Article
What card fees actually cost a masjid in Ramadan
Most treasurers know they pay "about 1.7%". Very few have multiplied it out across the one month of the year when giving triples. Here is the arithmetic, with nothing hidden.
The month that dominates the year
For most UK masjids, Ramadan is not a busy month — it is the year. Nightly ṣalāh, iftar collections, appeals between prayers, Laylat al-Qadr. It is common for a masjid to take a third or more of its annual donations in those thirty days, and contactless is now how a large share of that arrives.
Say a masjid takes £40,000 across Ramadan on card. At a typical donation-station rate of 1.69%, the fees are £676. At 1.99% — the published rate of at least one UK donation-kiosk vendor — it is £796. If those gifts came through a QR-code page at 2.5%, the fee is £1,000. That is a month of a part-time caretaker's wages, taken in slices of a few pence.
The slices nobody sees
Card fees are invisible in a way cash never was. Nobody stands at the door removing 4p from a £2 coin. But a £20 tap loses 34p to 45p on the card rails before it reaches the account — ours included — and the donor has no idea: they gave £20 and the masjid received a little over £19.60.
Add a platform subscription on top — £7.50 to £15 a month is normal for donation stations — and a masjid with two terminals can be paying £180 to £360 a year before a single donation is counted.
The two levers that actually move the number
There are only two honest ways to reduce this, and one of them is usually left on the table.
1. Claim the Gift Aid you're entitled to. This is the bigger number by far. Gift Aid adds 25% to eligible donations — on that same £40,000, if even half the gifts are Gift-Aid eligible and declared, that is £5,000 reclaimed from HMRC — £4,875 net if you use our claims service, which charges 2.5% of what it recovers. Compare either figure with the £676 in fees you were worrying about. The reason most masjids don't claim it isn't reluctance; it's that nobody asks the donor at the moment of giving, and a declaration collected later is a declaration you'll never chase down. On top of that, the Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme lets you claim on small contactless gifts of £30 or less without any declaration at all, up to £8,000 of donations a year.
2. Move payments off the card rails. A card donation travels through the card network, and several parties take a percentage on the way. A Pay by Bank donation moves directly from the donor's bank to yours over Faster Payments — fewer hands, and a fee we pass through at exactly what Stripe charges: 0.5% + 20p per payment, capped at £5, with nothing added by tapbanc. Because of the fixed 20p, that beats a 1.69% card rate on gifts above about £17 — a £50 gift costs 45p instead of 84.5p — and, to be honest about it, costs slightly more below that. On £20,000 of Ramadan giving moved across in £50 gifts, that is £158 saved in a single month (in £20 gifts the saving is a more modest £38); the money also arrives in seconds rather than days, which matters when an appeal is being counted the same night.
What to ask your provider this year
- What is my exact in-person rate, and is there a monthly fee on top of it?
- Does the terminal ask donors for Gift Aid at the moment they give — or not at all?
- Am I claiming GASDS on small contactless gifts? (If nobody has mentioned it, you almost certainly aren't.)
- Can donors pay directly from their banking app, or is card the only option?
- When does the money actually reach the masjid's account — the same night, or next week?
None of this requires switching in a panic. It requires one page of arithmetic before next Ramadan, done with your own numbers rather than anyone's marketing.