‘Working People Got Slammed By Credit Card Interest and Fees’
As the article shows, new numbers are out and they aren’t pretty for the American people.
Here’s the rundown:
- Americans paid more than $160 billion in credit card interest charges in 2024 — a 50% jump since 2022.
- “Annual interest charges since 2022 grew 52%, but the number of cardholders only grew by 9%. That represents an additional $45 billion in interest charges not explained by growth in accounts.”
- “Credit card banks made gargantuan, windfall profits by opportunistically raising APR margins when everything got more expensive and then keeping those margins high even when borrowing costs dropped.”
- Americans paid more than $30 billion in credit cardholder fees in 2024 — 25% more than in 2022 — the “highest volume of fees ever recorded.”
- Late fees comprised the largest chunk of this record-smashing fee revenue —American families paid $17 billion in late fees in 2024, up more than 13% since 2022.
And those are just the direct fees on consumers. Consumers also must ultimately shoulder the enormous burden of swipe fees imposed on Main Street businesses. Those numbers show:
- $187 billion in credit and debit card swipe fees in 2024
- $111 billion in credit card swipe fees on Visa/Mastercard transactions alone
- Increases of more than 70% in these fees since 2020
- $1,200 in higher prices on the average American family to cover swipe fees
All of this means gigantic profit margins that other businesses in functioning competitive markets cannot come close to replicating:
- Visa’s latest reported profit margin 50.15%
- Mastercard’s latest reported profit margin 45.28%
- Big banks’ average profit margin 30.89% (highest of all U.S. industries as of January)
- Retail’s average profit margin 4.6% (one-tenth of the banks’ margins)
- Grocery’s average profit margin 1.97%
The credit card industry tries to argue that if we just let them take more and more swipe fees from Main Street they will be good to consumers. All the facts prove that the opposite is true — rip-offs just make the credit card industry hungry for more rip-offs of both Main Street and consumers.
COMPETITION IS BETTER FOR EVERYONE
IT'S TIME TO PASS THE CREDIT CARD COMPETITION ACT