Visa interchange rates: how to read Visa's US schedule

Visa interchange rates are the fees Visa sets on each card sale, paid to the bank that issued your customer's card. For US merchants they all live in one public document, the Visa USA Interchange Reimbursement Fees, and the current edition lists rates effective April 18, 2026. Your processor pays interchange to the issuer and folds it into what it charges you.

The schedule is long and written for banks, not shop owners. This guide shows how it's laid out, pulls out the rates small businesses meet most often, and walks through using it to check a statement. If you want the basics first (who collects interchange and why it exists), read our guide to what interchange fees are.

Where does Visa publish its interchange rates?

On its US website, as a PDF. Visa's small-business page on credit card processing fees and interchange rates explains how interchange works, and the rates themselves are in the Visa USA Interchange Reimbursement Fees. Visa keeps a separate rate document for its Interlink network, the Interlink Interchange Reimbursement Fees, so an Interlink line on your statement won't match the main schedule.

Keep in mind what the schedule isn't. It isn't your price: Visa says merchants don't pay interchange directly; they "negotiate and pay a 'merchant discount' to their financial institution that is typically calculated as a percentage per transaction" (Visa). What you actually pay is interchange plus Visa's network fees plus your processor's markup, and our guide to the merchant discount rate takes that bundle apart.

It also doesn't change with your address. A sale in Nashville is priced from the same document as one in Spokane, because the card, the channel and your type of business are what move the rate. The border is different: Visa Canada publishes its own schedule with different programs and rates, which our guide to credit card fees in Canada covers.

How is Visa's interchange schedule organized?

By card, by how the card was taken and by type of business. Visa also lists Non-Qualified Consumer Credit, a costlier rate for consumer credit sales that don't qualify for a better program.

A few notes on reading the labels.

For consumer credit, "Product 2" is Visa's card-present group and "Product 1" is its card-not-present group. Each card product has a rate in both. The gap between them is where online and phone sellers lose money, and our guide to card-not-present transactions explains why that gap exists.

Debit is split 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 of 21 cents plus 0.05%, plus a 1 cent fraud-prevention adjustment for eligible issuers (Federal Reserve). Cards from smaller banks and credit unions are exempt from the cap and get Visa's own debit rates. Visa's exempt in-store rate costs more than the regulated one on sales above about $8, and a little less below that, because its fixed fee is 15 cents instead of 21.

Business-type programs depend on your merchant category code. Visa makes the acquirer responsible for assigning the right code (Visa Merchant Data Standards Manual), and a wrong code can put every sale in the wrong rows.

What are Visa's interchange rates in 2026?

Here are the categories most small businesses run into, from the schedule effective April 18, 2026. To make them comparable, the last column runs each one on the same $80 sale. These are interchange only, before Visa's network fees and your processor's markup.

The same $80 costs anywhere from 25 cents to $2.62 in interchange, and your customer, not you, picks the card. That's why one flat rate can't match your real cost on every sale.

Commercial cards get their own programs. Four of them, run on a $2,000 invoice:

Large Ticket sounds cheap because of its low percentage, but the $35 fixed fee makes it the most expensive line on a $2,000 invoice. By our math, it beats Commercial Card Not Present only above about $2,493, and Product 3 only above about $7,756. Product 3 depends on sending line-item data, which our guide to Level 3 credit card processing explains.

Why does the same Visa card cost different amounts?

Because how you take the card changes the program. A Visa Signature card tapped at your counter is 1.65% + $0.10. The same card typed into your website is 2.05% + $0.10. On $80, that's $1.42 versus $1.74.

Debit shows the effect more sharply. An exempt debit card dipped or tapped in a store falls in CPS/Retail at 0.80% + $0.15. Key the same card in and it moves to CPS/Retail Key Entry at 1.65% + $0.15, close to double.

Over a month, it adds up. Say a shop in Spokane takes 600 exempt debit sales a month averaging $80, and staff key 60 of them because the card reader is unreliable. Each keyed sale costs $1.47 instead of $0.79, so the shop pays an extra $0.68 on each of the 60. That's $40.80 a month, or $489.60 a year, for nothing. A terminal that reads chip and tap every time fixes it, and our POS terminals take chip, tap and swipe.

Small tickets have their own trap: the fixed fee. A $5 sale on a standard credit card in person costs 1.51% of $5 (about 8 cents) plus 10 cents, roughly 18 cents. That's about 3.5% of the sale, far above the 1.51% headline rate.

How do you use Visa's schedule to check your statement?

You match each Visa line on your statement to its row in the schedule, then redo the math. You only need a calculator and the PDF.

1. Make sure your statement shows interchange. On interchange-plus pricing, each Visa category is its own line. On flat-rate or tiered pricing, interchange is folded into a few rates, so there's nothing to match. Our guide to tiered pricing explains why.
2. List the Visa lines: the category name, the number of sales, the volume and the rate.
3. Find each category in the schedule edition that was in force for that month, and check the rate.
4. Recalculate the fee: volume times the percentage, plus the number of sales times the per-item fee.
5. Flag any category that doesn't match how you sell, such as card-not-present lines when you only sell in person.
6. Ask your processor about every flag, in writing.

Say a hardware store in Nashville sells only in person and finds these Visa lines (illustrative figures):

Every rate matches the April 2026 schedule, and the math checks out: 1.65% of $13,200 is $217.80, plus 220 times 10 cents, for $239.80. So the rates are right. The questions are about the categories.

The store doesn't take phone or online orders, so why did 35 sales land in Product 1, the card-not-present group? And 18 sales fell to Non-Qualified Consumer Credit, the most expensive line in the table above. Had those 18 been Traditional Rewards cards that qualified in person, they'd have cost $19.62 instead of $35.82. A $16.20 gap is small in one month, but it repeats every month until somebody asks why.

One more number to work out: your Visa interchange as a share of Visa sales. Here it's $340.37 on $16,730.00, or about 2.03%. Track it monthly. If it climbs while your card mix stays the same, something in how sales are qualifying has changed.

On our interchange-plus pricing, every Visa category shows up as its own line, so you can do this check yourself. Our walkthrough on reading a merchant statement covers the rest of the page.

How do Visa's rates compare with Mastercard's?

Close, but not identical, and the categories don't line up one to one. A few rough pairings from each network's current schedule:

The Mastercard figures come from its 2026-2027 US schedule. Don't read too much into the gaps. You don't choose which network your customer carries, and for most businesses, turning one away would cost more in lost sales than the gap in interchange. Our guide to Mastercard interchange rates walks through that schedule the same way.

Will Visa interchange rates change?

Yes, on two fronts.

The first is a class action settlement. On November 10, 2025, Visa reached a proposed settlement whose terms include "a reduction of the U.S. combined average effective credit interchange rate by 10 bps for five years" and a cap of 125 basis points on standard US consumer credit rates through the term of the agreement (Visa Form 8-K). On June 9, 2026, the court gave the settlement preliminary approval (Visa Form 10-Q). Preliminary isn't final, so none of it is on your statement yet.

The second is the debit cap. In October 2023, the Federal Reserve proposed lowering it; under the proposal, the cap on an average $50 debit sale would fall from 24.5 cents to 17.7 cents (Federal Reserve). Visa's April 2026 schedule still lists regulated debit at 0.05% + $0.21.

Either change would show up as new rates on the affected lines. On a flat rate, it would show up only if your processor chose to pass it on.

Common mistakes with Visa's schedule

• Reading it as a price list. It's what the card issuer gets. Your processor's markup and Visa's network fees come on top.
• Checking last year's edition. Compare each statement against the schedule that was in force that month.
• Ignoring the per-item fee. On small tickets, the fixed 10 or 15 cents matters more than the percentage.
• Assuming debit is always cheap. Exempt debit keyed in or taken online is 1.65% + $0.15, more than a basic credit card dipped in person.
• Trying to negotiate interchange. You can't. You can change which category your sales qualify for, and you can negotiate everything your processor adds.

The next step

Pull last month's statement and look for Visa category names. If you find them, run the six steps above. If all you see is one rate or three buckets, you can't check interchange at all, and that's worth fixing. Send the statement to us for a free statement review and we'll match each Visa line to the schedule and show where you're paying more than you should. Our page on credit card processing fees explains the other layers you'll see.