The Durbin Amendment, which was added to the Dodd-Frank Act in June 2010, directed the Federal Reserve to cap the amount that merchants pay to accept debit cards – a cost called “interchange.” On July 29, 2011, the Fed finalized the rule, dictating that debit card issuers could only charge up to 24 cents per transaction – a cut of nearly fifty percent from the average free market rate. Due to this major loss of revenue, debit card issuers were left with no choice but to turn to their customers to make up the difference and ensure that they could continue offering debit card services. Meanwhile, despite years of promises about the savings they would pass to consumers, merchants are laughing all the way to the bank. Experts estimate that merchants will save approximately $8 billion in interchange – costs that will ultimately be passed back to the customer.

Where’s My Debit Discount conducted a year long field data collection to assess whether retailers are passing any savings to their customers. We sent teams to major national retail chains in five metropolitan areas in the U.S.: Washington, DC; Portland, ME; San Francisco, CA; Atlanta, GA; and Boston, MA. The teams performed the first shopping trip before October 1, 2011, the implementation date for the Fed rule, and then returned to the same stores in September 2012. Each time, the same items were purchased to compare prices before and after the rule went into effect. For more information, you can check out our research paper outlining our methodology and our full results here.