Visa and Mastercard Fee Changes in 2026: What Merchants Pay

If you landed here looking for immigration visa fees, this guide covers something else: the card network fees Visa and Mastercard charge U.S. businesses. In 2026, those fees changed in three ways. Visa raised its digital commerce fees and added a card-present token fee. Mastercard bundled more services into its Digital Enablement Fee. And a proposed $38 billion settlement would trim interchange by 0.10 percentage points for five years. Here is what changed, who is affected, and how to see the impact on your own statement.

TL;DR

• Visa and Mastercard raised or restructured several network fees in 2026, most of them in April. Card-not-present and tokenized card-present transactions are hit hardest.
• The proposed settlement is small relative to the increases. It would cut interchange by 0.10% for five years and cap standard rates at 1.25%, and it still needs final approval.
• Commercial card savings now depend on Level 3 data. Visa's Level 2 incentives ended in April 2026.
• Your pricing model decides who absorbs the change. Flat-rate and blended pricing hide it. Network Offset and interchange-plus show it line by line.
• A statement review takes about an hour and tells you whether a rise came from the networks or from processor markup.

Table of Contents

• What changed in 2026 at a glance
• Visa changes in detail
• Mastercard changes in detail
• What the changes cost merchants overall
• The proposed swipe fee settlement
• Does this apply to your business?
• How to read your statement for the 2026 changes
• Ways to reduce your exposure
• Why your pricing model decides who pays
• See your costs line by line with PaySec
• Frequently asked questions
• Sources

What changed in 2026 at a glance

Most network fee changes are published in advance and take effect on a fixed date. The ones below are the ones most U.S. merchants will see on a statement. Amounts and dates come from Merchant Cost Consulting's 2026 interchange update unless another source is linked.

The dates have passed, so the question for most merchants is no longer "what is coming." It is "what did these add to my cost, and where does it show?"

Visa changes in detail

Digital Commerce Service Fee and token fee

The DCSF applies to card-not-present transactions: online checkout, phone orders, invoices paid by card and subscription renewals. The fee is a fraction of a percent, but it applies to every qualifying sale. For a business processing most of its volume online, that adds up across a year.

The new Card Present Token Fee reaches into the store and the restaurant. According to CMSPI's April 2026 analysis, the updates affect card-not-present transactions and authorized network-tokenized card-present transactions, particularly those from NFC digital wallets such as Apple Pay. A guest who taps a phone at your counter or table terminal can now trigger a network fee that a swiped card does not.

Commercial card data

Visa's Level 2 commercial card interchange incentives ended on April 17, 2026. Verified non-fuel merchants now need to submit Level 3 data to qualify for commercial card interchange reductions. Level 3 data means line-item detail: product codes, quantities, unit prices, tax and freight.

This matters most to B2B sellers: SaaS companies billing business customers, healthcare suppliers, wholesale ecommerce and any restaurant or caterer that takes corporate cards. Capturing and passing richer data also raises a security question, because more detail moves through more systems. If your team is mapping card-data controls to a wider security program, this walkthrough on mapping PCI v4.0.1 into ISO 27001 shows how to cut duplicate audit work.

Mastercard changes in detail

Mastercard's January 1 changes added fees for fallback and force-post transactions. Fallback happens when a chip cannot be read and the terminal falls back to another method. Force post is a transaction posted without a live authorization. Clean chip reads and normal authorizations avoid both.

The larger story is the Digital Enablement Fee. Per CardTraq's analysis, Mastercard folded Return Risk Intelligence, BIN Lookup, Identity Check and Passkeys into the DEF bundle effective April 6, 2026, and stopped billing those services as separate line items. The same source makes a point worth keeping in mind. Most pricing models catch the rate change automatically. They miss that the rate now covers more services. Flat-rate and blended-rate merchants carry that difference inside their acquirer margin.

Mastercard's April 17 updates also cover FPAN masking and fraud-processing changes, and the changes touch MOTO (mail order and telephone order) authorizations.

What the changes cost merchants overall

The totals are large because the fees touch so many transactions. CMSPI Global estimated that the April 2026 updates would add roughly $3.0 billion in cost to U.S. merchants. Within that figure, it put the Visa DCSF update at about $122.1 million and the Card Present Token Fee at about $14.6 million a year. It put the Mastercard DEF update at about $124.8 million.

For context, the Nilson Report figure cited by The Financial Wire shows U.S. merchants paid more than $170 billion in card-processing fees in 2023, with interchange the largest share. The network fee changes are a small slice of that, but they land on top of everything else.

A simple example shows the shape of it. A merchant with $1,000,000 a year in domestic online sales pays a DCSF of 0.015% on those sales, which is about $150 before any minimums apply. That is small on its own. Add token fees, DEF changes and a processor that passes each through with a markup, and the line items start to matter. The point is not the dollar amount of any single fee. It is knowing which fees you pay and who profits from each.

The proposed swipe fee settlement

Separate from the network fee updates, Visa and Mastercard have proposed a settlement with merchants. As Merchant Cost Consulting summarizes it, the deal would lower swipe fees by 0.10% for five years and cap standard rates at 1.25%, if finally approved. A judge granted preliminary approval on June 9, according to PYMNTS. Final approval and implementation terms are the open items. Check the court-approved settlement website or your acquirer's notices for the current status.

Another term deserves attention. Payments Dive reports that the pact would end the rule requiring merchants who accept one Visa or Mastercard card to accept all of them. Merchants could then accept some cards from a network and not others, for example by declining certain premium or commercial cards.

How much will the settlement save?

Less than the headline suggests. Redbridge notes that a 10 basis point cut is about 4% of the roughly 2.36% average credit processing fee in 2025. It also warns that networks could fill the gap with higher assessment fees, which would offset the reduction and raise the overall cost of acceptance.

The practical takeaway: do not plan around a settlement saving. Plan around the total you actually pay, and make sure your pricing model lets you see it.

Does this apply to your business?

The changes do not hit every merchant equally. Match your sales mix against the table.

Redbridge recommends a short list of steps. Understand your volume split across standard consumer, premium consumer and commercial cards. Model the decision to decline commercial cards. Build a surcharge strategy rather than just switching one on. Track total cost of acceptance. And get to the negotiating table with your acquirer early.

For platforms, Payments Therapist frames the questions well: how much of your volume is tokenized, whether tokenization is cutting fraud and improving authorization rates, and whether the new fees are passed through, absorbed or marked up in settlement.

How to read your statement for the 2026 changes

Follow these steps with your last statement from before April and your most recent one.

1. Find the interchange section. Interchange should be itemized by category. A single bundled interchange line with no breakdown hides the detail you need.
2. Separate assessments and network fees. These are the Visa and Mastercard charges. Look for digital commerce, token, digital enablement, fallback and integrity fee lines.
3. Find the processor markup. Under interchange-plus pricing, markup appears as its own visible line. Under flat or blended pricing, it is folded into one rate.
4. Compare before and after. Merchant Cost Consulting advises merchants to compare statements line by line around the April changes. Watch discount rates, per-item fees and authorization fees, which can signal processor margin increases rather than network increases.
5. Calculate your effective rate. Divide total fees by total card volume for each month. A rising effective rate with steady sales mix points to a fee change. A flat rate points elsewhere.
6. Sort your volume. Split card-not-present from card-present, and consumer from commercial. This shows which 2026 changes apply to you.

Our guide to seven hidden fees in a processing statement lists what else to look for, and our explainer on payment processing markup shows how markup is built.

Ways to reduce your exposure

Network fees are set by the networks. What a business controls is how its volume is structured and how it is priced. These are the levers that matter in 2026.

• Submit Level 3 data on commercial cards. If you sell to businesses, line-item data is now the route to commercial card interchange reductions. PaySec offers Enhanced Data Optimization built for this purpose.
• Review your card-present versus card-not-present mix. If online share is growing, the DCSF and DEF apply to a larger part of your volume.
• Keep chip reads clean and authorize every sale. This avoids Mastercard's fallback and force-post fees.
• Look at debit. Our guide to lowering debit versus credit fees and our overview of debit card processing cover the options.
• Understand rewards cards. Premium rewards cards carry higher interchange. We explain why credit card rewards cost merchants more on each sale.
• Choose a pricing model that shows every line. This is the biggest lever, and the next section explains why.

For a longer plan, our 90-day playbook for cutting card network fees breaks the work into weekly steps, and our overview of payment processing trends for 2026 covers the wider picture.

Why your pricing model decides who pays

Network fee changes reach every merchant. What differs is whether you can see them and what happens next.

With a flat rate, a network increase does not appear as an increase. It appears as a thinner margin for your processor, and that pressure tends to come back as a repricing notice. With line-by-line pricing, you see the change when it happens and can act on it.

What we see across merchants

Every year the networks adjust fees, and every year the merchants who feel it least are the ones who can see their costs. That is why we built PaySec around Network Offset Pricing. It passes through true wholesale interchange rates, and it removes hidden fees and flat-rate markups. Our merchants across 18+ industries typically save 30-60% compared to major processors.

The 2026 changes reward detail. Tokenized wallet payments, card-not-present volume and commercial card data each carry their own network fee or interchange condition. Our detailed transaction reporting breaks each of them out, so a restaurant group, a medical practice, an ecommerce store, a CBD retailer or a SaaS marketplace can see exactly which charge applies to which sale.

For merchants selling to other businesses, our Enhanced Data Optimization is designed to put Level 3 data in front of the networks so commercial card volume qualifies for the lower rates available. We pair that with PCI DSS Level 1 and SOC 2 compliance, no minimums, no long-term contracts and fast approvals, including high-risk verticals.

Our advice is simple. Do not wait for a settlement to lower your costs. Choose pricing that shows every line, and put your data to work.

PaySec Marketing Team

See your costs line by line with PaySec

PaySec offers Network Offset, Flat Rate and Custom Enterprise pricing, with no minimums and no long-term contracts. Our merchant services cover in-store processing, an ecommerce gateway, mobile payments, ACH and bank transfers, recurring billing, enhanced data optimization and fraud prevention. Terminals come with free placement at $0 per month.

To see how Network Offset would apply to your volume, review how Network Offset Pricing works or start at paysec.ai. Our team builds the comparison from your own statement.

Frequently asked questions

Did Visa and Mastercard raise fees in 2026?

Yes. Visa increased its Digital Commerce Service Fee and added a Card Present Token Fee on April 1, 2026. Mastercard restructured its Digital Enablement Fee on April 6 and added fallback and force-post fees on January 1. CMSPI estimated the April updates at about $3.0 billion in added merchant cost.

Will the Visa and Mastercard settlement lower my fees?

If finally approved, it would lower interchange by 0.10% for five years and cap standard rates at 1.25%. That is about 4% of an average credit processing fee, and Redbridge warns that higher assessments could offset it. Watch your total cost of acceptance, not the interchange line alone.

Do I need Level 3 data for commercial cards now?

If you sell to businesses and want commercial card interchange reductions, yes. Visa's Level 2 incentives ended April 17, 2026, so verified non-fuel merchants need Level 3 line-item data to qualify. Ask your processor how it captures and submits that data.

How do I know if a fee increase came from the networks or my processor?

Compare statements from before and after April, line by line. Network fees appear as assessments and named network charges. A higher discount rate, per-item fee or authorization fee points to processor margin. Interchange-plus and Network Offset pricing make this split visible by design.

Can I decline some Visa or Mastercard cards under the settlement?

The proposal would end the honor-all-cards rule, which could let merchants accept some cards from a network and not others, according to Payments Dive. It depends on final approval. Model the effect on commercial and premium card customers before changing acceptance.

Sources

• 2026 Interchange Updates, Merchant Cost Consulting
• April 2026 U.S. Network Fee Updates, CMSPI
• Mastercard's Digital Enablement Fee Restructure, CardTraq
• Payment News Today: April 2026, Merchant Cost Consulting
• The Visa & Mastercard $38 Billion Swipe Fee Settlement, Redbridge
• Will ditching the honor all cards rule matter?, Payments Dive
• Judge Signals Approval for Visa and Mastercard Swipe Fee Settlement, PYMNTS
• The OCC just rewrote the rules on bank fees, The Financial Wire
• How to Read Your Merchant Statement, CoreCommerce
• How Processor Increases Hide Behind Interchange Updates, Merchant Cost Consulting
• The Card Brands Changed the Rules Again, Payments Therapist
• Map PCI v4.0.1 Into ISO 27001, ISMS Calculator

Recommended

• Merchants: 5 Data Backed Ways to Lower Debit vs Credit Fees
• Card Brand Surcharge Rules 2026: What U.S. Merchants Must Know
• Why Credit Card Rewards Cost Merchants More Every Sale
• Merchants: Cut Card Processing Fees With Network Offset Pricing