Stripe International Fees: Cross-Border Card Costs Explained

What is the Stripe international card fee?

When a customer pays with a card issued by a bank outside the US (or outside your Stripe account's country), Stripe charges an additional 1.5% cross-border fee on top of the standard processing rate.

An international card fee is the extra Stripe cost applied when the customer's card was issued outside your Stripe account country. Currency conversion is a separate cost and can stack on top.

For a US account, a domestic card is typically 2.9% + $0.30. An international card adds 1.5% cross-border on top — before any currency conversion. The $0.30 fixed fee stays the same.

Example: $100 payment

What counts as an "international" card?

The fee applies when the card-issuing bank is in a different country than your Stripe account. For a US Stripe account:

The determining factor is where the card was issued, not where the customer is currently located or what currency they're paying in.

How to find international card charges in your data

In your Stripe Balance CSV export, international card transactions are identified by the text [international] appearing in the description field. For example:

To quantify the impact manually: filter your CSV for rows containing "[international]", sum the fee column for those rows, and compare to what the fee would have been at the domestic rate. The difference is your annual international card surcharge cost.

feeauditor.com does this automatically — it identifies high-fee international card charges, calculates the excess fee, and estimates your annual savings opportunity if you shifted those transactions to cheaper payment methods.

How much is this actually costing you?

It depends on what percentage of your customers are international. Some rough math:

Annual extra cost on $100k/year processing volume

At $500k/year volume, multiply by 5. At $1M/year, multiply by 10.

How to reduce international card fees