Interchange went up again in 2026. Here's what changed.

Why this page has a shelf life

Unlike most pages on this site, this one is explicitly tied to a moving target: Visa and Mastercard each publish updated interchange schedules on a regular cycle, typically around April and October each year, and the specific rate changes are the kind of thing that's accurate on the day it's written and stale within months. We check this page against the current published schedules on that same twice-yearly cadence rather than leaving it static.

The practical pattern worth understanding, even as specific numbers shift: interchange has trended upward gradually across most categories in recent years, driven by network-level changes rather than anything a merchant or processor does. A small percentage-point increase across a category sounds trivial until you multiply it by your annual card volume — for a business processing $50,000 a month in cards, even a tenth of a percentage point works out to hundreds of dollars a year.

What to actually do about it

You can't negotiate interchange itself — it's set by the networks regardless of your processor. What you can control is everything layered on top: your processor's markup, whether you're on transparent interchange-plus pricing (where a rate increase is visible and traceable) versus tiered or flat-rate pricing (where it can get absorbed into an already-opaque number without you noticing), and whether a surcharge or cash discount program makes sense to offset rising costs.

If you haven't checked your effective rate against current interchange since the last schedule update, that's the concrete next step — not because your processor did anything wrong, but because the ground underneath your pricing shifted, and only interchange-plus merchants see that shift clearly on their statement.

Common questions