What Is Interchange?

Interchange is a network-set fee, not a processor-set one. It's the money that flows from the merchant's bank to the cardholder's bank on every transaction, and its rate is driven largely by MCC and card type, a rewards credit card typically carries a higher interchange rate than a basic debit card, for instance, regardless of who processes the transaction.

The scale of what interchange touches is enormous: total US card, credit, debit, and prepaid, purchase volume reached $12.498 trillion in 2025, up 5.0% year over year, and combined Visa and Mastercard US volume alone hit $9.986 trillion, up 6.6%, per the Nilson Report's 2025 figures. That's the volume interchange rates apply across, even though most merchants never see the interchange component broken out clearly on their own statement.

Because interchange is fixed by the networks and isn't negotiable at the agent or processor level, the actual competitive lever an agent is selling is the markup layered on top of it, whether structured as interchange-plus, tiered, or flat-rate. That's exactly why understanding basis points and effective rate matters more to a real comparison than any bare "our rate is lower" claim, since interchange itself doesn't change no matter who processes the transaction.