What Visa’s Own Rate Schedule Confirms
Visa’s own published rate table, Visa USA Interchange Reimbursement Fees, the authoritative document for Visa transactions completed in the 50 states and DC, carries a current edition dated April 18, 2026, with “Rates Effective April 18, 2026” stated across every fee category it covers: consumer debit, consumer prepaid, consumer credit, commercial and purchasing card, business, and international transactions. Visa’s own document states plainly that merchants do not pay interchange reimbursement fees directly; merchants pay a merchant discount to their own financial institution, with interchange functioning as the rate that flows between financial institutions behind that discount.
The Annual Measurement Window Behind Every Rate Tier
The same document’s Credit Performance Threshold table, covering Retail, Recurring Telecom and Cable, and Supermarket merchant categories, is dated “Effective April 18, 2026, based on 12 months of activity ending September 30, 2025,” direct evidence that Visa recalculates its own volume-based qualification tiers on an annual cycle tied to a fixed measurement window ahead of each new rate edition. A parallel Small Merchant volume-maximum threshold, $280,000 in gross Visa consumer credit sales, is separately dated as based on 12 months of activity ending September 30, 2024.
This research pass confirmed that one specific, dated rate edition and its underlying annual measurement windows directly from Visa’s own document. It did not independently retrieve a second edition, such as an October 2025 or October 2026 date, within this session, so the commonly repeated claim that Visa updates interchange rates twice a year, every April and October, should be read as widely reported in trade and processor content, not as verified by this research pass.
The Numbers
Visa’s current interchange rate schedule carries an edition dated April 18, 2026, with “Rates Effective April 18, 2026” stated across every fee category the document covers.
Visa’s Credit Performance Threshold table is dated effective April 18, 2026, based on 12 months of activity ending September 30, 2025, an annual measurement-window mechanic.
A parallel Small Merchant volume-maximum threshold, $280,000 in gross Visa consumer credit sales, is dated based on 12 months of activity ending September 30, 2024.
US card network purchase volume reached $2.909 trillion in Q1 2026, up 7.9% year over year, the transaction base every interchange rate table applies to.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- Visa, Visa USA Interchange Reimbursement Fees
- Nilson Report, US Card Network Results First Quarter 2026