That "Save Your Rewards" Petition Is Funded by the Banks Collecting the Fee

If you’ve run into a “protect your credit card rewards” petition on a travel or points site this summer, look at who paid for it before you sign. It was the banks and card networks that collect the fee the petition is defending.

Start with the number nobody puts in the ad. Merchants paid $198.25 billion in credit card swipe fees in 2025, generally 2% to 3% of every transaction. That’s about $1,200 a year per household. You never see it itemized. It’s inside the price of your groceries and your gas, and you pay it whether you carry a rewards card, a debit card, or cash.

What the fight is about

The Credit Card Competition Act would stop banks with more than $100 billion in assets from locking every transaction onto one network, so merchants could route a payment over something other than Visa or Mastercard. More networks bidding, lower fees. Sens. Roger Marshall and Dick Durbin reintroduced it in January. In early August it picked up three more cosponsors: Bernie Moreno, Cynthia Lummis, and Angus King. President Trump backed it in January, saying it would “stop the out of control Swipe Fee ripoff.”

The industry has spent roughly $200 million against it since 2023, according to a Demand Progress report cited by Forbes. About $165 million of that was direct lobbying by the Electronic Payments Coalition, Visa, Mastercard, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, and Wells Fargo. Another $5 million or so went to advertising.

Some of that money bought the petition. The Elliott Report found travel sites circulating reader petitions against the bill this summer, dressed up as consumer activism and funded by banks and airlines. Those same sites earn a commission every time a reader opens a credit card. Asking their audience to defend swipe fees is asking their audience to defend the site’s revenue.

Candid Yak runs affiliate links too. If swipe fees fall, rewards get thinner and so do the payouts to sites like this one. We’re telling you anyway.

Run the trade yourself

The Electronic Payments Coalition says $47.5 billion in consumer rewards was on the line as of 2024. Bill supporters point to Australia, where regulators capped interchange, and estimate the rewards hit at under $1 per $1,000 spent.

Put those side by side. On $10,000 of card spending a year, that’s about $10 of lost rewards against roughly $1,200 you’re already paying through prices. That trade isn’t close.

What to do

Don’t sign a petition you haven’t traced back to its funder. That’s true here and it’s true the next time a site you like asks you to defend a fee you’re paying.

Don’t rearrange your wallet over this either. The bill has been sitting since January, it still isn’t law, and supporters are reduced to bolting it onto unrelated legislation as an amendment. Nothing about your card changes this month.

Go after the number you control instead. Your APR, not the swipe fee, is what drains a balance. Run yours through our debt payoff calculator, then check the credit cards hub and the best credit cards page.

File the rest away. If this bill ever gets a real vote, the rewards ads will get loud again, and you’ll already know who’s paying for them.

How Candid Yak makes money. Some of the products we write about pay us if you apply or sign up through our links. That never changes our verdict, our rankings, or the numbers in this article. We call a bad deal a bad deal whether it pays us or not. Some brands shown in our comparison tools are placeholder examples while we finalize partner agreements, and we label them as such.