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Heartland Payment SystemsC50

Platform & Vertical SaaS · Established US retail and restaurant businesses that want a large, well-supported processor, will negotiate…

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Overview

Heartland invented the Merchant Bill of Rights and has spent nearly thirty years making transparency its differentiator, which makes it genuinely odd that it publishes no rate, no term length and no cancellation fee anywhere. The support is real, the interchange-plus option is real, and the $100,000 breach cover bundled into the monthly fee is a better deal than most processors offer. But Global Payments has now put "Heartland Payment Systems is now Global Payments" at the top of its own brand page, so a merchant signing today is signing into a brand migration — new statements, new portals, new reps — with a contract that independent reviewers describe as three years with an auto-renewal and a $295 exit fee. That combination is why this sits at B- rather than higher.

Best for: Established US retail and restaurant businesses that want a large, well-supported processor, will negotiate interchange-plus in basis points, and are comfortable being migrated onto Global Payments' platform and branding over the life of the contract.

Strengths

  • + The Merchant Bill of Rights is a real, published document and Heartland is the only processor to have established one. Its FAQ walks through interchange, effective rate and markup in plain language and tells merchants how to calculate what they are actually paying.
  • + Interchange-plus is offered and promoted, not hidden behind a tiered default. Heartland states that on interchange-plus it takes no share of interchange and passes wholesale cost through without markup.
  • + The monthly service fee bundles PCI compliance validation through Sysnet and enrolment in a Merchant Protection Plan covering up to $100,000 in the event of a data breach — both of which are usually separate line items elsewhere.
  • + 24/7/365 US-based support, with Heartland claiming an average answer time of 30 seconds on its own site.
  • + Scale and stability behind it. Global Payments bought Heartland for $4.3 billion in 2016 and closed a $24.25 billion acquisition of Worldpay on 12 January 2026, so the processing platform underneath is not going anywhere even as the Heartland name does.
  • + Heartland's own FAQ tells you how to lower your costs — validate PCI, accept EMV, avoid downgrades, prioritise debit, consider surcharging where legal — rather than only selling you services.

Trade-offs

  • – The brand is being retired. Global Payments' brand page is headed "Heartland Payment Systems is now Global Payments" and tells merchants the name has changed. heartland.us is still live and still taking new applications under the Heartland name, so what you are actually buying is a Global Payments account mid-rebrand.
  • – No pricing of any kind is published. The FAQ names every fee category — discount fee, transaction fee, monthly settlement cost, service and regulatory mandate — and attaches a number to none of them. For a company whose differentiator is transparency, that is the central contradiction of the review.
  • – Contract terms are also unpublished. Independent reviewers describe a three-year term with automatic one-year renewals, a $295 early termination fee, a further $100 on leased hardware and a written-notice requirement. Heartland does not confirm or deny any of it publicly, so you cannot check before you are in a sales conversation.
  • – Fee and rate increases are the dominant complaint. The BBB profile for the operating entity shows 125 complaints in three years, and the recurring pattern is a price that moved after the account went live and that merchants say was not disclosed at signing.
  • – The interchange-plus markup — the only Heartland-controlled number in the whole quote — is negotiable and unpublished, which means the price you get depends on how hard you push rather than on a rate card.
  • – Heartland was the victim of one of the largest card breaches on record: card data taken via an SQL injection compromise and disclosed on 20 January 2009 — the Department of Justice indictment put the figure at 130 million card numbers, while other contemporary estimates were nearer 100 million — with reporting at the time putting Heartland's compensation payments at over $145 million. The company rebuilt around end-to-end encryption afterwards and this is now old history, but it is part of the record and it is why the breach-cover benefit exists at all.

Fees in detail

  • Online rate: Not published. Heartland offers ecommerce and virtual-terminal acceptance but quotes it only through a sales rep. Interchange-plus is availa
  • Contract: Not published. Independent reviewers consistently describe a three-year initial term that auto-renews in one-year increments unless cancelled in writing roughly three months before the end of the term. Heartland does not state its term length publicly, so verify it on the agreement you are handed.

Standard published rate for a domestic online card payment. Confirm current pricing on Heartland Payment Systems's pricing page.

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