Cross border fee and FX markup calculator

A cross border fee is a card network assessment charged because the acquiring bank and the issuing bank sit in different countries. It is a geography test. It is not a currency charge, it is not your processor's charge, and it is billed in full on a sale that begins and ends in US dollars. Merchants routinely pay all three charges while believing they paid one.

Card networks do not publish acquirer facing schedules to the open web, but US banks disclose them to their own merchants. Wells Fargo's pass-through schedule effective 1 July 2026 prints a Visa International Service Fee of 1.00% where the merchant is in the US, the issuer or cardholder is outside it, and the sale settled in USD, rising to 1.40% where it did not, plus a Visa International Acquirer Fee of 0.45% either way. Mastercard reaches the same place differently: US Cross Border at 0.60% or 1.00%, plus a Global Acquirer Fee of 0.85%. Both land on 1.45% and 1.85%. Discover charges one International Service Fee of 0.80%. There is a per item step too: Visa bills $0.0395 to authorize an international credit transaction against $0.0195 domestically.

The second charge is your processor's international card fee, and here is the trap that ruins most published estimates. On flat rate pricing the add-on is what you pay INSTEAD of the assessment, because the processor already absorbed the assessment when it set the add-on. Stripe, Square and PayPal charge 1.5%, Shopify Payments and Braintree charge 1%. On interchange plus the assessment reaches your statement and the processor adds nothing: Helcim publishes its pass-through as Visa plus 1.45% and 3.6 cents, Mastercard plus 1.45%, which is exactly the sum of the two Visa lines and of the two Mastercard lines in the bank schedule. Most pages ranking for this term still quote 0.80% and omit the acquirer fee, understating a foreign card by 65 basis points before anyone mentions currency.

The third charge is different because it is usually not expressed as money at all. A conversion charge is a spread: the provider converts at a rate slightly worse than the mid market rate and keeps the difference. Nothing is deducted, nothing appears on a statement, and the arithmetic reconciles perfectly. You simply received fewer dollars than the sale was worth.

Some processors do state it as a percentage. Stripe publishes plus 1% when conversion is required, and separately notes that its Adaptive Pricing feature presents the shopper a conversion fee starting at 2%. Braintree adds 1% when a transaction is presented in any non-USD currency. Shopify Payments charges 1.5% for United States stores and 2% elsewhere, and is the only one here whose documentation states the underlying rate is a mid-market rate without any markup, which makes the charge auditable rather than merely disclosed. PayPal publishes the largest figure and publishes it as a spread rather than a fee: 3.00% on most transactions and 4.00% on the listed conversion types.

Comparing those needs a reference rate from somebody who is not selling you anything, and in the United States that is the Federal Reserve's H.10 release, which is free, weekly and official. Multiply the foreign amount by the H.10 rate, subtract what landed, divide by the mid market value. The Cross-Border and FX Markup Calculator takes the quote direction as an input, because H.10 prints the euro as dollars per euro and the yen as yen per dollar, and reading one as the other inverts the answer silently. It also reports the markup two ways, because a provider that adds 3% to a yen per dollar quote takes 2.9126% of the value, not 3%.

Dynamic currency conversion is the terminal prompt offering a foreign cardholder the chance to pay in their own currency rather than yours. It is the most expensive version of everything above, because the markup is larger than a processor's own conversion fee and is charged to the cardholder rather than to you. That last part is why someone will sell it to you as free money.

The mechanics are documented rather than rumored. Adyen's developer documentation states that a customer selecting DCC pays the current exchange rate plus an additional markup, and that Adyen uses a revenue share model where the markup revenue can be split between the platform, the merchant and Adyen. After the portion Adyen keeps is deducted, the platform chooses how to split what is left. In Adyen's settlement report the DCC markup is its own column, where a negative amount indicates a credit in favor of the merchant. So all three gain, in an order set by a contract, and the rate is agreed in an addendum rather than published.

The network rules that constrain it are also your best defense as a buyer. The cardholder must be prompted to choose, DCC must not be offered by default or on an opt-out basis, and the disclosure has to carry the total in both currencies, the rate used, and any commission, fees or markups over the wholesale or government mandated rate. Visa tells its own cardholders that merchants must not choose on their behalf. The European Union went further: Regulation (EU) 2019/518 requires conversion charges to be expressed as a percentage mark-up over the latest available European Central Bank reference rates, with the main provisions applying from 19 April 2020. Nothing equivalent exists in the United States, which is why you have to compute it yourself.

Stacking is the part worth modeling. A $180 order on standard Stripe pricing costs $5.52 domestically. Add the international card add-on and it is $8.22. Add the conversion markup and it is $10.02. The all-in rate moves from 3.07% to 5.57%, and the two extra charges come to $4.50, roughly four fifths of the entire domestic fee on the same order.

The two tests are independent, and modeling them as one is the second most common error here. Braintree prices them separately: 1% where the card was issued outside the United States, and 1% where the transaction is presented in any non-USD currency. A US issued card charged in euros picks up the second and not the first. A UK card charged in dollars picks up the first and not the second. A UK card charged in euros picks up both. That is why the calculator gives you two checkboxes.

Which charge lands on your statement depends on your pricing model. Whether the third charge happens at all depends on the settlement currency. On flat rate you see the add-on and never the assessment; on interchange plus you see the assessment and the processor adds nothing. A euro balance paid out to a euro account is never converted, so the spread does not shrink, it does not occur, which is why Adyen lets you choose when and in which currency you settle. The cross border assessment survives that, because it is about where the card was issued. Then there is scale: at $60,000 a month with a $180 average ticket, 18% foreign volume and 12% converted, the mix adds 39 basis points to the blended monthly rate and $2,808 a year.

Do nothing if your foreign volume is under about 5% and you are on flat rate pricing. On the numbers above a 5% foreign mix with no conversion adds roughly 8 basis points to a blended rate. That is real money at scale and noise at $60,000 a month.

Act on the conversion markup first, because it is the largest and the least visible. Work out your implied markup against the H.10 rate for the day of the payment. Under about 1.25% you are in published add-on territory and there is nothing to find. Between 1.5% and 2% you are paying something like a stated conversion fee. Around 3% to 4% you are in wallet spread territory, where PayPal's published figure sits, and on six figures of converted volume that is a five figure annual line that never appeared as a fee. Above about 3.5%, check whether the payment ran through dynamic currency conversion at the terminal, or whether the money was converted twice.

Then act on structure rather than on rate. Real volume in one foreign currency argues for a settlement account in that currency, which removes the conversion instead of discounting it. A meaningful international mix on flat rate pricing argues for pricing interchange plus against it, because the assessment you would then see is 1.45% or 1.85% for everyone, so the only thing left to negotiate is the markup. Volume in one country argues for asking what local acquiring would do, since a domestically acquired sale is not cross border at all. What none of this argues for is selling less internationally: a 5.57% all-in rate on a $180 order is a poor rate and an excellent order, and the number that decides it is your gross margin.