How to Pass the Stripe Fees to Your Customer Easily 2026

Stripe's standard US rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents per successful card charge, though your rate can differ by pricing plan, card type and country. On an $11 invoice, that works out to roughly 62 cents — not a round number, which is why a flat surcharge often over- or undercharges slightly.

Check your own rate under Billing in the dashboard instead of assuming the standard figure; negotiated or volume rates are common once you're processing steadily. Stripe also has a dedicated surcharge feature of its own, currently in public preview and built for developers integrating at checkout.

It calculates a per-transaction maximum for you and enforces it through the API. If you're comfortable writing code against Stripe's Payment Intents, that native feature is worth reading about before you build the manual version below, which is aimed at Invoicing, not checkout.

Stripe's dashboard groups its tools under a few headings: Global Payments for checkout and payment methods, Money Management for payouts, and Revenue and Finance Automation for Billing, Invoicing and Sigma reporting. Passing on a fee is a pricing decision, so Invoicing under Revenue and Finance Automation is where the work happens, not anywhere in Payments.

In the left sidebar under Billing, click Invoices to see every invoice on the account: drafts, open, past due and paid, each with its total, customer and due date. Working from a real invoice is the fastest way to see how a small fee changes the total, since the amount due updates as you add items.

Open an invoice for editing and use the Items section to add a line beyond your normal product or service. "Add a new line item" lets you create one labeled something like "Processing fee" with the amount you calculated, sitting next to your existing catalog items. This keeps the fee visible and separate on the invoice PDF and payment page instead of folding it silently into your price, which matters both for disclosure and for your own bookkeeping.

If a separate line item feels too conspicuous, Stripe's Add tax rate dialog offers a second pattern, even though it's built for sales tax: define a rate as a percentage, then choose whether to show it added on top of the price or included in it. That "Include tax in price" toggle does the same job as a fee baked into the sticker price. Set the rate, choose Included, and the surcharge disappears into the number the customer sees instead of showing as a line.

Surcharging isn't universally allowed, and the limits are more specific than "check your state." Visa caps card surcharges at 3% and requires roughly 30 days' notice to your acquirer before you start; Mastercard's cap is 4%. Neither network permits a surcharge on debit or prepaid cards, only credit.

Ten US states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Oklahoma and Texas) cap or ban surcharges outright, and rules differ again outside the US. Whichever method you use, the amount needs to be clear before the customer pays, not discovered afterward.

An itemized line is the easiest to defend if a customer asks about it later. Building the cost into your base price instead sidesteps most of this paperwork, since a higher price isn't a regulated surcharge. Test the finished invoice as a customer would see it before sending it to anyone for real.