What Canada’s Code of Conduct means for merchants

What the Code of Conduct is

The Code of Conduct for the Credit and Debit Card Industry in Canada is a set of commitments about how merchants are to be treated: what must be disclosed before you sign, how much notice a fee change requires, what you can and cannot be required to accept, and how a complaint must be handled.

It is not a statute. The card networks operating in Canada adopted it voluntarily, and the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada monitors compliance — the Payment Card Networks Act gives the FCAC Commissioner the mandate to supervise payment card network operators and to monitor the voluntary codes of conduct they have adopted and made public.

In practice the commitments reach you through contracts rather than through regulation. A network requires its acquirers to comply, an acquirer requires the processors and service providers beneath it to comply, and the obligations end up in the agreement you actually signed. That is why the useful version of a Code question is usually a question about your own agreement.

The Code was first published in 2010 and updated in 2015. A substantially rewritten version took effect on 30 October 2024, with a further set of provisions effective 30 April 2025.

Who it binds

The Code binds the payment card network operators, the acquirers that connect merchants to those networks, card issuers, and — since the 2024 revision — the downstream participants that sit between an acquirer and a merchant.

That last category is the meaningful change. A downstream participant is any entity with a direct or indirect relationship to an acquirer that provides payment processing services to Canadian merchants: processors, payment facilitators, aggregators, independent sales organizations and their agents. Most Canadian merchants contract with one of those rather than with a bank, and under the older Code their position was less clear than it is now.

The Code does not bind you. It creates obligations for the industry and rights you can invoke; it does not govern how you price your goods or which customers you serve. The card networks’ own operating rules still apply to you as a merchant, and those are a separate document with separate obligations.

What must be disclosed before you sign

Before you sign an acquiring agreement you are entitled to a plain-language cover page: an information summary box setting out the key elements of the agreement, and a fee disclosure box setting out what you will pay. All disclosures must be presented in a clear, simple and non-misleading manner.

The information summary box carries the terms that decide whether a deal is a good one rather than the terms that decide whether it is enforceable — the term and any renewal, cancellation rights and how to exercise them, who to contact, and the complaint-handling procedure.

The fee disclosure box carries the money: the rates by card type and by acceptance method, per-transaction charges, and the recurring charges that do not vary with your volume. Acquirers and downstream participants must also make this information readily available on their websites, and the networks must publish their applicable standard interchange rates, wholesale discount rates and acquiring network assessment fees online.

RapidCents carries both boxes in Section A of its Services Agreement. The summary disclosures are broken out as clauses A.1 through A.10 so that each one has its own number, the fee disclosure box is A.11, and other fees are A.12 — which means a question about a charge can be asked against a clause rather than against a page.

What must appear on your statement

Your statement must arrive no less frequently than monthly, and it must show your effective merchant discount rate for each type of payment card you accept.

The Code defines that rate the way a finance team would: total fees paid to the acquirer for processing a given type of payment card, divided by total sales volume for that type of card. Because the definition is fixed, the number is comparable between two providers in a way that a quoted rate is not.

The statement must also show the interchange rates and amounts, wholesale discount rates and network assessment fees charged during the period, all other rates and fees, and the number and volume of transactions for each type of payment transaction.

This provision is what makes a statement review possible at all. When a statement gives you interchange separately, assessments separately and the count and volume behind each category, the arithmetic that separates pass-through cost from your provider’s margin is available to you without asking anyone’s permission.

Notice of a fee increase or a new fee

A fee increase or a new fee reaches you by advance written notice. You are not supposed to discover it on the statement after the fact.

Under the provisions that took effect on 30 April 2025, an acquirer or downstream participant must notify a merchant between 30 and 60 calendar days before the change takes effect. The same requirement applies where a network reduces one of its core fees and the reduction is not passed on to the merchant in full.

The notice has to be specific rather than general: the previous fee and the new fee, the amount of the change being passed on to you, and whether the change originates with the payment card network operator, the acquirer or the downstream participant. A notice saying only that rates are being adjusted does not meet the requirement.

The networks themselves work to a longer clock. They must give acquirers at least 120 calendar days’ notice of a non-structural fee change and 210 calendar days for a structural one, and must post fee changes publicly ahead of the effective date. An increase applied under a fee schedule already set out in your agreement is a different case, because you agreed to that schedule when you signed.

Your right to cancel without penalty

When one of those notices arrives, you may cancel your agreement without penalty, and the notice itself has to tell you that the right exists.

The right attaches to the events the notice covers: a new fee, an increase outside a schedule already written into your agreement, and a network cost reduction that is not passed through to you in full. It also attaches to a material adverse change to your terms imposed unilaterally, or to material terms added that you did not negotiate.

The window is short, so the date on the notice matters. The revised Code sets it at 70 calendar days from the date the change takes effect, and an individual agreement may give you longer — the window that governs you is the one written in your agreement and repeated in the notice. RapidCents gives ninety days from receiving the notice, exercised by written notice to support and a signed account closure form, at clause A.3, and charges no early termination fee in any case, at A.4.

Cancelling without penalty does not cancel what you already owe. Chargebacks, refunds, fees and fines arising from transactions processed before the termination date survive termination. RapidCents states this at A.5, and every acquiring agreement has an equivalent clause.

What you cannot be required to accept

Accepting a network’s credit cards does not oblige you to accept its debit cards, and accepting its debit cards does not oblige you to accept its credit cards. The election is made per category, not per network, and no network rule may bundle the two.

What follows from electing a category is that you accept every valid card within it on the same terms. You cannot take a network’s basic consumer credit card and refuse its premium card, which is why card mix is a cost to manage rather than a choice to make at the counter.

The second protection is against negative option acceptance. When a network introduces new functionality or a new product, you are not automatically enrolled in it and cannot be billed for it by default; the choice has to be yours.

RapidCents preserves both points expressly. Its Services Agreement states that nothing in the agreement requires you to accept a category of payment method you have not elected, notes that the Code permits accepting credit from a network without accepting its debit and the reverse, and confirms that having elected a category you accept every valid card within it on the same terms.

Discounting and surcharging are not the same thing

The Code guarantees discounting. You may offer a lower price for one payment method than another — cash, debit or credit — and you may discount differently between card networks. Nothing in a network’s rules may prevent it.

Surcharging is a different mechanism with a different source. Adding a fee on top of the ticket price for a credit card payment became available to Canadian merchants outside Quebec in October 2022 as a result of a class action settlement with Visa and Mastercard, and it is governed by the networks’ surcharging rules rather than by the Code.

Those rules set the boundaries. The surcharge may not exceed your cost of acceptance for that card brand and may not exceed 2.4 percent, whichever is lower. You must notify the network and your acquirer in advance of starting, and disclose the surcharge clearly at the point where the customer decides — at the entrance or on the checkout page — and again on the receipt. Interac debit may not be surcharged at all. In Quebec, consumer protection law prevents charging more than the advertised price, so the option is not available there.

The choice between the two is more commercial than legal. A discount for debit and a surcharge on credit can produce almost the same arithmetic and very different conversations at the till, and the surcharge carries disclosure obligations the discount does not.

How to complain, and where it escalates

Start with the party you contracted with — your processor or your acquirer — and put the complaint in writing.

The revised Code sets the clock on what happens next. Your complaint must be acknowledged within five business days. It must be investigated and answered within 20 business days by an acquirer or a downstream participant, or within 30 days by a payment card network operator. If that timeline cannot be met you must be told why and when to expect an answer. Complaint procedures must be published on the provider’s website.

Complaints then travel upward whether or not yours is resolved. Acquirers and downstream participants report Code-related complaints to the networks, and the networks report them to the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada semi-annually — which is how a pattern becomes visible even when each individual complaint is closed.

If the answer does not arrive or does not address the issue, escalate to the payment card network for the brand involved, and to the FCAC, which monitors compliance with the Code. RapidCents publishes its own procedure at clause A.6: support first; the Executive Office if the complaint has not been resolved or closed within fourteen business days; and a final escalation channel if a further five business days pass without a substantive answer.

Whatever the route, the complaint that gets a useful answer is the specific one. Dates, statement lines, amounts, the clause you believe was not honoured, and copies of what you have already sent.