Practice Steps Before Enabling This Feature
On the practice side, implementing a surcharge policy is not as simple as flipping a switch. Before implementing surcharges, a practice must conduct due diligence to ensure compliance with regulations in their respective state(s). While Hint seeks to highlight these needs, we will not verify compliance for a given account. Each practice is responsible for ensuring adherence to state regulations.
We recommend practices take the following steps:
✅ Step 1: Consult Legal Counsel
Check with your legal counsel to ensure your practice is allowed to pass credit card fees to patients in your state, and whether additional steps are needed in preparation. Feel free to share this article with your counsel on how the feature works, to communicate when and how fees are passed through to patients.
State regulations vary and are typically stricter than federal ones.
Surcharging is illegal in some states.
No single-source database provides real-time state-level regulatory updates. Therefore we advise verifying with legal counsel for state-specific surcharge regulations.
✅ Step 2: Update Your Terms & Policies
Ensure your patient agreements and terms of service reflect new surcharges for credit card payments.
✅ Step 3: Notify Your Patients
We recommend informing existing patients about this change so they understand the fees and can update their default payment preferences if desired. To avoid transaction fees, patients can consider using a bank account (ACH) or debit card instead.
Find this link in Settings > Online Signup > Patient Portal and copy the blue link to include in your email.
Important to Note:
Compliance
A practice considering surcharges must complete a state-level regulation review. While Hint ensures universal compliance requirements are integrated into our application design, the responsibility for due diligence and adherence to state-specific laws ultimately lies with the practice. Practices should consult with legal or compliance professionals to ensure their surcharge implementation aligns with all applicable regulations.
Transaction Fees
Transaction fees will be added for payments from credit cards of any brand. No transaction fees will be added for payments made by ACH / Bank accounts, debit cards, or pre-paid cards (such as HSA/FSA).
Please be aware that the credit card transaction fees that will be added to patient invoices are based on your subscription plan in Hint. To review your transaction fees within your Hint account, visit Admin>Account>Billing.
Applicable Payments
Fees will be added to all of the following payments:
✅ Auto-paid invoice payments
✅ Payments made during Online Signup
✅ Manually processed payments (by the provider or patient, full or partial)
✅ Dunning (automated retry) payments
✅ Scheduled Partial Payments
Invoice Type
This feature applies to retail customer invoices only (not sponsor invoices or external payments).
Current Limitation
This feature currently does not support partial refunds. Practices can issue full refunds to patients inclusive of transaction fees, but cannot issue partial refunds on an invoice.
Feature Tiers
This feature is available to all Hint subscription tiers.