees Went Up

Chase payment processing problems rarely announce themselves. There is no alert, no dashboard flag, no courtesy call from your relationship manager. The detection method below works on any processor, and the whole check takes about ten minutes.

Why the Largest Processor in the Country Can Get Away With This

Chase processes over $2.6 trillion in US card volume annually and is the number one merchant acquirer in the country by both dollar volume and transaction count. A 15-basis-point increase across a book that size generates an enormous amount of revenue even if only half the merchants are affected and most never notice.

The second reason is the moat. Chase merchants are overwhelmingly bank-relationship merchants — they chose Chase for processing because they already banked there. Switching is not just a new processor; it is untangling the banking relationship, giving up same-day deposits, and losing the comfort of one institution handling everything. Fees can climb inside that moat without triggering a switch, because the merchant would rather absorb $1,200 a year than separate their processing from their banking. If you want to file a formal complaint, the CFPB complaint portal accepts merchant payment processing complaints directly.

That calculation works — until you run it over five years. Five years of a 15-basis-point overpayment on $65,000 a month is $5,850. That is the cost of new dental chairs. And these are not hidden fees in the traditional sense: Chase disclosed the changes. They disclosed them in a way that made the increase invisible to anyone not specifically looking for it.

Tom Kessler is an illustrative composite. The fees, contract terms and mechanics described here are real and documented elsewhere on this site — the person and the business are not. Brookside does not publish real clients’ statements, which is why the sample statement review is a composite too.

Find Out What Your Chase Statement Is Actually Costing You

If you are in the same position Tom was — banking and processing under one roof, not sure whether the convenience is costing you $1,200 a year or $3,600 — send us a recent statement. We will calculate your effective rate, identify every fee that changed, and tell you exactly what an interchange-plus merchant account would cost for your volume and card mix. No obligation. No pressure. Just the math.

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