THE PENNY IS GONE AND YOUR CASH TOTAL NOW ROUNDS TO THE NEAREST NICKEL

🔴 Swipe fees hit nearly $200 billion last year. Now the register is splitting into two prices.

CNBC reports that what you actually pay increasingly depends on how you pay.

On cash: the U.S. Mint issued the last circulating penny in November, ending 232 years of production. Each one had come to cost 3.69 cents to make, up from 1.42 cents a decade earlier. An estimated 300 billion are still in circulation, but merchants who run out of change are rounding totals to the nearest nickel.

20 states have passed laws allowing or requiring rounding, according to the Centsless legislative tracker. A bipartisan bill called the Common Cents Act would let merchants round down on totals ending in 1, 2, 6 or 7 cents and up on 3, 4, 8 or 9. It has cleared both the House and Senate, but the two versions differ and final passage is uncertain.

On cards: swipe fees averaged 2.35% of the purchase price in 2024, up from 2.02% in 2010, per the National Retail Federation. Credit card spending rose 5.1% to about $6.46 trillion in 2024 while processing fees rose faster, up 9.3% to $148.52 billion, according to the Nilson Report. The NRF says swipe fees are the second-largest operating cost for most retailers after labor.

So smaller merchants are adding credit card surcharges, permitted by Visa and Mastercard since 2013.

The habits have already flipped. In 2025 consumers averaged 47 payments a month: 16 by credit card, 15 by debit, six in cash. In 2016 cash led with 14.

Would you switch to cash to dodge a card surcharge?

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