Challenge

For years, AFGE collected dues from its members through automatic payroll deductions from the federal government payment system. But in 2017, with the incoming Trump administration signaling potential changes to federal labor policies, AFGE grew concerned about the stability of this model. In response, the union decided to build an independent dues collection platform to safeguard its financial operations.

That year, AFGE rolled out an initial iteration of its E-Dues platform that was built largely on a ready-to-use billing solution—but it quickly revealed major limitations. The system’s lack of customization options made it difficult to set up multiple dues structures. Onboarding each chapter onto the system took about two weeks, because the payment vendor was responsible for the process and it relied on fragile APIs that regularly broke.

Managing the transition to online dues payments was also a challenge because it could take anywhere from one to six weeks before the government payroll system stopped making dues deductions. As a result, AFGE would sometimes double-charge a union member if an unexpected payroll deduction took place days before a scheduled E-Dues transaction.

Together, those issues made it clear that the platform wouldn’t be able to handle the volume and complexity that would come if the political environment changed quickly and a large number of union members rushed to sign up. AFGE needed a billing platform that could scale to support online dues collection for 100% of its members, while also improving visibility into its finances.

“We were looking for a provider that could support complex subscription structures and recurrence, matched with a developer-first API experience,” said Taylor Higley, AFGE’s director of information services.

Solution

AFGE’s search for a scalable payments and billing platform led to Stripe in 2018. “Stripe understood our vision for growing what was then a tiny program into something much bigger,” said Higley.

AFGE used Stripe Billing’s flexible billing logic and support for multiple pricing structures to define 35 distinct subscription tiers for the union’s 900 affiliates. The result was the creation of approximately 7,500 pricing plans across the organization. To solve the problem of double-charging dues, the union used Billing’s robust APIs to delay subscription payments when necessary. That way, when a government agency that shared payroll deduction data with AFGE sent notice of a recent dues payment via payroll deduction, AFGE could automatically delay the E-Dues payment by one pay period through the API.

With Billing, AFGE began processing dues payments on Stripe Payments. The union used built-in authorization optimizations and recovery tools to help reduce failed payments, including network tokens, which replace a card’s primary account number with a unique, secure identifier, enabling seamless payment processing; Stripe’s card account updater, which automatically updates card details for customer cards that have expired or been replaced; Adaptive Acceptance, which uses AI to identify and retry false declines in real time; and Smart Retries, which identifies the optimal day and time to retry a failed payment.

AFGE also adopted Stripe Sigma, a powerful reporting tool that provides detailed analyses in response to AI-assisted queries. The union began using Stripe Sigma to run daily reports that were automatically integrated with AFGE’s CRM, and to perform ad-hoc queries about dues payment data.

Another improvement that helped support the growth of E-Dues was the adoption in 2018 of the Payment Element, part of Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite—a collection of features designed to improve online payment conversion rates and revenue. Using the Payment Element, AFGE made ACH debit and credit cards available as payment options. More recently, AFGE activated Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Link—Stripe’s accelerated checkout solution that autofills payment details for a smoother checkout flow and higher conversion rate.

To better accommodate members looking to pay via direct debit, AFGE added Stripe Financial Connections, which enables seamless bank account connectivity and verification via bank login. This eliminates the need for members to manually enter routing and account numbers, and it verifies sufficient funds up front to help prevent payment returns.

This unified Stripe-powered platform proved significant in 2025 when new political pressures increased the urgency of the union’s efforts to migrate members away from payroll deductions and a surge of union members signed up. In the first 5 months of 2025, the percentage of AFGE members using E-Dues increased from 11% to 47%.

Results

Onboarding time for local chapters reduced from weeks to minutes

After switching to Billing, AFGE’s developers were able to onboard chapters extremely quickly, with only minutes required to complete the process for each chapter instead of two weeks. As a result, the overall total time to complete the setup for the entire 900 chapters onto Stripe was just two weeks.

AFGE avoids double charges and reduces needs for refunds

AFGE’s implementation of delayed payments through Billing nearly eliminated double charges for the 60% of members whose government agencies send AFGE their data, avoiding thousands of refunds every pay period.

“Having the ability to impact the money flows programmatically has made this a success story,” said Higley. “That agility and degree of control over subscriptions has allowed us to adapt quickly—something that’s been essential to keeping AFGE strong in this environment.”

5.63% uplift in revenue from authorization optimizations and Smart Retries

AFGE has seen a 5.63% uplift in revenue due to Stripe’s authorization optimizations and recovery tools to help reduce failed payments. Those features have also made subscription management easier on the local chapter level, enabling volunteers with little to no technical expertise to easily respond to members’ payment-related inquiries.

Stripe Sigma saves time on finance tasks and improves visibility into dues payment data

AFGE’s information services team relies on Stripe Sigma’s data analysis capabilities to gain practical insights in multiple areas of its operations, including managing its complex dues management structure and data integration between backend systems. The use of Stripe Sigma for syncing data with the CRM saved the union time by eliminating a download-by-API approach that was difficult to scale as the volume of E-Dues transactions increased.

“I’m not a full-time developer, so I love the new generative AI in [Stripe] Sigma, which writes queries with you,” said Higley. “It’s given me a lot of power to find issues I can escalate over to the dev team, for example, or get ahead of questions that may arise on the business side.”

AFGE’s developers turn on six new payment methods easily with the Payment Element

The ease of adding new payment types through the Payment Element became clear when AFGE decided in November 2024 to activate Apple Pay to better serve its member base. “Being able to turn on Apple Pay in one day, that made a huge difference for us,” said Karim Ruiz, AFGE’s deputy director of software engineering. “We love the APIs—they’re so easy to understand and manage.”

Monthly recurring revenue jumps 7x between January and July of 2025

AFGE’s Stripe-powered billing and payment system passed the volume test when a surge of members began signing up for E-Dues in early 2025. In less than 6 months, monthly revenue collected through E-Dues increased from $1 million to just under $7 million.