The Credit Card Competition Act is back in 2026: what independent gas stations should do about swipe fees now.

What the Credit Card Competition Act actually does

The Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA) is not a price cap. It does not set your interchange rate, and it does not hand you a rebate. What it does is structural: it would require the largest issuing banks, those above roughly $100 billion in assets, to enable at least one credit-routing network other than Visa or Mastercard on the cards they issue. Today most credit transactions run on a single network with no alternative. Force a second option onto the card and processors can route to whichever network is cheaper, which is how competition starts pushing swipe fees down.

This is the same idea the Durbin Amendment applied to debit years ago, now aimed at credit interchange, the fee that actually hurts fuel retailers. The 2026 reintroduction is bipartisan: Sens. Dick Durbin and Roger Marshall on the Senate side, Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Lance Gooden in the House. The genuinely new development this year is that the effort won White House support, which is the kind of political weight the bill has never had in prior sessions.

Why swipe fees hit gas stations harder than most retail

For a convenience store, card processing is the second-largest operating cost line, behind only labor. NACS general counsel Doug Kantor has made this point repeatedly, and the math is brutal specifically because of how fuel is priced. Interchange is charged as a percentage of the ticket. When the ticket is a candy bar, a percentage is small money. When the ticket is a fuel fill-up at elevated prices, the percentage scales with the pump price, and the pump price is mostly product cost you already paid your supplier for.

Work an example. A customer fills up for $80 and pays with a rewards credit card. At a blended 2.5 percent, that is $2.00 in card fees on a single transaction. Now look at what you actually earn on that fuel. Independent net fuel margin frequently lands in the 3 to 7 cent per gallon range after costs. On a 20 gallon fill, 5 cents a gallon is a dollar of margin. The card fee on that same transaction was two dollars. The interchange did not shrink your margin. It ate all of it and then some, and you paid to move fuel at a loss on the card leg.

This is why fuel retailers are the loudest voice in the interchange fight. A department store marks up its goods and can absorb a percentage fee inside a healthy gross margin. A gas station cannot. The fuel side runs on pennies per gallon, so a percentage-based fee on a large fuel ticket is structurally hostile to the business model. The CCCA is the industry trying to change that structure at the source.

The realism: momentum is up, passage is not guaranteed

Here is the part the trade headlines tend to soften. This bill, or a close version of it, has been introduced in prior Congresses and has not become law. The card networks and the largest banks lobby hard against it, and the counterargument, that routing changes would disrupt rewards programs and card security, has kept it stalled before. The 2026 version has more behind it than any prior attempt, including the White House backing. That is real. It is not the same as passed.

What you can control on card cost today

You do not get a vote on interchange this quarter. You do have several levers that work regardless of what Congress does, and every one of them is available to you right now.

1. Know your true effective rate, per store

Your effective rate is total card fees divided by total card volume, expressed as a percentage. It is the only number that tells you what you actually pay, because it folds in interchange, assessments, and every processor markup and junk line into one figure you can compare month over month and store to store. Most operators quote the rate their processor pitched them, not the rate they are actually paying. Those are rarely the same number.

2. Read the processor statement like it contains errors

Because it often does. Tiered pricing, downgrades from mis-keyed transactions, monthly PCI fees, statement fees, and rate creep after an introductory period are all common, and all recoverable if you catch them. A card statement that jumps 30 basis points with no change in your card mix is a flag that needs review, not a number to pay on autopilot.

3. Negotiate, or switch, on interchange-plus

Interchange-plus pricing exposes the processor markup as a separate line, which makes the markup negotiable and comparable across bids. Tiered and flat-rate plans hide the markup inside a blended number that is easy to quote and impossible to audit. If you are on a tiered plan and have never re-bid, that is the highest-leverage phone call on this list. See how to switch credit card processors at a gas station for the actual mechanics.

4. Use surcharge or cash-discount where it is legal

Passing some card cost to the customer who chose the card, or discounting for cash, moves the economics in your favor without waiting on a network to compete. The rules vary by state and by network, and getting the signage and receipt disclosure wrong creates its own exposure, so this is a read-the-rules-first move. Start with credit card surcharge vs cash discount and the state rules.

Make the fee visible in your close

The reason swipe fees are the second-largest cost that almost nobody actively manages is that they are invisible in the way most stations close the day. Fuel sales, inside sales, lottery, and cash all get reconciled. Card fees show up weeks later on a processor statement that lands in a different inbox than the one where the daily numbers live. By the time you see the fee, it is history, and it is aggregated across every store so you cannot tell which location is bleeding.

This is the specific thing a loss-attribution back office fixes. StationPro surfaces your true effective card rate per store, sits it next to your fuel margin in the same daily close, and flags the month a processor line moves against you so a statement error gets caught in days instead of quarters. It will not vote the CCCA into law. It will make sure that when the fee moves, on a rate change, a downgrade, or a silent markup, it appears on your numbers with the store and the date attached, instead of hiding inside a blended total nobody reads.