The Durbin Amendment is a provision in the final bill of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, aimed at debit card interchange fees and increasing competition in payment processing. The Durbin Amendment asked Congress to establish “reasonable and proportional” fees to the amount of interchange charged by issuing banks for debit transactions.
Merchants are now able to set a minimum transaction amount ($10.00) for credit cards and offer discounts for payments by cash, check, debit, etc. However, as a common mis-conception, merchants cannot apply a surcharge to transactions.
The Durbin Amendment did not make a clear distinguishment between online and offline debit transactions. In otherwords, the federal regulation applies for both check card transactions as well as pin-based debit transaction acceptance.