The April 2026 Visa and Mastercard fee changes, and why your rate crept up
By Yan Payments
Why your rate didn’t go down, even though nothing about your business changed
Visa and Mastercard update their interchange and fee schedules twice a year, every April and October, and most of the time it’s a rounding error nobody notices. This April wasn’t that. CMSPI, a payments cost consultancy, estimated the spring 2026 changes would cost US merchants about $475 million in additional fees, split roughly $145 million from Visa’s changes and $330 million from Mastercard’s. If your effective rate ticked up this year and you didn’t change processors, didn’t change your card mix, and didn’t do anything differently, this is probably at least part of why.
These aren’t hidden processor markups like the “annual system enhancement” fees we’ve written about before. They’re baked into the wholesale cost of accepting a card, set by the networks themselves, and every processor has to pass them through eventually. Here’s what actually moved.
Mastercard’s authorization fee got more expensive
Mastercard charges a small fee every time a transaction gets authorized, whether or not the sale goes through. That fee, sometimes labeled “Undefined Authorization Fee” on a statement, went up to 0.30% of the transaction amount with a 5-cent minimum. On top of that, Mastercard now assesses its MOTO (mail order/telephone order) authorization fee on every attempt, including ones that get declined.
That second part matters more than it sounds like. A business that takes a lot of phone orders, or that runs into a lot of declines for any reason (an expired card, insufficient funds, a mistyped number), used to only pay on the authorizations that actually went through. Now every attempt counts. If you process a meaningful volume of phone or mail orders, this is worth watching specifically.
Visa expanded its Digital Commerce Service Fee
Visa’s Digital Commerce Service Fee, a charge tied to card-not-present and online transactions, went up to 0.015% domestic (0.035% cross-border), with a penny minimum either way. Small on its own. What makes it bigger in practice is that Visa also widened which services the fee applies to, adding it to several verification and data services merchants already use to screen online orders, including account updater and verification tools. More transactions now carry the fee than did before, even at the same sales volume.
This one lands hardest on e-commerce and card-not-present merchants specifically. If you run a restaurant that’s mostly swipe and tap in person, you’ll feel this less than a business that takes most of its orders online or over the phone.
Visa’s Level 2 program is gone, replaced by a stricter one
This is the change worth paying the most attention to if you process a lot of business or corporate cards. Visa discontinued its standard Level 2 interchange discount program on April 18, 2026. Level 2 used to give merchants a lower rate on business and commercial card transactions in exchange for submitting basic extra data, a tax amount and a customer code, with the sale.
In its place, Visa is phasing in the Commercial Enhanced Data Program (CEDP), which asks for more complete, invoice-level detail on B2B transactions to qualify for the better rate. If your point-of-sale or invoicing software doesn’t capture and submit that data automatically, transactions that used to qualify for Level 2 pricing can fall back to the standard commercial rate, which runs noticeably higher. Fleet and fuel cards are handled separately and aren’t part of this change.
What this looks like on an actual statement
Say a retail shop processes $25,000 a month, with $4,000 of that on business/corporate cards from B2B customers and about $6,000 online or by phone.
- Mastercard authorization fee increase: affects every Mastercard authorization attempt, including declines. Rough added cost is a few dollars a month, more if decline rates are high.
- Visa Digital Commerce Service Fee expansion: affects the $6,000 in online/phone orders. Rough added cost is single-digit dollars a month, but it compounds with volume.
- Level 2 sunset / CEDP: affects the $4,000 in business card volume, if invoice data isn’t submitted. Rough added cost is tens of dollars a month if those transactions downgrade to standard commercial rates.
None of these is dramatic alone. Together, and especially if you process meaningful B2B or online volume, they can add up to a visible shift in your effective rate without anything on your end changing.
What to actually do about it
Pull your last two statements, one from before April and one from after, and compare your effective rate (total fees divided by total card volume) rather than just eyeballing the summary page. If you take business or corporate cards, ask your processor directly whether your system is submitting Level 2 or CEDP-level data on those transactions. If it isn’t, that’s a fixable gap, and it’s the single biggest lever in this list. If you run a lot of phone orders, ask about your decline rate and whether there’s anything on your end, like better address verification or catching expired cards before you try to charge them, that would cut down on authorization attempts that go nowhere.
If you want a second set of eyes on your statement to see which of these actually hit you, get in touch and we’ll go through it line by line.
Sources
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