Retail Credit Card Processing: What a Store Pays

Retail consumer credit: the rows an independent store actually reaches

Visa's consumer credit tables price by card product as well as by program, which is why two sales at the same till can cost different amounts for reasons that have nothing to do with you. The table below sets out the card-present consumer credit programs relevant to retail, effective April 18, 2026, across three of the six product columns Visa publishes. Read down the first value column for the everyday case. These are interchange reimbursement fees paid between banks — Visa states that merchants do not pay them and pay a merchant discount to their own financial institution instead — so they are a floor to compare your pricing against, not your price.

Why the performance thresholds are not for you

The first three rows of that table look like a ladder you could climb. They are not. Visa publishes the qualification criteria separately, effective April 18, 2026 and based on 12 months of activity ending September 30, 2025. Retail Threshold I requires a minimum of 133.4 million transactions and $8.83 billion in volume. Threshold II requires 86.3 million and $4.73 billion. Threshold III, the lowest published rung, requires 19.2 million transactions and $1.08 billion. Each additionally requires a maximum dispute financials ratio of 0.020%, calculated as a percentage of the merchant's gross transaction count, and PCI compliance. Supermarket Tier III, the lowest supermarket rung, requires 23.4 million transactions and $1.35 billion. Those are numbers for national chains. The practical consequence is that an independent retailer's consumer credit sales sit on Product 2 and Product 1, and the only two levers that move the number are which card the customer presents and whether the sale qualifies at all. This also means that when a pricing schedule calls a transaction qualified, mid-qualified or non-qualified, it is describing that provider's internal buckets rather than Visa's published programs. Those two vocabularies use the same words for different things, and the difference between them is a line item.

Debit: the statutory cap, and the routing right that goes with it

Debit is usually the largest share of retail volume, and it is the only part of the card mix with a legal ceiling. Regulation II, at 12 CFR 235.3(b), provides that an interchange transaction fee for a covered electronic debit transaction may be no more than the sum of 21 cents and 5 basis points multiplied by the value of the transaction. Section 235.4(a) permits an issuer that meets the fraud-prevention standards in that section to receive up to 1 cent more per transaction. That is why Visa's schedule carries a regulated column at 0.05% + $0.21 with a footnote adding a cent for certified issuers. Issuers below the asset threshold are exempt, which is why the same card type can price at 0.80% + $0.15 or at 0.05% + $0.21 depending only on who issued it — nothing about the sale changes. Two routing provisions matter as much as the cap. Section 235.7(a)(1) requires issuers to enable at least two unaffiliated networks on every debit card, and 235.7(b) prohibits an issuer or a network from inhibiting, by contract, requirement, condition, penalty or otherwise, the ability of any person accepting debit cards to direct the routing of a debit transaction over any network that may process it. That right is only worth something if your terminals are configured to use it, so ask how debit routing is set on your equipment and get the answer in writing.

The keyed sale is the expensive sale, twice over

Keying a card number at the counter costs a retailer twice. The first cost is the rate: CPS/Retail, Debit is 0.80% + $0.15 while CPS/Retail Key Entry, Debit is 1.65% + $0.15, and the prepaid equivalents move from 1.15% + $0.15 to 1.75% + $0.20. Visa's schedule also notes that the key-entry program does not apply to PIN-authenticated transactions. The second cost is liability. Visa's dispute condition 10.3 allows an issuer to dispute a transaction where the cardholder denies authorisation of or participation in a key-entered transaction conducted in a card-present environment, within 120 calendar days of the transaction processing date. A chip transaction at a compliant device does not create that right. So the staff habit of typing in a card that will not read is not a small operational shortcut; it changes both the price and who carries the fraud risk. If cards are failing to read often enough that keying has become routine, the reader is the problem to fix.

Returns, refunds and the rules behind the counter

Visa's rules let a merchant set its own credit refund policy, and then attach conditions to it. If you restrict the return of goods or the cancellation of services, you must disclose the policy: for card-present transactions, at the point of transaction before the cardholder completes the sale, or on the front of the transaction receipt — and where the disclosure sits on the receipt or in a separate contract, it must be accompanied by a space for the cardholder to indicate acceptance. For e-commerce, the disclosure belongs in the sequence of pages before final checkout, behind a click-to-accept button, checkbox or equivalent. For card-absent sales that are not e-commerce, it goes by mail, email or text message. A merchant must not require a cardholder to waive the right to dispute a transaction with the issuer. When you process the refund, the rules require the credit to go to the same payment credential used for the original transaction to the extent possible, and prohibit processing a credit transaction receipt without a previous retail transaction with the same cardholder. On timing, in the US region an issuer must post a credit to the cardholder's account within 3 business days of settlement for credit cards and within 1 business day for Visa Check Cards, unless circumstances or account history warrant a delay. Two dispute conditions follow from getting this wrong. Condition 13.6 covers a credit or voided transaction receipt that was not processed: the issuer must wait 15 calendar days from the date on the credit transaction receipt before disputing, and must process the dispute no later than 120 calendar days from that date. Condition 12.5 covers an incorrect transaction amount, with the dispute amount limited to the difference between the amounts. Neither is expensive to prevent and both are expensive to lose.

Small baskets change the arithmetic

A fixed per-transaction amount is invisible on a $200 sale and dominant on a $4 one. Visa publishes named small-ticket programs for exactly this reason: CPS/Small Ticket, Debit at 1.55% + $0.04, CPS/Small Ticket, Prepaid at 1.60% + $0.05, and a consumer credit Small Ticket program at 2.20% with a $0.04 minimum on Visa Infinite and Visa Signature products and 1.90% with a $0.04 minimum on Traditional Rewards and all other products. Note the shape of those rows: the credit ones carry a minimum rather than a fixed addition, which is the opposite structure from the rest of the schedule. Whether your sales reach those programs is decided by Visa's rate qualification guide, which Visa does not publish, so the only honest answer is that it is a question for your acquirer rather than something to assume. What you can do without asking anyone is calculate your own effective rate — total fees divided by total volume for the month — and then look at what a flat per-item fee does to it at your average basket. A store averaging $8 a sale and a store averaging $80 a sale should not be on the same pricing structure, and usually are.

Compliance and the two contracts

PCI DSS validation sits with the merchant. The PCI Security Standards Council publishes the merchant guidance and the self-assessment questionnaires, and which one applies depends on how cards reach your systems — a shop floor on validated point-to-point encrypted terminals is a different scope from a back-office PC that runs the web store. Visa's own published performance threshold criteria list PCI compliance as a requirement, which is a reminder that it is a condition of the programs rather than a service you buy. Separately, remember that the POS and the merchant account are two agreements with two sets of terms. Before signing either, establish the term and its renewal mechanism, the early termination amount, whether hardware is sold, rented or financed through a separate non-cancellable lease held by a third party, and who owns an export of your product catalogue and customer records. The Federal Trade Commission's July 2022 complaint against First American Payment Systems, and the refunds the FTC announced to affected small businesses in February 2025, are a public record of what happens when exit terms are not clear at signing. This is general information about published card network rules and federal regulations, not legal advice (September 17, 2026).

About the rate tables on this page: Visa is the only card network that publishes a public US merchant interchange schedule, so the rate tables on this site are Visa-only. Mastercard, American Express and Discover do not publish an equivalent US merchant schedule, and their rates are neither shown above nor implied by these figures. Ask your processor for the rates that apply to each network on your account.