Congress is trying again to break the Visa/Mastercard swipe fee duopoly

The bill is back

In January, Senators Dick Durbin and Roger Marshall reintroduced the Credit Card Competition Act, with a companion bill in the House from Reps. Lance Gooden and Zoe Lofgren. If the name sounds familiar, it should. This is the same basic proposal that went nowhere in 2022 and nowhere again in 2023 and 2024. It’s now on its third trip through Congress, and this time it showed up with an endorsement from President Trump the same day it was filed, who posted that it would stop what he called the “out-of-control swipe fee rip-off.” Visa and Mastercard’s stock dipped on the news, then recovered within a few days.

What it would actually do

The bill would require banks that issue credit cards and hold more than $100 billion in assets to enable at least two unaffiliated networks on each card, with at least one of them not Visa or Mastercard. Right now, if your card says Visa, every transaction on it almost always routes through Visa’s network. This bill would force a real alternative onto the card, giving merchants and their processors a choice of which network actually handles the transaction, and in theory, some competitive pressure on what that routing costs.

If you’ve heard of the Durbin Amendment, which already does something similar for debit cards, this is sometimes called “Durbin 2.” It’s narrower, though. The debit rule also capped what banks could charge in interchange fees. This bill doesn’t cap anything. It only forces routing choice and leaves it to competition between networks to bring fees down, or not.

Where it actually stands

Both bills are sitting in committee, Senate Banking and House Financial Services. Senate Banking’s chair, Tim Scott, said in an interview earlier this year that he’d committed to holding a markup on it, and then his office walked that back to say it would be a hearing instead. As of this writing, there’s no confirmed record of that hearing having actually happened. No committee vote, no floor vote, in either chamber, despite the presidential endorsement and the bipartisan sponsor list.

That pattern, bipartisan support and a prominent endorsement with no actual committee action, is exactly what happened in 2023 and 2024 too. Prediction markets have been pricing this accordingly: betting markets tracking the bill’s odds of passing in 2026 have put the chances in the single digits to low teens, and falling as the year goes on.

The case for it

The National Retail Federation argues that card networks control something like 80 to 85% of the market between them, that U.S. households pay somewhere around $1,200 a year in costs tied to swipe fees baked into retail prices, and that card-issuing banks collect over $100 billion a year from these fees industry-wide. Convenience store groups and several labor unions have also backed the bill, on the theory that real routing competition would put downward pressure on what merchants, and ultimately customers, pay.

The case against it

Community banks, credit unions, and the Electronic Payments Coalition oppose it, pointing to what happened after the original Durbin Amendment capped debit interchange: average fees dropped from roughly 51 cents to 24 cents per transaction, banks lost billions in revenue, and a lot of that showed up as cuts to free checking and rewards programs rather than lower prices at the register. Their argument is that this bill would do the same thing to credit cards, with no guarantee merchants pass the savings on to customers, while reducing security investment and hurting smaller card issuers who can’t easily add a second network.

What this means for you right now

Nothing, yet. If you’re a merchant hoping swipe fees come down because Congress forces more competition onto the card networks, this is worth watching, not worth planning around. It’s failed to get out of committee in two previous sessions of Congress with similar bipartisan backing, and nothing about this attempt so far looks structurally different. If it does eventually move, the realistic version is a multi-year phase-in for large issuers, not an overnight change to your statement.

If you’d rather lower what you actually pay today instead of waiting on Congress, that’s a conversation worth having now.

Sources

• Senate press release, Durbin and Marshall reintroduce the Credit Card Competition Act, January 2026
• National Retail Federation statements on swipe fee legislation
• ICBA and allied financial trade group opposition statements
• Reporting on Senate Banking Committee hearing and markup status, 2026