Mastercard interchange rates: reading the US schedule

Mastercard interchange rates are the fees Mastercard sets on each card sale for the bank that issued the card. In Mastercard's words, its rates "are established by Mastercard, and are generally paid by acquirers to card issuers on purchase transactions" (Mastercard). The acquirer is the bank behind your merchant account. For US merchants, the current rates are in the Mastercard 2026-2027 U.S. Region Interchange Programs and Rates, effective April 17, 2026.

You never pay Mastercard's interchange as a separate bill, but it's inside every Mastercard sale. This guide shows how Mastercard's schedule is put together, which rates small businesses see most, what pushes a sale into a pricier program, and how to check the Mastercard lines on a statement. For the wider picture, see our guide to what interchange fees are.

Where does Mastercard publish its interchange rates?

In two places. Mastercard's merchant page, Mastercard Interchange Fees and Rates Explained, explains how interchange works and what decides each rate. The rates themselves are in the 2026-2027 US schedule, a PDF.

A few lines from Mastercard's own page are worth knowing before you read the PDF:

• The rates move. Mastercard says its rates "are typically updated semiannually," so check the effective date of the edition you're using.
• Mastercard doesn't set your price. It says it "has no involvement in acquirer and merchant pricing policies or agreements."
• Interchange is one layer. Mastercard calls it "one component of the Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) established by acquirers." Our guide to the merchant discount rate covers the rest of that rate.

The US schedule covers US merchants only. Canadian merchants have their own Mastercard schedule for Canada with different programs and rates; our guide to credit card fees in Canada explains that side.

How is Mastercard's interchange schedule organized?

Each rate depends on the card, the program the sale qualifies for and, for some programs, how big you are. The card part is the easiest to read.

Consumer credit cards come in five tiers: Core, Enhanced Value, World, World High Value and World Elite. In the Merit III Base program, rates run from 1.65% + $0.10 on Core cards to 2.30% + $0.10 on World Elite. Small business cards have their own table, with tiers labeled "Level 1 / Business Core" through "Level 5." Those "levels" are card tiers, not the Level 2 and Level 3 data you may have heard about, so don't mix them up. Large-market commercial credit cards have programs that reward detailed transaction data.

Debit splits by the size of the bank behind the card. Cards from issuers with $10 billion or more in assets fall under the Federal Reserve's Regulation II cap: 21 cents plus 0.05%, plus a 1 cent fraud-prevention adjustment for eligible issuers (Federal Reserve). Cards from smaller issuers are unregulated and priced by Mastercard's schedule.

A few programs you'll see:

The volume tiers matter less than they look. Mastercard's cheapest Merit III rate, Tier 1, requires USD 1.80 billion a year in qualifying volume. Ask your processor whether your volume qualifies for any tier above Base before you assume it does.

What are Mastercard's interchange rates in 2026?

Here are the rates most small businesses run into, from the schedule effective April 17, 2026, each run on a $60 sale. They're interchange only. Mastercard's network fees and your processor's markup come on top.

The card tier alone moves a $60 sale by 39 cents, from $1.09 on a Core card to $1.48 on World Elite. Keying the Core card instead of dipping it adds 18 cents.

Small Ticket rates work differently. On a Core consumer credit card, the fixed fee drops from 10 cents to 2 cents: Small Ticket Card Present is 1.65% + $0.02 and Small Ticket Card-Not-Present is 1.95% + $0.02. Take an $8 sale on a Core card:

• Small Ticket Card Present: 1.65% of $8 is about 13 cents, plus 2 cents, for about 15 cents.
• Merit III Base: the same 13 cents, plus 10 cents, for about 23 cents.
• Small Ticket Card-Not-Present: about 16 cents, plus 2 cents, for about 18 cents.

Eight cents looks tiny. For a cafe in Charlotte running 3,000 small sales a month, it's $240 a month, if those sales qualify. Mastercard sets the conditions for each program, so ask your processor whether your low-value sales are landing in Small Ticket.

For commercial cards, here's the large-market credit card on a $5,000 invoice:

Data Rate III saves $30.00 on that invoice, and it depends on sending line-item data. By our math, Large Ticket only beats Data Rate III on invoices above about $7,756. An industrial supplier in Milwaukee billing a few of these a week should ask which programs its invoices qualify for. Our guide to Level 3 credit card processing covers the data side.

What decides which Mastercard rate a sale gets?

Mastercard spells it out. Each rate has requirements that must all be met, including "merchant category; the time between authorization and clearing; the presence or absence of magnetic stripe data; the submission of enhanced transaction data; and a merchant's Mastercard sales and transaction volume" (Mastercard).

Each one turns into something you can check:

The card tier is the one thing only your customer controls. At the Merit III Base rate, a World Elite card costs more than a Core card on every sale.

How do you check Mastercard lines on your statement?

Match each Mastercard line to its program and card tier in the schedule, then redo the math. You need interchange-plus pricing for this; on a flat rate or tiered plan, Mastercard's categories are folded into a few rates you can't check. For how those pricing models differ, see our guide to interchange-plus vs flat-rate pricing.

1. List the Mastercard interchange lines: program, card tier, number of sales, volume and rate.
2. Find each one in the schedule edition in force that month.
3. Recalculate: volume times the percentage, plus the number of sales times the fixed fee.
4. Flag lines that don't fit how you sell, such as Key-entered sales at a counter.
5. Ask your processor about each flag.

Back to the Charlotte cafe. Its Mastercard lines might look like this (illustrative figures):

The rates all match the April 2026 schedule. Total Mastercard interchange is $469.43 on $21,940.00, about 2.14% of Mastercard sales.

The line to ask about is Key-entered. Forty typed sales at a cafe usually means a card reader is failing or staff are working around it. Dipped and qualified at the Merit III Base rate, those sales would have cost $21.16 instead of $24.28. Three dollars won't change your month. A broken reader will, so fix that. If you take phone orders on purpose, a virtual terminal keeps them organized, and they'll price as card-not-present sales.

On our interchange-plus pricing, each Mastercard category appears on its own line, at cost, with our markup shown separately.

Is Mastercard interchange higher than Visa's?

On the three pairings below, yes, by 14 to 20 cents on a $100 sale, though the programs don't line up exactly. Here's that $100 sale under each network's 2026 schedule, using Visa's April 18, 2026 schedule:

That doesn't mean you should push customers toward Visa. You don't choose the card in their wallet, and a few cents of interchange isn't worth an awkward moment at checkout. If your Mastercard effective rate sits a little above your Visa rate, this is one likely reason, and it isn't a sign that anything is wrong. Our guide to Visa interchange rates walks through Visa's schedule the same way.

When is a line-by-line check worth the time?

Not always. If Mastercard brings in a few hundred dollars a month, the interchange on it is a few dollars, and an hour with the schedule won't pay for itself. Divide your total Mastercard fees by your Mastercard sales, watch that number from month to month, and move on.

It's worth the hour when any of these is true:

• Mastercard sales run into the thousands each month.
• You take payments more than one way (counter, phone, online), so sales can land in different programs.
• Key-entered or card-not-present lines appear and you can't explain them.
• You accept commercial cards, where the program can move the cost of a single invoice by $30 or more, as the $5,000 example shows.

Common mistakes with Mastercard interchange

• Treating the schedule as your price. Your processor adds network fees and its markup, and Mastercard has no say in that.
• Expecting a volume tier. The top Merit III tier needs USD 1.80 billion a year, so check before you assume you qualify.
• Confusing card "levels" with data levels. "Level 1 / Business Core" is a card tier, not Level 1 data.
• Letting batches sit. Mastercard counts the time between authorization and clearing among its requirements.
• Reading last year's rates. Mastercard typically updates twice a year, so match each statement to the edition in force that month.

The next step

Find last month's statement and look for Mastercard program names like Merit III, Small Ticket or Key-entered. If they're there, run the five steps above. If you only see one rate for every card, there's nothing to check, and that's a pricing problem in itself. Send the statement to us for a free statement review and we'll match each Mastercard line to the schedule. Interchange is the same for businesses anywhere in the US; the markup on top is where quotes differ, and our page on credit card processing fees explains each layer.