PAD vs Interac e-Transfer vs Credit Card: What Getting Paid Costs a Canadian Home Service Business (2026)

For recurring clients in Canada, pre-authorized debit (PAD) is the cheapest way to get paid. Take 300 visits a month at $140. PAD costs about $175 to $540 a month to collect. Cards cost about $1,300 to $1,470. Interac e-Transfer at TD costs about $450.

The catch is software. Housecall Pro and Jobber take cards in Canada, but no PAD and no e-Transfer. And neither one lets an outside tool mark the invoice paid. So the real cost of cheap payments is the office time spent matching them.

We build software for home service shops on Housecall Pro, Jobber and ServiceTitan, including payment links between them and banks. Below are the published rates, a calculator for your own numbers, the PAD rules that matter, and how the matching gets done. This is general information, not financial or legal advice.

The rates, side by side

Last verified 2026-11-03, from Housecall Pro, Square Canada, Stripe Canada, Jobber, GoCardless Canada, Rotessa and TD’s business fee guide.

Two of those need a footnote. Housecall Pro and Jobber both say “all prices in USD” on their pricing pages, and neither confirms the currency Canadian payouts settle in. Rotessa does not state a currency on its pricing page.

Calculator: what your visits cost to collect

Put in your average visit and how many visits you bill a month. The bars sort themselves, most expensive on top.

At the default numbers, the spread is about $1,290 a month between a Housecall Pro card on file and Rotessa. That is roughly $15,500 a year on the same visits.

Watch the caps. Stripe’s PAD fee stops at $5, so it hits the cap on a $460 job. GoCardless stops at $3, which it reaches at about $347. For big one-off jobs, a capped PAD fee beats a flat card percentage by more.

How PAD works under Rule H1

Every PAD in Canada runs under Payments Canada Rule H1. The rule was last amended in July 2026, and paper PAD agreements end on December 1, 2028. Here is what it means for a service shop. (source, verified 2026-11-03)

1. The client signs an agreement first. It can be electronic. The rule calls it a “Payor’s PAD Agreement”. You have to verify who the client is with “commercially reasonable methods”. Rotessa charges $2 per online bank check of the client, when one is needed.

2. Confirmation goes out 10 days before the first debit. The client can waive or shorten that. If they do, the confirmation is due within 5 days after the first debit.

3. Changing amounts need notice. For PADs on a set schedule, you send 10 days of notice before any change to a fixed amount or date. If the amount varies, you send notice before every debit after the first. If your bill changes from visit to visit, put a waiver of that notice in the agreement. Both sides can agree to reduce or waive it, and the clause has to be displayed prominently.

4. Sporadic debits need a yes every time. A “sporadic” PAD is one with no set schedule, like a one-off repair. For those, you need the client’s authorization for each debit, and that cannot be waived.

5. Clients can claw back for 90 days. A personal customer can claim a refund for up to 90 calendar days after a debit. A business customer gets 10 business days. The grounds are a debit that broke the agreement, a cancelled agreement, or missing notice.

6. Cancelling takes up to 30 days. Once a client cancels, you must stop new debits within 30 calendar days.

Put together, PAD fits recurring clients. It fits one-off jobs badly. A weekly clean, a biweekly lawn cut or a monthly pool service runs on one signed agreement. A furnace repair on a stranger’s house needs a fresh authorization, which is more work than tapping a card.

Interac e-Transfer for business: cheap, familiar, hard to track

Canadians already know e-Transfer. That is its biggest strength. The client needs no new form and no signup.

What works:

• Request Money. You send a request, the client accepts it in their banking app. At TD it costs $1.50 when accepted.
• Autodeposit. Interac says funds “land without a login” once it is set up.
• Invoice numbers can ride along. Interac says the system is ISO 20022 compliant, so invoice and customer numbers can travel with the payment.
• Limits are high. Up to $25,000 per transaction, depending on the bank and the account.

What hurts:

• The client has to act every time. A request sits until they accept it. PAD pulls on schedule without anyone clicking.
• Your bank tells you by email. RBC, for example, promises confirmation “through email notifications and online reporting”. Your job software never hears about it.
• We found no plug-in for small shops. RBC offers APIs through an advisor, but documents no webhook for incoming e-Transfers. Interac’s own API is for banks. We could not find a self-serve feed of incoming e-Transfers at any of the big five banks.
• Features vary by bank. Interac says so itself. Check yours before you plan around Request Money or remittance fields.

Interac charges your bank, not your client. Your bank then sets your fee. (source)

Credit cards: the most expensive, and the easiest

Cards cost the most per visit. They also need the least from the client: one card, saved once.

There was a federal cut. Effective October 19, 2024, the government lowered interchange for small businesses under $300,000 in annual Visa volume and under $175,000 in Mastercard. In-store credit interchange dropped to a 0.95% weighted average, and online dropped 10 basis points. Ottawa called it “up to 27 per cent” lower. It “expects” processors to pass the savings on, and the Code of Conduct says they must tell you if they don’t. (source)

There may be more coming. CFIB reported in October 2026 that Visa is raising that threshold to $750,000 in annual Visa sales, with new rates from October 24, 2026. CFIB also reports a new per-transaction network fee, from Mastercard now and Visa in 2027. These are CFIB’s figures. We could not confirm them with Visa or Mastercard. (source)

If you pay a flat rate like 2.9% or 3.49%, ask your processor in writing what changed for you after October 2024.

On Housecall Pro, the card on file is the expensive one. We broke down every rate in Housecall Pro’s credit card fees.

The reconciliation problem

Here is the part the fee tables leave out.

Housecall Pro and Jobber cannot take PAD or e-Transfer in Canada. Housecall Pro’s bank payments are US only. Jobber’s are too, and Canadian Jobber Payments accounts get no EFT, PAD or Interac option. So the cheap money arrives outside your job software.

And neither API can write it back. We read all 95 documented Housecall Pro API operations: invoices are read-only, and nothing records a payment. For Jobber, we found no way to write a payment in any schema copy we checked. A Jobber support reply says invoices are meant to be marked paid inside Jobber. Jobber’s developer docs block automated reads, so we could not check them directly.

That leaves a person. Every PAD and every e-Transfer gets marked paid by hand, in Housecall Pro as “Other” or in Jobber with Collect Payment. At 300 visits a month, that is 300 clicks plus the hunting to find which deposit is which.

What a builder does about it

The honest build is a matcher. It does three things:

1. Reads open invoices from Housecall Pro (MAX plan only, since that is the only plan with API access) or from Jobber.
2. Reads what came in. Rotessa’s API has a transaction report for payment status. It has no webhooks, so the matcher checks it on a timer. For e-Transfers, it reads a bank export or the notification emails.
3. Hands the office a paid list. These 287 invoices match a payment. These 9 are short. These 4 deposits match nothing.

Someone still clicks “paid” in the job software. But nobody digs through statements, and the misses show up the same day.

Full automation only works in a system you own. That means a payment closes its invoice on its own. There, PAD, e-Transfer and cards all write to the same invoice table, and nobody touches it. That is a bigger build, and it pays off only when fees and office hours are both high.

Which one to use

• Recurring clients (cleaning, lawn, pool): move them to PAD. One signed agreement, a waiver for variable amounts, and the lowest fee on the chart.
• One-off jobs: take a card or send an e-Transfer request. Sporadic PAD needs a new authorization each time.
• Clients who won’t sign a PAD form: e-Transfer Request Money. Cheaper than a card, but you chase acceptance.
• Anyone moving volume off cards: plan the matching before you switch, or the savings turn into office hours.

We build these payment links for Canadian shops: PAD and e-Transfer matched against Housecall Pro or Jobber invoices. See how we handle payment integrations, or book a 30-minute call and bring a month of payouts. We’ll tell you whether the matcher pays for itself at your volume.

Adeocode is not affiliated with any bank, processor or software company named here.

On Housecall Pro in Canada? Read what Canadian accounts don’t get.