The CFPB just told the White House it wants another crack at credit card late fees, over a year after the Bureau itself abandoned its $8 fee cap in a settlement.
The Bureau’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs submission for a new Request for Information on “Credit Card Late Fees and Late Payments” is basically the first paperwork stage before any rulemaking. Nothing in the RFI is public yet.
Here’s what died: in March 2024, the CFPB finalized a rule cutting the late fee safe harbor from $30 to $8 for issuers with over a million accounts, projecting $10 billion in annual savings for the roughly 45 million people who get hit with fees every year. Banking trade groups sued immediately, arguing the CARD Act didn’t give CFPB authority to set what amounted to a price control. The case moved from the Northern District of Texas to the Fifth Circuit on appeal, where the Bureau, under new leadership, stopped defending its own rule and agreed to vacate it as part of a settlement.
That’s the pattern here: an aggressive Biden-era rule, industry litigation, a Trump CFPB that walks away rather than fights. Reopening the file with an RFI instead of a fresh rule suggests the Bureau wants a narrower approach that survives a CARD Act challenge, not a repeat of the $8 fight it just lost.
The RFI isn’t due out yet, and Trump has already floated capping card interest rates at 10% this year, so the fee fight isn’t happening in isolation.
Marcus Webb