What the Visa/Mastercard interchange settlement actually changes for you

If you’ve gotten an email lately telling you to “claim your Visa/Mastercard settlement money,” you’re not imagining things, and you’re also not necessarily looking at a scam. There really are two separate settlements moving through the same federal court case. One already happened. The other is still being fought over, and as of this writing it hasn’t taken effect. Mixing the two up is easy, and it’s exactly what the scam emails are counting on.

The old settlement: a cash payout, and the claim window is closed

The first one is the $5.54 billion damages settlement from In re Payment Card Interchange Fee and Merchant Discount Antitrust Litigation, a case that’s been in the courts since 2005. It covers interchange fees merchants paid on Visa and Mastercard transactions between January 1, 2004 and January 25, 2019. The court gave it final approval back in December 2019, the Second Circuit upheld it on appeal in 2023, and the deadline to file a claim was February 4, 2025. That deadline has passed.

If you filed a claim before that date, you don’t need to do anything else. Payouts are happening in phases: a first round went out earlier this year, and the court approved a second distribution in June 2026 that was expected to go out around now. If you never filed, there’s nothing to claim retroactively, no matter what an email tells you.

The new one: rule changes, not a check in the mail

The second settlement is a different animal. It doesn’t pay merchants cash. Instead, it changes the rules Visa and Mastercard operate under, and the numbers involved are much bigger: reporting puts the projected value of merchant savings at roughly $38 billion through 2031. Visa and Mastercard reached this deal with merchant plaintiffs in November 2025, and the court gave it preliminary approval in June 2026.

Preliminary approval is not final approval. A fairness hearing is scheduled for November 16, 2026, and it’s not a formality. Nearly a thousand merchants and trade groups, including the National Retail Federation, the National Restaurant Association, and individual companies like DoorDash, filed formal objections in September 2026 asking the judge to reject the deal, arguing the relief is “temporary and meager” with loopholes that let the networks raise other fees to make up the difference. Whether the settlement survives that hearing in its current form is genuinely an open question right now.

Here’s what it would change if it goes through as written:

• Average credit card interchange would drop by about 10 basis points (0.1 percentage point) for five years.
• Standard consumer credit card interchange would be capped at 1.25%, more than a quarter below typical current rates, for eight years.
• Merchants would get the right to decline entire categories of cards, like premium rewards or commercial cards, with 30 days’ notice to their processor.
• Surcharging limits would loosen, allowing merchants to surcharge up to the lesser of 3% or their actual cost of accepting Visa credit cards.

Debit card rules aren’t part of this: debit interchange is governed separately under federal law and isn’t touched by this settlement.

Assuming it clears the November hearing, reporting suggests actual implementation wouldn’t start until late 2026 or early 2027 at the earliest, and there’s no confirmed rollout timeline from Visa or Mastercard yet. If you use Yan Payments for processing, you don’t need to track the court docket yourself. We’ll flag it when it’s real and tell you what changes on your account.

Nothing to sign, nothing to claim, right now

For both settlements, the important thing to understand is that neither one requires you to sign up for anything today. The old one’s claim window is shut. The new one hasn’t taken effect. If either changes, it happens automatically, with no form to fill out and no fee to pay anyone to “process” it for you.

That last part matters because settlement scams are a real, documented problem here. During the first settlement, a fraudulent look-alike site called Settlement2023.org mimicked the official claims site and used a deepfake AI voicemail impersonating a celebrity to push merchants toward it. A court ordered it shut down. The genuine settlement administrator site is paymentcardsettlement.com, and that’s the only place you should ever enter information related to either case.

A few red flags worth watching for in any “settlement” outreach:

• Requests for your bank account or Social Security number by email or text
• Any request for an upfront “processing fee” to release your payout
• Vague references to “the settlement” without a case name or court
• Promises of an unusually large payout with urgency language pushing you to act now

If something arrives claiming to be settlement-related and asking for money or sensitive information, don’t click through. Go directly to paymentcardsettlement.com and check there instead, or get in touch and we’ll take a look.

What to actually do right now

Nothing, and that’s fine. The old settlement will keep distributing to merchants who already filed. The new one is still in front of a judge. If you want a periodic check on where things stand, we’ll cover it here when there’s real news, not before.

Sources: Payments Dive, NPR, Top Class Actions on the fake settlement site, paymentcardsettlement.com official FAQ.