Baltimore, MD · Standard risk
Credit card processing for Baltimore dental practices
Large tickets, treatment payment plans and health data adjacency make compliance the expensive variable, not rate. Here is how that plays out for a dental practice operating in Maryland.
Maryland · zero-cost position
Surcharging generally permitted
Our reading as of August 2026. Verified per engagement — not relied on from a web page.
Credit-card surcharging is generally reported as permitted in this state, subject to the card-brand rules: the surcharge may not exceed your actual cost of acceptance, it may never be applied to debit or prepaid cards, and it must be disclosed at the point of entry and again at the point of sale. A cash-discount program is also available if you prefer that framing.
Maryland permits surcharging. Baltimore's medical and dental density means the more pressing exposure is usually card-on-file architecture for patient balances and payment plans, which puts practices in PCI scope unnecessarily.
What Baltimore means for a dental practice
A dense medical and professional-services corridor, where patient-responsibility balances and card-on-file architecture are the main compliance exposure.
Dental combines large tickets with in-house payment plans, and the plans are usually run on a spreadsheet plus a stored card. That is card-on-file at scale without the controls. Large tickets also mean commercial and HSA/FSA card handling, where missing Level 2 data costs real money on every transaction.
Where Baltimore dental practices lose basis points
- Missing Level 2 data on commercial and HSA/FSA cards
- Payment-plan installments processed as unrelated keyed transactions
- Treatment deposits keyed without address verification
How we would structure it
- Level 2 data capture configured so large tickets qualify correctly
- Tokenized payment plans with dunning, keeping card data out of practice systems
- PCI scope reduction so the practice is not storing what it does not need to
- Surcharge structured for large-ticket, low-frequency billing
- Zero-cost structured as a surcharge or cash discount program for Maryland, with the disclosure and receipt language installed as part of the work
Built in Chicago
EY Loma Solutions is a Chicago practice, and every piece of software we ship is designed and built here. When we build a dental practice a custom CRM with payments inside it, that work is done by our own people in Chicago — not offshored and not white-labeled from somebody else's platform.
How our CRM builds workQuestions
Baltimore dental practices, answered
Can Baltimore dental practices legally run 0% cost processing?
Maryland permits surcharging. Baltimore's medical and dental density means the more pressing exposure is usually card-on-file architecture for patient balances and payment plans, which puts practices in PCI scope unnecessarily. For a dental practice specifically, we would structure this as a surcharge or cash discount program sized against a $180–$4,500 average ticket. As of August 2026 that is our reading of the Maryland position, and we re-verify it as part of every engagement rather than relying on a page like this one.
What should a Baltimore dental practice be paying to process cards?
The only number worth comparing is your effective rate: total fees divided by total volume processed. For dental practices with a $180–$4,500 ticket and a card mix that is card-present and card-not-present with payment plans, the cost drivers are specific — missing level 2 data on commercial and hsa/fsa cards is the most common one we find. We derive your effective rate from three statements at no cost.
Do you have Baltimore references, or are you remote?
We are a Chicago practice and we work with merchants across the United States, Baltimore included. Every engagement runs the same way regardless of geography — statements in, arithmetic out, in writing. A dense medical and professional-services corridor, where patient-responsibility balances and card-on-file architecture are the main compliance exposure.
Is dental practice in Maryland hard to get approved?
No. Dental practices are standard risk in Maryland, so you should be looking at a competitive market of acquirers. If you have been quoted high-risk pricing for a standard-risk category, that is worth questioning.
Do you build custom CRM software for Baltimore businesses?
Yes — all of our software is designed and built in Chicago. Sometimes. Treatment-plan financing and recall workflows are frequently the gap between practice-management software and how the office actually runs. Builds are delivered with source code and full data export, with card, ACH and recurring billing embedded in the workflow.
Baltimore dental practices: find out what you are actually paying.
A statement review costs you nothing and takes us under an hour. Surcharging generally permitted in Maryland.