Home / Dual Pricing / Illinois
Illinois permits dual pricing, and puts almost all of the compliance weight on disclosure across every channel you sell through. The counter is the easy part. The web checkout is where operators get caught.
Illinois allows merchants to charge a different price for card payments. There is no state cap of the kind Minnesota has. What Illinois has instead is a disclosure requirement, and it applies across in-person, online and telephone transactions alike.
That all-channel scope is the part that catches people. A restaurant that puts honest signage at the register and honest pricing on the printed menu, and then runs an online ordering system that shows a single price and adds a fee at checkout, has a compliance gap in the channel that is often growing fastest.
There is also a change on the horizon. The Illinois Interchange Fee Prohibition Act stops processors from charging interchange on the tax and gratuity portions of a sale. Its core provision survived a first court challenge, drew a federal preemption order that may exempt national banks, and now takes effect on 1 July 2027. It does not change your obligations today, but it does change what you should buy today.
Where Illinois stands
Last reviewed 1 September 2026. General information about how we configure systems, not legal advice. Confirm your position with your attorney before launching.
Illinois is the state where the online checkout matters as much as the counter. Build it as one program across every channel rather than as a counter program you later bolt online ordering onto.
On the menu, in every channel
Printed menu, web menu, third-party delivery listing and phone-order script all carry the same two prices. One advertised price per item, everywhere the item is advertised.
At the point of sale and at checkout
Signage where the guest pays, and equivalent disclosure on the web checkout before the card is entered. The online step is the one most systems handle badly by default.
On the receipt
The difference shown as its own line item, not folded into the total. Illinois is explicit about this, and it applies to the emailed receipt as well as the printed one.
An illustrative example for a Chicago-area full-service room. We model your actual numbers from your last three statements first.
Worked example · Illinois
Model it
Three statements against a dual-price structure, so the decision is made on your numbers rather than a generic percentage.
Map every channel
List every place a price is advertised: menu, website, delivery apps, phone script, third-party listings. In Illinois this step is the compliance work, and it is worth doing on paper first.
Reprice and configure
Both prices into the POS item file, the online ordering system and the delivery listings, with the receipt configured to show the difference as its own line.
Train the counter and the phone
Phone orders are a disclosed channel in Illinois. Whoever answers the phone needs the same sentence the counter staff use.
Yes, with disclosure. Illinois requires that customers be told across in-person, online and phone transactions, and the difference has to appear as its own line item on the receipt. Debit and prepaid cards may not be surcharged.
Yes, and that is the point most often missed. A surcharge disclosed at the register but not in the web checkout is disclosed in one channel out of the ones you actually sell through.
They are separate things. Dual pricing changes what the customer pays. The interchange rule changes what you are charged on the tax and gratuity portion of a sale. You can run both, but only if your POS can transmit tax and gratuity as separate data fields to the acquirer.
No. The disclosure obligation exists now and the interchange rule is still under appeal. If you are replacing a system this year anyway, specify one that can split those fields, and run dual pricing on it in the meantime.
Delivery platforms control their own checkout, so in practice the dual price applies to your direct channels and the delivery listing is priced separately. Getting that separation right, and documented, is part of the setup.
Send us your last three statements and we will show you what this looks like for your Illinois business before you commit to anything.
