If you got your card from a local credit union or community bank for the low APR, there’s a good chance it charges you extra every time you buy from a foreign merchant. The big banks you skipped? Most of their cards don’t.
That’s not a hunch. We counted.
What the government’s own data says
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau surveys card issuers on their terms twice a year. Its latest survey covers the second half of 2025 and lists 663 card plans. We sorted them by issuer size.
Among the 25 largest issuers, 259 of 410 plans charge no foreign transaction fee. That’s 63%. Capital One reported 53 plans and none of them charge it. USAA, Navy Federal, PenFed and Truist reported zero across the board too.
Smaller banks and credit unions flip the picture. Of their 253 plans, 182 charge the fee. That’s 72%. (Giant credit unions like Navy Federal and PenFed count as big issuers in the survey, and they charge nothing.)
Here’s the twist. The small guys usually charge less when they do. Of those 182 plans, 139 charge 1%. Among the big issuers that charge a fee, 134 of 151 charge 3%.
Store and brand cards sit in the expensive corner. Synchrony, Comenity and First National Bank of Omaha issue many of the retailer-branded cards in the survey, from JCPenney and Ulta Beauty to Northern Tool. Together they reported the fee on 77 of 112 plans, every one of them at 3%.
You don’t need a passport to pay it
The fee follows the merchant, not your plane ticket. Experian’s explainer, dated September 29, says buying online from a merchant in another country may trigger the fee “even if the purchase price is displayed in USD.”
So that boutique jacket from a European site, or the replacement part shipped from Canada, can carry a 3% surcharge you didn’t see at checkout. Holiday shopping season is when that adds up quietly.
The math
Take a $2,000 trip. A 3% card costs you $60 in fees. A 1% credit union card costs $20. A no-fee card costs nothing.
Twenty bucks isn’t a crisis. Sixty on every trip, for the rest of your life, is real money for zero benefit. That’s dumb math when Capital One alone reported 53 plans that skip the fee.
Verdict: keep the small-issuer card if it’s your low-rate card at home. Just don’t make it your travel card or your overseas-shopping card.
What to do this week
Pull up your card’s pricing table and find the line labeled foreign transaction. If you can’t find your paperwork, search your issuer in the CFPB’s credit card agreement database.
If the number isn’t zero, put a no-fee card in your wallet before your next trip or your next order from an overseas website. Our best travel cards list and the no-annual-fee picks are a starting point, and our credit cards hub covers the rest.
About our count: The CFPB flags each plan as issued by a top 25 institution or not. Its survey reports plans, not accounts, so these shares don’t tell you how many cards in circulation carry the fee. The data runs through December 31, 2025, and issuers may have changed terms since then.
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.