What Is Interchange-Plus Pricing?

The structure is genuinely simple to state: interchange, passed through at whatever the card networks actually charge on that transaction, plus a fixed basis-point markup, plus a small per-transaction fee, equals the merchant's total cost. That's a meaningfully different structure from an older tiered pricing model, which groups transactions into vague buckets, qualified, mid-qualified, non-qualified, and obscures the real markup inside a blended number the merchant can't easily audit.

The reason interchange-plus is widely viewed as the more transparent structure is that the markup itself is quoted as a fixed, disclosed number in basis points rather than buried inside a blended rate, which means an agent or a merchant can actually verify the real cost against a statement instead of taking a rate claim on faith. That verification is precisely what a serious statement analysis is built to do.

Because interchange itself doesn't change between processors, only the markup does, quoting interchange-plus terms is what lets two competing offers actually be compared apples to apples in basis points. A real statement analysis leads with converting whatever a prospect's current setup charges back into an equivalent interchange-plus number before proposing anything new, so the comparison means something.