The Case Dual Pricing Guides Already Make
Existing guidance on this site and across the industry treats dual pricing as the settled winner over the older cash-discount model: easier to explain to a merchant, easier to sell on a first call, and safer under card-brand compliance rules. That case is not wrong. Dual pricing’s federal protection under the Durbin Amendment is real, and it holds in every state, including the ones that have banned surcharging outright.
What that framing leaves out is the actual patchwork underneath the pitch. Federal protection for one specific structure is not the same thing as a settled national consensus on how every version of card-fee pass-through should be sold, priced, or disclosed.
Where Cash Discount Language Still Fits
Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, and Puerto Rico ban surcharging outright as of 2026, per StrictlyZero’s 2026 state-by-state merchant compliance guide. In those jurisdictions, a program that is genuinely structured and marketed as a discount for one payment method, rather than a fee added for another, is not a workaround, it is the only version of card-fee pass-through those states actually allow.
An agent who has fully switched to selling dual pricing everywhere, without distinguishing structure from label, risks pitching something in a ban state that reads, to a regulator or a card network, exactly like the surcharge that state has already prohibited. The old cash-discount framing still applies there; it was simply built for a stricter legal environment that some states never actually left.
The Number Even the Card Networks Disagree On
Visa’s own May 2022 published compliance guidance caps merchant surcharges at 4%, per CCSalesPro’s breakdown of that guidance, a figure that has circulated across practitioner content for years. StrictlyZero’s separate, 2026-dated compliance guide instead states that Visa and Mastercard now enforce a 3% cap as of early 2026.
That discrepancy may reflect a genuine rule change between 2022 and 2026, or it may reflect one source being imprecise. Either way, an agent repeating either number as settled fact, without checking Visa and Mastercard’s current operating regulations directly, is repeating a number nobody has actually confirmed is still accurate.
New York’s Total Price Rule Complicates Both Pitches Equally
New York’s total-price disclosure requirement does not favor dual pricing over cash discount, or the other way around. It requires that whatever price a merchant posts is the actual, final price a customer pays, which restricts how either model can be presented on a receipt or a sign, well beyond the narrower question of how a surcharge is labeled.
That detail rarely makes it into a pitch built around “dual pricing has already won.” A New York merchant needs the same careful structuring either model requires elsewhere, which undercuts the idea that one model is simply, universally simpler to sell than the other.
Why “Dual Pricing Has Won” Undersells the Actual Complexity
Treating dual pricing as a fully settled, one-size-fits-all replacement for cash discount flattens a genuinely state-by-state, card-network-by-card-network question into a single national talking point. It is a stronger pitch in most states. It is not a complete answer in all of them.
An agent who can name the actual patchwork, which states still require discount-style structuring, and where the surcharge cap number itself remains unresolved, sounds more credible to a skeptical merchant than one repeating a pitch that treats the whole country as legally identical.
What This Means for How an Agent Should Actually Pitch
The practical takeaway is to know which four states still require a genuine discount structure rather than a surcharge label, and to be honest that the exact surcharge cap percentage is a number in flux rather than a settled figure to quote with confidence, not to abandon dual pricing as the lead pitch.
Human + AI SDRs can qualify a merchant’s state and current pricing model before a rep ever gets on the call, so the agent walks in already knowing which version of this pitch actually applies.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- StrictlyZero, Is Dual Pricing Legal in My State? The 2026 Merchant Compliance Guide
- CCSalesPro, The Case for Dual Pricing: Understanding Visa Compliance