Rogers is taking a page from Telus’ playbook and will soon hit customers with a credit card processing fee if they use one to pay their phone or internet bill.
Per a notice on its support site and a warning spotted by some customers already, Rogers will start charging a 1.6 per cent credit card processing fee on January 17, 2027. This will only apply to those who pay their bills via a credit card, with other payment options being exempt. These include:
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- Direct debit from your bank account
- Online banking payments
- Cheques
- Rogers gift cards
- Prepaid cards
- Debit Mastercard
- Visa Debit
In the notice, Rogers says the charge “reflects the fees we are charged by credit card companies.”
However, there are some exemptions. For one, customers in Quebec won’t be subject to the credit card processing charge, nor will customers on “select specialized plans.” These include Connected for Success customers and former Shaw Mobile customers on migrated plans.
Quebec residents are exempt because the province’s Consumer Protection Act prohibits charging those kinds of fees.
Update Oct. 21, 2026, at 2:32 p.m. ET: Rogers shared the following statement with MobileSyrup about the new fee:
“When customers choose to pay their bill by credit card, we are charged a payment processing fee. These costs have gone up nearly 40% since 2020, and we now pay about $150 million a year in fees. It’s increasingly common across many sectors for a charge to apply when consumers choose to pay by credit card – and this change helps us recover our costs. Customers have other ways to pay their bill without the charge, including by debit card or direct debit from their bank account, and it’s easy to change payment methods.”
However, $150 million per year in fees is frankly a drop in the bucket for a company like Rogers, which reported over $5.6 billion in total revenue and nearly $1 billion in free cash flow in just the second quarter of 2026 alone.
The credit card fee issue dates back to a lawsuit against credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard over so-called ‘interchange fees’ charged to businesses. The result of the lawsuit was that businesses were granted the ability to add a surcharge to cover the cost of credit card fees, which came into effect in October 2022.
Rogers isn’t alone in charging these fees (and the company sent MobileSyrup a lengthy list of other bills that have credit card processing fees), but I think the finger-pointing misses the point. Canadians are generally fed up with being squeezed by companies for every penny.
The CRTC can’t save you
fizkes/Shutterstock
Notably, this comes after Telus pulled a similar stunt in 2022. The carrier filed a request with the CRTC in August of 2022 seeking permission to add a credit card processing fee of 1.5 per cent. But while the CRTC expressed concern over the practice, it also admitted that carriers didn’t need permission to charge such a fee.
The commission did say it would “explore all available regulatory options” if the process continued, but frankly that hasn’t amounted to much more than former CRTC chair Ian Scott saying the telecom industry should “treat Canadians with respect and do better.”
Ultimately, Telus reversed the decision roughly a year later, telling CBC News it heard customer concerns about the fee.
Back when Telus added its credit card fee, Rogers told MobileSyrup that it had “no plans to move ahead with a fee like this at this time.” Frankly, I’m shocked Rogers waited as long as it did to add the fee. So far, Bell has not added a credit card fee.
But perhaps the most frustrating part of this is that carriers have spent the last several years pushing customers into using credit cards for automatic payments. Carriers incentivized auto pay by bundling discounts with it.
Telus, meanwhile, requires customers to sign up for pre-authorized bank payments to get an auto pay discount, but that brings a host of other issues with it. For example, if a carrier overcharges customers and takes the money right from their bank account — which happens more than you think! — it can be extremely difficult to get the money back. The horrible state of telecom customer service makes this problem even worse. One of the few resources available to Canadians, the CCTS, is facing a rising tide of complaints, causing slower resolution times.
And don’t even get me started on the rampant fraud plaguing the telecom industry right now.
All this is to say, Canadians are being squeezed from all sides by telecom companies. And as much as a credit card fee sucks, I would be very hesitant to give any of these companies pre-authorized bank access. But hopefully Rogers takes another page from Telus’ playbook and reverses course on the credit card processing fee.