Electrician has added £20 charge for paying by credit card

mattie54

Hello,
I recently had some work done by an electrician. Now that I've received the invoice they say I can pay by bank transfer (free) or pay by credit card with a charge of approximately £20. I thought it was now against the law to charge a fee on card payments? I asked them about this and they said it was their payment provider that added the charge and was nothing to do with them. Please could you advise as I would prefer to pay by card but I'm not sure they should be charging a £20 fee

Thanks,
Matt

biscan25

Hi Matt,
You are correct, this has been banned since 13 January 2018. Ask him to take off the charge. Payment by credit card is the most secure method, I would not pay for a service by bank transfer unless I had utmost trust in who I was paying and hadn't received the request by email

D3xt3r5L4b

mattie54 said:

Hello,
I recently had some work done by an electrician. Now that I've received the invoice they say I can pay by bank transfer (free) or pay by credit card with a charge of approximately £20. I thought it was now against the law to charge a fee on card payments? I asked them about this and they said it was their payment provider that added the charge and was nothing to do with them. Please could you advise as I would prefer to pay by card but I'm not sure they should be charging a £20 fee

Thanks,
Matt

If their payment provider adds the charge that’s tough - they need to suck it up and absorb that charge. 

SuperAllyB

If you (quite rightly) refuse to pay the charge, they might remove credit card as an option?  

If the works already done and you threaten to take the matter further they probably don't have a choice though.

eskbanker

Do you have the option to make a credit card payment for an amount of your choosing?  If so, then doing this for the amount excluding the surcharge should reasonably be seen as settling your debt to the sparky, and they'd struggle to enforce any attempt to claim the £20, given the legal situation....

Malkytheheed

The problem with tradesmen (and taxi drivers) accepting card payments is that will have to pay some income tax for once! They don't like that! 

Martin_the_Unjust

Did the electrician do a fair job for a fair price? Are you likely to want to use him again?

If so you may want to consider paying the extra £20, good trades people are difficult enough to find.

jet01

Martin_the_Unjust said:

Did the electrician do a fair job for a fair price? Are you likely to want to use him again?

If so you may want to consider paying the extra £20, good trades people are difficult enough to find.

If he’s trying to illegally charge an extra £20 he has no right to then it’s not a fair price no matter how good is work might be. I wouldn’t want to do business with people who try to rip me off and then try to blame their card merchant when they are called out on it. 

Migster

There's not much you can do in reality to force him to drop the charge. I think it is Trading Standards who police this particular regulation and while you can complain to them, it's probably not something they'll be prioritising for enforcement.

cymruchris

If he's a small sole trader - he might not even be aware that there was a change in the law - or that the law applies to him. You might want to offer him some genuinely friendly advice - about how the law changed a while ago, and you can be prosecuted for charging a credit card fee, and that you wouldn't want someone like him to be caught out. Their payment provider will always have charged a fee - they aren't wrong there. Most businesses hide it in the overall price though - so as a consumer you'll never see it. 

Grumpy_chap

Is the card fee significant?  £20 on a job to fit one extra plug socket is quite different to £20 on a complete house rewire.