Small Tickets: What Visa's Schedule Charges on a $4 Sale

What Visa's schedule actually lists

Small-ticket pricing is not a marketing idea; Visa gives it named fee programs in the published schedule. Three things are worth noticing in the table below. First, the consumer credit Small Ticket program is a straight percentage with a minimum in cents rather than a percentage plus a per-item fee, so the cents floor only binds on very small sales. Second, Restaurant and Taxi are priced the same way, which is why quick-service businesses often see the same shape of cost. Third, the debit and prepaid small-ticket programs do carry a fixed per-item amount on top of the percentage. Visa's footnote adds that the small-ticket rate on PIN-authenticated Visa Debit and Visa Prepaid transactions applies only to Visa Network 002 transactions.

Regulated debit is a cap, not a discount, on a small sale

The Federal Reserve's Regulation II says a covered issuer may not receive an interchange fee above $0.21 plus 0.05 percent of the transaction value, plus a $0.01 fraud-prevention adjustment if eligible. That cap is widely described as cheap debit, and on a large sale it is. On a small sale it is the opposite, because almost all of it is fixed. Work it through on a $4 sale using only the published rates: the regulated card tops out near $0.21 plus about half a cent, which is roughly 5.4 percent of the sale, while Visa's exempt CPS/Small Ticket, Debit program at 1.55% + $0.04 comes to about $0.10, or roughly 2.6 percent. The arithmetic is ours; the rates are Visa's and the cap is the Board's. The practical consequence is that a debit-heavy business with a very small average ticket does not automatically have cheap debit, and the mix of covered and exempt issuers in your own card base moves the number.

What the Federal Reserve's own data shows

The Board publishes what issuers actually received. Across all networks in 2024, covered transactions averaged $48.95 in value and $0.23 in interchange, or 0.47 percent of the sale, while exempt transactions averaged $42.27 and $0.51, or 1.21 percent. Exempt transactions were 39.3 percent of the number of transactions. Two things follow. Your debit cost depends heavily on which issuers your customers bank with, and neither figure is a benchmark for what you pay, because both are interchange between banks rather than your merchant discount.

What the schedule does not tell you

Visa's Core Rules say a transaction must meet the qualifications defined in the Visa Rules and in the applicable Interchange Reimbursement Fee rate qualification guide to qualify for a particular fee, and that the acquirer must request the correct fee. The rate qualification guide is not a public document, and the phrase "small ticket" does not appear anywhere in the public Visa Core Rules and Visa Product and Service Rules. So you cannot check your own eligibility from published material. You can ask your acquirer, in writing, which fee programs your sales were assigned to last month and how much volume landed in the higher non-qualified programs. On interchange-plus pricing those program names appear on your statement. On flat-rate or tiered pricing they usually do not, and any difference between the program cost and your rate stays with the provider.

Card minimums: what the rules and the statute allow

Visa's general rule is that a merchant must not establish a minimum or maximum transaction amount as a condition for honouring a card. The US carve-out is narrow and specific. Visa's rule for the US Region and US Territories says a merchant must not set a minimum except for a transaction with a credit card issued in the US Region or a US Territory, that the minimum must not be greater than USD 10, and that it must not discriminate between issuers or between Visa and another payment network. That matches the federal statute at 15 U.S.C. 1693o-2(b)(3), which stops networks from preventing a $10 credit-card minimum on the same non-discriminatory terms. Debit cards are not covered, so a minimum on debit is not permitted. Outside the US, check the network's local rules before you post a sign.

What to ask for in a quote

Ask for cost in dollars on your actual numbers, not a percentage. Give the provider your average ticket, your monthly transaction count and your monthly volume, and ask for the total monthly cost including every fixed fee. Then ask four follow-ups: which fee programs my sales qualified for last month, whether small-ticket programs are among them, what share of volume landed in non-qualified programs, and whether lower programs reach my statement on the pricing plan being offered. A provider who cannot answer on your own numbers has not modelled your business.

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.