Beginning October 1, a Maryland retailer that turns away a customer’s cash for a $40 purchase is breaking state law, not just company policy. House Bill 191, now Chapter 714 of the state’s 2026 laws, bars merchants from refusing cash, requiring a card instead, or charging extra for paying with bills and coins on most in-person retail purchases. Governor Wes Moore signed the measure on May 26, 2026, and the Maryland General Assembly’s own bill record sets the effective date squarely at October 1.
What the New Cash-Payment Law Requires
The statute’s text, formally titled “Consumer Protection – Retail Transactions for Essential Consumer Goods – Cash Payments,” is direct about what a merchant may not do: prohibit a customer from paying cash, require the use of a card instead, or charge a fee specifically for a cash payment, according to the bill’s enrolled text. The requirement applies to in-person purchases, so a Marylander buying groceries, clothing or most other retail goods at a physical counter gains a right that, before October 1, existed only at a store’s discretion. Until now, a Maryland business could legally post a “cards only” sign and turn away a customer holding nothing but bills, the same practice a growing number of restaurants and retailers adopted nationwide as digital payment became more common. Chapter 714 does not ban card payments or discourage them; it only stops a business from refusing the cash alternative outright.
Inside the kit: A retailer that still refuses cash after October 1 is violating state law, and documenting that violation calls for the same kind of paper trail a household needs for an unrelated bank dispute. The debt-validation steps and a protected-funds and dispute log in The Bank Account & Debt Protection Kit cover how to keep that kind of record straight.
Which Purchases Are Covered, and Which Are Not
The law’s protection is not unlimited. It covers in-person transactions between $5 and $300, according to the bill text, so a very small purchase or a large one, such as furniture or a major appliance, can fall outside the requirement depending on price. The statute also carves out three specific exceptions: a transaction conducted by telephone, mail or over the internet, and any transaction to pay for parking a vehicle in a lot, garage or metered space. A Marylander shopping online, or paying a parking meter with a card only, is not covered by the new cash-acceptance right even after October 1.
A Separate Law on Rounding Cash Transactions
Maryland lawmakers passed a second, unrelated cash-related law in the same session that is easy to confuse with the acceptance mandate. Chapter 515, House Bill 1026, authorizes merchants to round cash transaction totals to the nearest nickel rather than requiring exact-cent pricing, a response to the declining availability of pennies rather than to cash acceptance itself. That law took effect as soon as it was enacted, separate from Chapter 714’s October 1 start date, and it permits rounding rather than requiring merchants to take cash at all. Confusing the two risks a shopper thinking a store’s rounding practice has something to do with whether it must accept cash in the first place, when the two statutes address different questions entirely.
Enforcement and the Fines for Refusing Cash
A violation of the cash-acceptance law counts as an unfair, abusive or deceptive trade practice under Title 13 of Maryland’s Commercial Law, the same section that governs the state’s broader consumer-protection enforcement. The bill text sets fines of up to $5,000 per violation after a retailer has already had two chances to come into compliance, rising to $10,000 or more for violations after that. That structure gives a business room to correct a cashless policy once flagged before facing the steeper penalty, rather than triggering a fine on the first reported incident. The bill text does not name a single state office responsible for fielding complaints, which typically places enforcement of a Title 13 violation with the Maryland Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division, the office that already handles other unfair-trade-practice complaints under the same chapter of state law.
Why Lawmakers Pushed the Bill
Delegate Gregory Wims, the Montgomery County Democrat who sponsored the bill, said cash acceptance matters because “cash is the staple of our country” and “no person should be prohibited from using legal tender when trying to buy groceries at the supermarket or clothes at a clothing store.” Supporters pointed to Maryland’s unbanked population, about 3.4 percent of households according to a 2023 FDIC report cited in coverage of the bill, as residents who depend on cash because they lack a bank account to fund a card in the first place. Those households are not the only ones affected: a shopper whose card is temporarily frozen, lost, or simply declined at checkout also loses the fallback of paying cash at a store that has gone cashless, regardless of whether that shopper banks regularly elsewhere. The Maryland Retailers Alliance opposed the measure, citing the cost of handling more cash in stores and the security risk of keeping more of it on hand, concerns that did not stop the bill’s passage or Governor Moore’s signature. Delegate April Rose called the escalating fine structure “very steep” during debate over the bill, arguing individual businesses should be free to set their own payment policies.
When a Store’s No-Cash Policy Meets State Law
Maryland’s cash-acceptance law does not cover every purchase, and a shopper who runs into a retailer still enforcing a no-cash policy past October 1 has no single hotline to call, only a state consumer-complaint process built for exactly that kind of violation. The same household juggling that kind of dispute often has a separate bank account problem sitting untouched at the same time, since neither one announces itself as more urgent than the other.
The Bank Account & Debt Protection Kit sets out the 2-month bank protection rule and the frozen-account response for a household sorting out which financial problem needs a call first…