Interchange fee lookup: current US Visa and Mastercard rates

Interchange is one line inside your processing cost, not the whole of it. Every published program has the same shape: a percentage of the transaction, plus a fixed amount, and sometimes a cap or a minimum on the total. Visa's Product 2 program is 1.65% + $0.10, so a $50 sale carries $0.825 of percentage plus a dime, which the network rounds to $0.93. That is what your acquirer pays the bank that issued the card.

Two things sit on top of it before you get a bill. The network charges the acquirer assessments, a small percentage of volume. Your processor then adds its markup, which is the only part of the stack anybody negotiates. On interchange plus pricing your statement itemises all three, so the rows in this table appear on it by name. On flat rate pricing you see none of them, which is how a merchant can be handed a worse interchange program and never notice.

Two operators in the published schedules are routinely mishandled by pages that retype them. A minimum is not a fixed fee: Visa prints its restaurant program as 2.10% with a minimum of $0.04, so a $10 check costs 21 cents, not 25. A cap ceilings the entire fee rather than the percentage part of it: CPS/Automated Fuel Dispenser Debit is 0.80% + $0.15 with a $0.95 cap, so a $200 fill costs 95 cents rather than the $1.75 the uncapped formula gives. The Interchange Fee Lookup applies both the way the network does.

What this page cannot tell you is which program a given sale actually qualified for. That is settled after the fact by your merchant category code, whether the card was present, what data your terminal or gateway sent, and when you settled. Your statement records what happened; this table records what each outcome costs, and the gap between them is the money.

Visa's own rate sheet opens by saying that merchants do not pay interchange reimbursement fees; merchants pay merchant discount to their financial institution. That is formally accurate and practically irrelevant. Interchange moves from the acquiring bank to the issuing bank, and the acquiring bank recovers it from you inside whatever you were quoted. You pay it, just not directly, which is exactly why so few merchants can name what they are paying.

It follows that interchange is not negotiable, and anyone offering to negotiate it is confused or selling something. Your processor cannot discount a fee it does not keep. What it can move is its own markup, and on a flat rate plan it can also absorb the difference when your transactions qualify for a cheaper program than your headline rate implies. A pitch that promises lower interchange describes something that cannot happen; one that promises a lower markup should be quoted in basis points over interchange.

The levers a merchant does have are qualification, tender mix and markup. Tender mix is usually the largest and is almost never modelled: a $2,500 rent payment costs $5.00 of interchange under Mastercard's capped Merit I program for real estate merchant category codes on an exempt debit card, and $51.10 on a consumer credit card under Visa's Product 1. That tenfold difference is produced by which card the payer reaches for, and it is why property managers, schools and utilities push so hard toward bank payments.

For a benchmark, the Federal Reserve publishes what US debit interchange averages. Across all networks in 2024 it was $0.34 per transaction on an average value of $46.32, splitting into $0.23 on covered transactions and $0.51 on exempt ones. Credit is another order of magnitude: the consumer credit programs in this table run from 1.15% + $0.05, which is Mastercard's Service Industries rate, up to 3.15% + $0.10 at both networks' ceilings, or $0.63 against $1.68 on a $50 sale.

The first gate is your merchant category code. Mastercard limits its Merit I insurance rate to codes 5960 and 6300, real estate to 6513 and day care to 8351, and each is 1.43% + $0.05 on a Core card against 1.95% + $0.10 for plain Merit I. That is 52 basis points and a nickel, decided by four digits your acquirer assigned you rather than by anything you did at the till. Its Emerging Markets education and government debit rate is restricted to ten named codes and capped at $2.00.

The second gate is the acceptance channel. Visa's CPS/Retail Debit program is 0.80% + $0.15 when the card is dipped or tapped and CPS/Retail Key Entry is 1.65% + $0.15 for the same card typed in by hand. On credit, the card present Product 2 program at 1.65% + $0.10 becomes the card not present Product 1 program at 2.04% + $0.10, and the restaurant program moves from 2.10% with a 4 cent floor in the dining room to 2.20% with an 8 cent floor on a delivery order.

The third gate is data, and it is worth the most on commercial cards. Visa's Commercial Product 3 rate, which requires line item level detail, is 1.75% + $0.10. The same corporate card with no enhanced data lands on Commercial Card Not Present at 2.70% + $0.10. That is 95 basis points for populating fields your gateway can already send, which on $80,000 a month of corporate card invoices is $760.

The fourth gate is scale, and it runs both ways. Visa's Retail Credit Performance Threshold I needs 133.4 million transactions, $8.83 billion of volume, a dispute financials ratio at or below 0.020% and PCI compliance; Mastercard's Merit III Tier 1 needs USD 1.80 billion. Those are national chain rates. The exception runs the other way: Visa's Small Merchant Fee Program is open at or below $280,000 of gross Visa consumer credit sales, and Small Merchant Product 2 at 1.43% + $0.10 is 22 basis points better than Product 2. It is the one place in the schedule where being small is worth money.

Regulated debit is the row most worth getting right, because it is not a percentage and not a network pricing decision. 12 CFR 235.3(b) caps the fee at 21 cents plus 5 basis points of the transaction value, and 235.4 lets an issuer that certifies to its fraud prevention standards add no more than 1 cent. Under 235.5(a) it applies only to cards from an institution that, with its affiliates, holds $10 billion or more in assets. Cards from smaller banks and credit unions are exempt and priced by the network.

Because the formula is almost entirely fixed, the cap is a large discount on a big ticket and a penalty on a small one. On a $250 sale it is $0.34, an effective rate of 0.14%, which nothing else in the schedule comes near. On a $4.50 coffee it is $0.21, an effective 4.7%, where Visa's CPS/Small Ticket Debit program on an exempt card would be $0.11. That shape is what sits behind the Federal Reserve's 2024 figures, where covered transactions averaged $0.23 and exempt ones $0.51.

There is a proposed change that has not happened. On 25 October 2023 the Board requested comment on lowering the base component to 14.4 cents and the ad valorem component to 4.0 basis points, raising the fraud prevention adjustment to 1.3 cents, and updating the cap every other year from issuer cost data. It has not been finalised. The operative numbers remain 21 cents plus 5 basis points, plus the 1 cent adjustment nearly every covered issuer claims.

There is also live litigation. On 6 August 2025, in Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the US District Court for the District of North Dakota held that the Board had exceeded its statutory authority and vacated Regulation II, then stayed its own vacatur pending appeal to the Eighth Circuit so that interchange would not become a completely unregulated market. The cap is still in force while the appeal runs. Plan against the number that is in force, not the one that might replace it.

Both networks reprice on a published schedule, in April and in October. The editions behind this table are Visa's, effective 18 April 2026, and Mastercard's, effective 17 April 2026. That cadence is why most interchange rate tables on the web are wrong: one captured and never revisited has been superseded twice a year ever since. A table with no effective date beside the rates is not telling you the one thing you most need to know about it.

A larger change is queued behind the twice yearly one. Visa's Form 8-K of 10 November 2025 describes a proposed settlement of the merchant interchange multidistrict litigation: a reduction of the US combined average effective credit interchange rate by 10 basis points for five years, standard US consumer credit rates capped at 125 basis points, and more merchant options to surcharge. The Eastern District of New York granted preliminary approval in June 2026 and final approval is still outstanding. Size it honestly: 10 basis points off an effective 1.86% is a five percent cut in the interchange line, not in the bill.

The answer means act in three situations, each checkable from a statement. If you are on interchange plus and volume is settling to Non-Qualified, EIRF or Standard, you are paying the ceiling on sales that should have qualified, which on a $50 average ticket is $0.75 each against Product 2. If your merchant category code does not match a category program you belong in, the gap is 52 basis points on the Mastercard insurance and real estate codes alone. And if a large recurring payment runs on consumer credit when the payer would use debit or a bank transfer, the tender mix is worth more than any negotiation open to you.

It means do nothing at least as often. On flat rate pricing under roughly $10,000 a month, none of these rows reaches your bill and the right response to an interchange table is to close it. If your volume is already card present debit at a supermarket or fuel merchant category code, you are near the floor of the published schedule. And if a processor offers to negotiate your interchange, the useful information is not the offer, it is what the offer tells you about the seller.