Credit card processing and merchant services in North Dakota

North Dakota's sales tax rate is 5% for most retail sales, and the Office of State Tax Commissioner notes that cities and counties may levy their own sales and use taxes on top. Treat the 5% as a starting point, then add the local rate for each place you sell before you program a terminal or an online checkout.

North Dakota hasn't legislated on card surcharges; we found no statute, and the NCSL table shows none. What binds you is the network rulebook. Visa allows up to 3% and Mastercard up to 4%, in each case only up to your actual cost of acceptance. Debit and prepaid cards are excluded, and the fee has to be disclosed before the sale and itemized after it.

Whether a surcharge is worth it depends on your mix. Suppose a shop runs $15,000 a month on cards, two-thirds of it on credit. A 3% surcharge on the credit portion would recover about $300 a month, and some customers will notice. Cutting the effective rate from 3% to 2.5% on interchange-plus pricing would save about $75 a month on all of it without any customer seeing a change. Some businesses do both.

If you take payments away from a counter, at a market, on a job site or at a customer's door, mobile payments cover tap to pay and mobile card readers, and the virtual terminal covers phone payments and invoices. Every account comes with a dedicated rep, and there's no long-term contract to sign. A free statement review is the simplest first step.