Adyen fee calculator: what interchange++ actually costs

Adyen does not have a rate. It has a markup, and the markup sits on top of two costs that belong to other companies. The first plus is interchange, which goes to the bank that issued your customer's card. The second plus is the card scheme fee, which goes to Visa or Mastercard. Adyen's own money is what is left: an acquirer fee its documentation says starts at 0.60 percent per transaction and falls with monthly card volume, plus a $0.13 fixed processing fee charged on every transaction whatever the payment method. Quote any one of the three on its own and you have a number that describes nothing.

The Adyen Fee Calculator asks which card was used, applies Visa's published interchange for that card, adds the scheme fee, adds Adyen's two lines, and shows the four figures separately. The split on the default scenario holds roughly across the whole US card mix. An $85 online payment on a Visa traditional rewards card costs $2.61: $1.83 of interchange, $0.14 of scheme fees, $0.51 of Adyen acquirer fee and $0.13 of Adyen processing fee. Pass-through is $1.97, or 75.5 percent. Adyen is $0.64, or 24.5 percent.

That last figure is the only one anybody can negotiate, and a ten basis point improvement on it is worth eight and a half cents on this payment. One quirk catches people on refunds. Adyen's support documentation describes the processing fee as charged when Adyen receives a payment request or a refund request, so a sale that is later refunded carries the $0.13 twice. On a low margin business with a high return rate that is a real line, and it is separate from the interchange the issuer keeps.

Interchange is the largest component and it is set entirely by the card. Visa publishes the whole schedule. On a card not present consumer credit payment under Visa's Product 1 programme, effective 18 April 2026, a plain card with no rewards programme costs 1.89 percent plus $0.10, a traditional rewards card 2.04 percent plus $0.10, a Visa Signature card 2.05 percent plus $0.10, a Visa Signature Preferred card 2.50 percent plus $0.10, and a spend qualified Visa Infinite card 2.60 percent plus $0.10. That is a 71 basis point spread on identical transactions, wider than Adyen's entire acquirer fee.

Debit is a different world. A regulated debit card, capped by the Durbin Amendment, costs 0.05 percent plus $0.21 online, with an additional $0.01 where the issuer certifies compliance with Visa's fraud prevention standards. An exempt debit card from a small issuer costs 1.65 percent plus $0.15 for the same purchase, over thirty times as much on a $50 order. In a store the rate halves again to 0.80 percent plus $0.15 under CPS/Retail. If much of your volume is regulated debit, a flat rate plan is charging you a credit card price for a debit card cost.

Scheme fees are the smaller plus and the one with no public schedule, because Visa and Mastercard do not publish acquirer facing rates to the open web. What is published is what a bank discloses to its own merchants: a Visa U.S. Acquirer Service Fee of 0.14 percent on credit and 0.13 percent on debit, and an authorization processing fee of $0.0195 on a US credit authorization. Treat those as a floor. Both networks levy a dozen further conditional fees and Adyen passes all of them through in the same invoice line, so this page's default understates the scheme fee rather than overstating it.

The received wisdom is that interchange++ beats a flat rate on large tickets and loses on small ones. Run Adyen's actual price list and that inverts. Adyen's total fixed cost on a US card not present credit payment is $0.2495: ten cents of interchange, $0.0195 of scheme fee and $0.13 of processing fee, against 30 cents on a 2.9 percent plus 30 cents flat rate. Adyen is five and a half cents cheaper before the percentage is considered at all, so it wins on the smallest tickets. A $5 payment costs $0.39 on Adyen against $0.45 flat.

What decides the answer is the card, and the crossover runs in both directions. On a plain, traditional rewards or Visa Signature card, Adyen's combined percentage is 2.78 to 2.79 percent, under the flat 2.9 percent, and its fixed cost is under 30 cents, so there is no crossover at all: Adyen is cheaper at every ticket and the gap widens as the ticket grows. On a Visa Signature Preferred card the combined percentage is 3.24 percent and the two prices meet at $14.85, above which the flat rate wins. On a spend qualified Visa Infinite card the crossover falls to $11.48. American Express in North America, at 3.3 percent plus $0.10 on top of the $0.13, crosses at exactly $17.50.

Two readings follow. If your basket is heavy in premium rewards cards, interchange++ transfers that expense onto you and a flat rate is card mix insurance you were getting cheaply. And the answer is sensitive to the acquirer fee you are actually quoted: on $250,000 of monthly volume every extra 0.20 percentage points costs $500 a month, so a markup above roughly 0.78 percent wipes out the $448.52 advantage in the worked example above. Adyen says the acquirer fee starts at 0.60 percent and is determined by monthly card volume, so 0.60 percent is a floor, not a rate to assume.

Adyen states on its pricing page that it has no monthly fees, setup fees, integration fees or closure fees, then adds that it does have a minimum invoice depending on industry or business model. It does not say what the minimum is, and this page will not invent one. The calculator treats it as an input with a starting value of $120, the figure third party reviews most commonly report for direct US accounts, and you should replace it with whatever your own agreement says. Enterprise contracts run materially higher.

The mechanism is what matters, and it is the one a merchant account monthly minimum uses: a floor on the invoice, not an extra line on it. Adyen bills the greater of the month's fees and the minimum, so a merchant generating $61.59 of fees against a $120 minimum pays $120, not $181.59. Modelling it as an addition, which is what a monthly fee field invites, overstates a small merchant's bill by the whole of the fees they actually generated. This calculator applies it as a floor for exactly that reason.

The volume that clears the floor is one line of arithmetic: cost per dollar of volume is the combined percentage plus the combined fixed fee divided by the average ticket. On the default profile that is 2.78 percent plus $0.2495 divided by $85, which is 3.0735 percent, so a $120 minimum stops costing anything above $3,904 a month. Change the ticket and it barely moves: $3,176 at a $25 ticket, $4,167 at a $250 ticket. That is a low bar, and it says something plainly. Adyen's minimum invoice is not what keeps small merchants off Adyen. Its onboarding is.

Do nothing if your card mix is premium rewards heavy and your quoted acquirer fee is not close to the 0.60 percent floor. Those two together turn interchange++ from a saving into a bill, and both are visible before you sign. Ask for a card mix breakdown off your current statement, then ask Adyen what fee your volume actually earns rather than reading the number off the price list. A quoted markup above roughly 0.78 percent on a rewards heavy US online basket means a 2.9 percent plus 30 cents flat rate is cheaper, and the honest answer is to stay put.

Switch when your volume contains cheap cards you are currently paying a credit card price for. Regulated debit at 0.05 percent plus $0.21 costs $1.03 on an $85 payment through Adyen against $2.77 on a flat rate, and every cent of that difference is currently margin for your flat rate processor. The same logic applies in a store, where Visa's Retail Credit programme prices a plain consumer credit card at 1.43 percent plus $0.10 against 1.89 percent online. A business with a shop and a website should never measure itself against one blended number.

Move the large tickets off cards before renegotiating anything. Adyen prices ACH Direct Debit at $0.27 plus the $0.13 processing fee, so $0.40 flat, with no percentage and no cap because it needs none. A $4,000 B2B invoice costs $0.40 by ACH and $111.45 on a Visa rewards card through the same processor, and the crossover against a card is $3.45. After that, treat the acquirer fee as the only negotiable line and revisit it annually: interchange resets every April and October when Visa republishes, and your markup moves when your volume does.