Donations
The quiet leak in online giving: card processing fees, explained
Every online card donation loses a slice to processing fees — and much of that slice is negotiable. Here's how interchange-plus pricing works, and why it matters for missions.
Every card gift arrives a little smaller than it left.
The scenario
December is when Daniel, who runs operations at a small church-planting nonprofit, likes to look at the giving numbers. This past year, online gifts came in at fifty-two thousand dollars — the best month they’d ever had. Then the bank deposits landed at fifty thousand six hundred, and the gap just sat there.
It wasn’t a mistake. It was the processing fee — the small cut taken from every card gift on its way in. Daniel had always filed that under the price of taking cards online. Most of it is. But he’d never looked closely enough to notice which part of it he could actually change.
A $100 online gift
What a ~2.5% processing fee is made of
Interchange and assessments are set by the networks. The gold slice — the processor markup — is what you can negotiate.
There are three common ways card fees are priced, and they are not equally transparent.
Flat rate. One blended percentage on every transaction — simple and predictable, but usually the most expensive over time, because the provider builds a comfortable cushion into that single number.
Tiered. Transactions get sorted into “qualified,” “mid-qualified,” and “non-qualified” buckets, each priced differently. It looks detailed, but you rarely control which bucket a donation lands in, and the logic is opaque by design.
Interchange-plus. The clearest of the three. The card networks set a base cost — the “interchange” — for every transaction. A transparent processor passes that exact cost through and adds a small, disclosed markup on top. Nothing is blended or hidden, and every statement itemizes interchange, network fees, and markup as separate lines.
Why does this matter for a mission specifically? Because recurring gifts are your lifeblood, and they run at high volume. Consider a mission with 500 monthly donors giving an average of $40 — roughly $240,000 in card volume a year. The gap between an opaque blended rate and transparent interchange-plus can easily be a few tenths of a percent, which is somewhere around $700 to $1,200 a year returned to the field — plus, for the first time, the ability to see exactly what you're paying and to verify you're getting any reduced nonprofit rates the networks offer.
The takeaway: ask your processor one direct question — Am I on flat-rate, tiered, or interchange-plus pricing? — and ask to see interchange and markup itemized separately on your statement. If they can't or won't show you, that's your answer.
Most of the fee is fixed — but the slice you can negotiate is the one most nonprofits never touch.
Where SNDR fits
Through its processing partners, SNDR offers interchange-plus card processing — you pay the actual interchange set by the networks plus a low, disclosed markup, itemized on every statement, with PCI DSS Level 1 handled by those partners. More of every online gift stays with the mission.