Retail payments with inventory that actually matches the shelf

The Visa programs a retail sale lands in

Retail is the category Visa's US schedule is built around, which means a retailer has more named programs to fall out of than most merchants. The table below is the exempt-debit ladder, and the spread between the top and the bottom is the number worth carrying into any conversation about pricing. These are interchange reimbursement fees paid between financial institutions; Visa states that merchants do not pay them, and your merchant discount sits on top. What the table shows is that the same customer, the same card and the same basket can cost materially different amounts depending only on how the sale reached the network.

Debit is capped, and the routing choice is yours

A large share of retail volume is debit, and debit has a statutory ceiling that credit does not. Under 12 CFR 235.3(b), an interchange transaction fee on a covered electronic debit transaction may be no more than 21 cents plus 5 basis points of the transaction value. Section 235.4 permits an additional fraud-prevention adjustment of no more than 1 cent per transaction for issuers that meet the standards in that section. Those caps apply to issuers above the asset threshold, which is why Visa's schedule shows a separate regulated column at 0.05% + $0.21. Two further provisions matter operationally. Section 235.7(a) requires issuers to enable at least two unaffiliated payment card networks on every debit card. Section 235.7(b) prohibits an issuer or a network from inhibiting, by contract, condition or penalty, the ability of anyone accepting debit cards to direct the routing of a debit transaction over any network that can process it. In practice that is a question about how your terminals and your POS are configured, and it is a legitimate question to put to your provider in writing.

"Qualified retail" in your agreement is not Visa's retail

This is where a lot of retail pricing conversations go wrong. Visa publishes credit performance threshold criteria for the retail and supermarket categories, 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, 86.3 million and $4.73 billion; Threshold III, 19.2 million and $1.08 billion. Each also requires a maximum dispute financials ratio of 0.020%, calculated as a percentage of the merchant's gross transaction count, and PCI compliance. Those are national-chain numbers. No independent store reaches the lowest published rung. So when a pricing schedule uses the word qualified, it is describing that provider's own tier definition, not Visa's threshold programs, and the gap between the two definitions is exactly where a non-qualified surcharge lives. Ask for the definition in writing and compare it with the published schedule.

Returns and refunds at the till

Retail lives or dies on the return counter, and the card rules are specific. A merchant may set its own credit refund policy, but if it restricts returns, refunds or cancellations, Visa's rules require it to disclose that 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 if the disclosure is 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 must appear in the sequence of pages before final checkout with a click-to-accept, checkbox or equivalent acknowledgement. A merchant must not require a cardholder to waive the right to dispute a transaction with the issuer. When you do refund, the rules require the credit to go back to the same payment credential used for the original transaction to the extent possible, and a merchant must not process a credit transaction receipt without having completed a previous retail transaction with the same cardholder. 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 — useful to know when a customer calls to say the refund has not landed.

Card-present does not mean fraud-proof

Retailers often assume an in-store sale cannot be charged back for fraud. Two published rules say otherwise. First, the US region participates in the EMV liability shift for counterfeit POS and ATM transactions, and the liability sits with the issuer only when the transaction took place at an EMV-compliant chip-reading device and, if chip-initiated and authorised online, the authorisation request carried full chip data. Take the card details any other way and the protection does not apply. Second, Visa's dispute condition 10.3 covers a cardholder denying authorisation of or participation in a key-entered transaction conducted in a card-present environment, with a time limit of 120 calendar days from the transaction processing date. In other words, keying a card at the counter creates a fraud dispute right that dipping the chip does not. That is a staff training point as much as a hardware one.

POS, hardware and what happens when you leave

The POS system and the merchant account are two agreements. Retail adds a third consideration that restaurants mostly do not have: the inventory database. If your product catalogue, cost prices and supplier records live inside the POS, the cost of changing POS is measured in data migration, not in hardware. That is a reason to keep processing portable even when the POS is not. Before signing either agreement, establish four things in writing: the term and how it renews, the early termination amount, whether the hardware is sold, rented or financed through a separate non-cancellable lease held by a third party, and who owns an export of your catalogue and customer data. The Federal Trade Commission's 2022 complaint against First American Payment Systems, and the refunds it announced to affected small businesses in February 2025, are a matter of public record on exactly this point: exit terms that were 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.