Tiered Pricing: The Structure Built to Be Unauditable

How the buckets work

A tiered agreement lists a qualified rate, a mid-qualified rate and a non-qualified rate, sometimes with a per-transaction fee on each. The qualified rate is the lowest and is often the one quoted. The agreement or the processor's program guide says what makes a sale qualify, for example a swiped, dipped or tapped consumer debit or non-rewards credit card, batched on time. Keyed sales, online sales, rewards cards, business cards and late batches may be moved to the higher buckets. Those definitions are written by the processor, not by Visa or Mastercard, and they vary from one provider to the next. Read your own agreement for the exact wording.

Why you cannot audit it against Visa's schedule

Visa says merchants do not pay interchange directly: they negotiate and pay a merchant discount to their financial institution, and interchange flows between banks. Visa publishes the interchange side. Its US schedule effective April 18, 2026 sets different rows for card type, product and channel. For example, exempt debit is 0.80% + $0.15 under CPS/Retail and 1.65% + $0.15 under CPS/Card Not Present; consumer credit Product 2 (card present) in the All Other Products column is 1.51% + $0.10; and Non-Qualified Consumer Credit is 3.15% + $0.10 across every consumer credit product. A tiered statement rolls all of those into three lines. Without the interchange row for each sale, you cannot tell how much of a mid-qualified or non-qualified charge is network cost and how much is processor margin.

Visa's own tiers are something else

Visa's schedule also uses the word tier, which causes confusion. Its Supermarket Credit Tier 0 to III rows and Retail Credit Performance Thresholds I to III apply to merchants that meet published minimums; for example, Retail Performance Threshold I requires 133.4 million transactions and $8.83 billion in volume, based on 12 months of activity ending September 30, 2025. Those are network interchange programs. They are not the qualified and non-qualified buckets on a small business's tiered statement.

Test your own statement

Take one month's statement and write down, for each bucket, the volume, the rate and the fees. Then work out your effective rate: total fees divided by total card sales. Illustrative example only, with made-up round numbers: if a statement showed $20,000 of sales and $600 of total fees, the effective rate would be 3.0%. Repeat for two more months. If a large share of volume lands in mid-qualified or non-qualified, or the effective rate is far above the qualified rate you were quoted, ask the processor for an interchange-level report for the same months. A provider that can produce one can show you what each sale actually cost.

How to move off tiered pricing

Ask your current processor, in writing, whether it can reprice the account as interchange-plus with the markup stated in basis points and a per-item fee. Ask whether it needs new equipment or a new application; often it is a pricing change on the existing account. Also ask for the change-of-pricing clause in your agreement, because a new structure is only useful if the markup cannot be raised quietly later. In a 2022 complaint, the FTC alleged that one processor, First American Payment Systems, typically raised its rates, including percentage markups on cost-plus pricing, at least once a year. That is an allegation about one company, but it shows why the written change terms matter as much as the structure.

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.