Section 75: when you can claim from your credit card company

When it applies

The price band is about the item, not the payment. A single item with a cash price over £100 and not more than £30,000 qualifies. And here is the part that surprises people: you only need to have paid some of it by credit card. A £150 deposit on your card for a £4,000 sofa puts the whole £4,000 inside section 75. The law attaches to the transaction, not the amount you financed.

It must be a credit card, or another regulated credit agreement arranged for the purchase, which is why car finance disputes work on the same section. Debit cards, charge cards and prepaid cards are outside it: for those, the route is chargeback instead, a card-scheme process with time limits measured in months. Useful, but a rulebook, not a law.

It covers breach of contract and misrepresentation. This section has the standards of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 built in. A product not delivered. Faulty or not as described. A service abandoned half-done. A promise at the point of sale that turned out to be false. If you could sue the seller for it, the card company answers for it too, including where the seller has vanished, gone into administration, or sits overseas.

One genuine trap: paying through a third-party payment service rather than the seller directly can break the legal chain section 75 needs. Where a processor sat in the middle, the position gets argued case by case. Make the claim anyway and let the card company explain itself, because the ombudsman has seen every version of that argument.

What can you claim?

Whatever you could have claimed from the seller, because the card company’s liability is the seller’s liability, mirrored. The price back for a failed purchase. The cost of putting bad work right. Consequential losses that flow from the breach, the way they would in a claim against the seller itself. The card company cannot cap this at “what you paid on the card”: if the £150 deposit example above ends with the sofa company in administration, the claim is for £4,000.

The letter

Attach what you have: the order, the receipt, photos, the seller’s non-answers. You do not have to chase the seller first, prove they’re insolvent, or wait for anything: the liability is equal, and going straight to the card company is often faster than another round with a seller who has stopped replying.

If they say no

A rejected section 75 claim is a financial complaint, and that puts you on a road this site has already covered. The card company gets eight weeks to give you a final answer. Then you have six months to take it to the Financial Ombudsman. Free, binding on the firm, and well used to card companies whose first answer to section 75 is hopeful boilerplate. Behind it all, a claim under the Act itself has the usual six years of a legal claim, so an old purchase isn’t automatically a dead one.

Common questions

I only paid the deposit on my card. Does the £100 threshold look at the deposit?

No, the threshold is the item’s cash price, and any credit card payment towards it, however small, brings the whole purchase in. A £1 card payment on a £29,999 item is inside section 75; a £99 item paid entirely on the card is not.

Do I have to go after the seller first?

No. “Jointly and severally liable” means you choose who to pursue, in either order or both at once. The right exists precisely for the moments chasing the seller is pointless. Insolvency, silence, or a company on the other side of the world.

Can I use it for a purchase under £100?

Not section 75, but chargeback covers any card including debit, with no minimum, under the card schemes’ own rules. Ask your bank for a chargeback promptly; the windows are short. If the bank refuses to attempt one, that refusal is itself a complaint you can run the normal way.

Sources: Consumer Credit Act 1974, section 75 (the right itself, including the £100 and £30,000 limits); Consumer Rights Act 2015 (the standards whose breach the claim usually rests on); Financial Ombudsman Service (where rejected claims go).