In our first blog, Nickel Rounding Is Coming – Xstore Is Ready, Are You?,  we discussed why penny rounding is happening, how it works, what retailers in Canada are doing, and what changes retailers can make to be ready for this change in United States cash tendering and retail POS systems.  

Nickel Rounding in the U.S.: Why the Method Matters

In this follow-up, we take a closer look at the rounding methods themselves, why the choice is no longer purely a technical preference, and how emerging regulatory considerations and customer experience expectations in retail POS environments are influencing which approach retailers are choosing in practice. 

New York’s Cash Pricing Law and Its Impact on POS Rounding

That landscape is beginning to change. In November, New York State passed legislation intended to ensure that customers are not charged more for using cash than for using credit or debit cards, bringing new attention to how nickel rounding is applied in U.S. retail point-of-sale systems in practice. 

https://legislation.nysenate.gov/pdf/bills/2025/S4153A

For those who do not like reading legal documents, the law was put in place to make sure cash payments are still available to consumers for food vendors and retailers. The wording of the law says that a customer cannot be charged more for using cash than they would be for using credit.  

When Nickel Rounding Creates a Cash vs. Card Pricing Gap

To illustrate the issue, consider a customer whose total comes to $10.04. If that customer chooses to pay with cash and the retailer is using a half-up rounding method, the total would be rounded to $10.05. A customer paying by card, however, would still pay $10.04. In this scenario, the customer ends up paying more solely because they chose to pay with cash, highlighting a cash versus card pricing discrepancy created by nickel rounding. 

Under New York’s new law, that difference matters. Even a one-cent increase caused by rounding could be interpreted as charging more for a cash transaction than a credit or debit transaction, placing the retailer on the wrong side of the statute and introducing regulatory risk for retail cash payments. 

The goal of the law was not to force retailers to use a certain nickel rounding method, but we can see that it is a side effect of it.   

At the time this was written, there is no other state- or federal-level legislation addressing this issue. While it’s uncommon for municipalities to regulate currency handling in this much detail, that doesn’t mean local rules can’t exist. Retailers should always check with their accounting or legal teams to understand any potential risk and make sure they’re covered when configuring nickel rounding methods in retail POS systems. 

What Retailers Are Choosing in Practice

SkillNet’s customers who have begun the move to nickel rounding have consistently chosen the round-down approach. The thinking is simple; it creates a better customer experience. And in retail, happy customers tend to make everything else easier down the line. This pattern is not unique to SkillNet engagements. Across early U.S. nickel rounding implementations, retailers are prioritizing customer experience and risk reduction over marginal cost differences. 

Based on these factors, we recommend that retailers consider adopting the round-down method for nickel rounding. While it does result in a slightly higher cost compared to half-up rounding, it significantly reduces both legal risk and customer friction. Our estimates place the nationwide impact at approximately $250–$450 million per year. In the context of total U.S. retail cash sales, that represents about 0.05%, effectively a nickel of a percentage point. From a system and operations perspective, it provides a more predictable customer experience and reduces the risk of unintended pricing differences between cash and card transactions. 

Implementing Nickel Rounding in Xstore

As discussed in the earlier blog, the configuration change for Xstore retailers is straightforward. Xstore already supports multiple rounding methods, including the round-down configuration, allowing retail IT teams to implement nickel rounding configuration changes without major system modifications. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us. We’re always here to help with your retail needs. 

Nickel rounding in the U.S. is still evolving, and we expect more clarity to emerge over time. For now, retailers are navigating a balance between customer experience, day-to-day operations, and regulatory awareness. Based on what we are seeing today, rounding down feels like the right step; it reduces friction, builds trust, and avoids unnecessary risk. As this topic continues to develop, we will keep tracking changes and sharing what we learn to help retailers stay informed and prepared. 

For additional context, see Part 1: Nickel Rounding Is Coming – Xstore Is Ready, Are You?

Related SkillNet Services 

• POS Modernization Services
• Oracle Retail Xstore Implementation & Upgrade Services

The Penny’s Last Run 

How would your company fare if your team decided to start selling a large portion of your merchandise below cost? While not a perfect analogy, the United States government has been doing something similar for years now. It now costs almost three cents to make one penny; literally more than they are worth. The US Treasury has decided that the cost can no longer be justified and ordered its last batch of blanks. Pennies will only be made until those blanks run out, estimated to be sometime in 2026. 

This means that our US retail stores are going to have to make like our Canadian neighbors and figure out nickel rounding. While there is no mandated date for nickel rounding, some US banks have already started to tell retailers that they will no longer supply pennies. In some areas, what retailers have in their store safes, store banks, and cash drawers are all retailers have to work with. Also, it is better to be ready for it now than to scramble to abide by some last-minute legislation.

At first glance, this might seem like just a point-of-sale change, but looking a little deeper, there are side effects that ripple out to multiple touchpoints in the retail world, including auditing, cashier operations, and even customer trust. Every retail organization needs to be ready to adjust these touchpoints for a seamless transition.

What Exactly Is Nickel Rounding? 

Nickel rounding is the calculation of the system to either round up or round down the total amount the customer pays based on the amount due to the nearest multiple of $0.05.  

To get a little technical, the math is basically a “half round up.” Here’s how it works in practice: 

• A total of $10.01 → rounds down to $10.00 
• A total of $10.03 → rounds up to $10.05 
• A total of $10.07 → rounds down to $10.05 
• A total of $10.08 → rounds up to $10.10 

The good news is that this only holds true for cash transactions. Tenders such as credit, debit, gift cards, and those checks that all retailers love, will still be down to the cent. 

Xstore POS: Technically Ready for Nickel Rounding 

Luckily for Xstore Point of Service users, Xstore versions all the way back to before version 7 know how to handle this calculation. It is just a matter of setting up your tender configuration to account for pennies no longer existing. We will not be getting deep into the technical side, but in general, it is as simple as telling Xstore that the minimum denomination is now $0.05 and removing the penny from the system.

Minor configuration changes are all that are required to get Xstore to start calculating cash to nickel rounding. Not only will it start to calculate the new rounded total, but that rounding will show up on the receipt. There is no configuration update needed to show this; the system sees the rounded total and adds it to the tender area of the receipt.  

If you need more details on these configurations, our Xstore experts will gladly walk you through all the changes.  

Unfortunately, this might be the easiest part of the changeover. The next challenge that retailers will have to handle is the downstream systems.

Beyond the POS: Downstream Systems Need to Catch Up 

Every retail business has some kind of accounting and auditing system. These systems read the transactional logs for many purposes, but one of the biggest is to flag the exact side effects of this change, unbalanced transaction amounts. If the amount paid by the customer does not match the amount due, a flag is raised. Downstream systems will have to do a little more math to manage these transactions gracefully.  

Fortunately, Xstore already gives us an easy way to accomplish this one extra math step. In the transactional log, there is already a rounding tag present. Before the configuration changes are made, this tag always has a value of 0.00 because no rounding is being done. Most retailers just ignore it, but it will become very important to retailers since the rounding tag is designed to show the amount that was added or removed from the amount due to denomination rounding.  

In the earlier example of the total owed by the customer of $10.01, but the customer paying $10.00, this tag will have -0.01. A total of $10.08 will have a rounded tag value of 0.02. This tag is present for all tender types, so no special coding is required to filter for just cash transactions. The accounting and auditing systems only need to take this tag into account for the totals to balance. 

Preparing Store Associates for the Change  

The third major touchpoint to get ready is your associates. While the system logic can be updated in minutes, front-line readiness takes planning. The customer-facing users need to be ready to not only understand what they are seeing on the screen but also be able to explain it to those customers. There is no out-of-the-box fix for this issue, but the solution is most likely already baked into retailers’ normal operations and training.  

A simple training session should cover: 

• Which tenders are affected (cash only). 
• How rounding appears on receipts. 
• The rounding logic and sample scenarios. 
• How to explain the change to customers clearly and confidently. 

The easiest way to deploy the tender change to your production stores is going to be through an update build, so this training can be rolled into the training given when deploying any other kind of system change. Just make sure it covers the most important part of their involvement, talking to customers. 

Communicating Change to Customers  

The most critical path to success is going to be ensuring that your customers understand the change, what to expect, and why, in the end, this change does not really affect them at all. There are going to be a lot of customers who suddenly have to pay an extra $0.02 and are going to want to know why.  

• Your employees should be ready to explain what is happening and should be able to point out the receipt where it shows the change. Informing your customers of this change before it happens is the best way to head off any arguments that your managers might have to handle.  
• Some marketing emails or signs announcing the change will go a long way in making sure your customers do not feel “cheated”.  
• Worst case, have a cashier stash of pennies for customers that want exact change. This, of course, could cause other concerns, but we will leave that for your loss prevention teams to discuss.     

Quick Facts: What This Really Means for Retailers  

A few other facts to consider based on other countries’ experiences:  

• Only impacts approximately 0.02% of total transactions since this affects cash transactions of a certain amount 
• Rounding happens post-tax. This means that a retailer’s pricing strategy will have no effect on the frequency of rounding up or rounding down. Item prices that end in 0.99, 0.45, and 0.00 will be affected the same.  
• It is a tender total change so there is no change to the tax liability for retailers. It is the same as a cash drawer over/short count. 
• It will speed up all cash count types and has the possibility of even speeding up your transactions, since no one will have to slide out the pennies from the till one by one anymore. 

From Pennies to Preparedness  

While pennies will still exist in many piggy banks, glass jars, and couch cushions, soon they will not need to exist in your organization’s cash drawers or store banks. This is a monumental change to the American shopper psychology, but it does not need to be an equally monumental change to your operations.  

There are a few touchpoints to manage, but with proper preparations, this can be a very smooth transition for everyone involved. Xstore is ready, and if your team does feel the need for help, SkillNet Solutions is always here to help guide your organization to success.

Learn more about SkillNet’s:

• POS Modernization Solutions
• Oracle Xstore Services