From the 31st, 3.004 million credit card merchants will be subject to preferential fees

Fee Refunds for New Credit Card Merchants in the First Half of This Year

We have truly entered the endemic era. Our daily lives, overturned by the COVID-19 virus, are rapidly recovering. Insadong, which once only had banners expressing the pain of self-employed workers on its gloomy streets, is now bustling with the energy of foreign tourists as if nothing had happened. Even the sight of people wearing masks has become an unfamiliar scene. COVID-19 is quietly fading into a distant memory for us. Photo by Jinhyung Kang aymsdream@

From the 31st, preferential fees will be applied based on sales amount brackets to 3,004,000 credit card merchants. There are a total of 3,136,000 credit card merchants, of which this corresponds to 95.8%.

The Korea Financial Telecommunications & Clearings Institute (KFTC) has sent application notices to merchant business locations for credit card merchants eligible for preferential fee rates. You can check the applied fee rates through the KFTC call center or the integrated merchant sales transaction information inquiry system.

PG sub-merchants who receive card payments through PG companies or transportation settlement operators, as well as individual taxi operators, will also be subject to preferential fees. Preferential fee rates (0.5~1.5%) will be applied to 1,626,000 PG sub-merchants with annual sales of 3 billion KRW or less (93.1% of all PG sub-merchants) and 165,000 individual taxi operators (99.9% of all taxi operators). Whether preferential fees apply can be confirmed through the PG company or transportation settlement operator used by the business operator.

If a newly opened credit card merchant in the first half of 2023 initially applied the general merchant fee rate but was later confirmed through National Tax Service tax data, etc., to fall under small or medium-sized merchants based on sales scale, the preferential fee rate will be applied retroactively, and each card company will refund the fee difference to the merchant’s card payment account.

The refund amount is calculated as the difference between the card fees already paid by the newly opened credit card merchants in the first half and the card fees that would have been paid if the preferential fee rate had been applied.

You can check the total refund amount through the KFTC’s integrated merchant sales transaction information inquiry system, and detailed information such as daily and per-case refund amounts can be confirmed on each card company’s website. It is estimated that about 65 billion KRW will be refunded to 194,000 merchants newly opened in the first half of 2023 with annual sales of 3 billion KRW or less.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.