What Are Scheme Fees? Visa and Mastercard Network Fees (2026)

Scheme fees, also called network or assessment fees, are the charges Visa, Mastercard and other card networks bill acquirers for every transaction that runs through their systems. They are distinct from interchange, which goes to the cardholder’s bank, and from the acquirer’s own margin. Acquirers pass scheme fees through to merchants, and platforms pass them through to their sub-merchants.

They matter in 2026 because they are the part of card costs that regulators have not capped and that has grown fastest. The UK regulator found core scheme fees up by more than a quarter in real terms in six years, the European Commission reopened the file in 2025, and both networks keep adding behavioral fees around tokens, authentication and cross-border traffic that an operator can influence.

What are scheme fees and how are they different from interchange?

A card payment carries three cost layers. Interchange is set by the scheme but paid to the issuer; in the EU it is capped at 0.2% for consumer debit and 0.3% for consumer credit. Scheme fees are set by the scheme and paid to the scheme, by the acquirer. The acquirer margin is what the acquirer or PSP keeps. In interchange++ pricing the three lines are shown separately; in blended pricing they are mixed into one rate. We describe the networks themselves in Visa, Mastercard and local schemes explained.

Scheme fees are not one fee. A US acquirer’s price list shows the main families: an assessment of 0.14% of volume on Visa credit and 0.1275% to 0.1475% on Mastercard, per-transaction authorization and clearing fees, an international service assessment of 0.80% plus 0.45% on non-US cards, a fixed monthly network access fee, and integrity fees for misuse of authorization, late settlement or pre-authorizations left open. Europe has its own versions, with cross-border, non-domestic settlement currency, 3-D Secure, account verification and tokenization fees.

How do scheme fees work, line by line?

1. Assessment (brand or volume fee): a percentage of every transaction, the base toll for using the brand.
2. Processing fees: cents per authorization, clearing record, reversal or file transfer. Mastercard’s Canadian Network Access and Brand Usage fee moves to authorization on October 19, 2026, at $0.0195 domestic and $0.0295 interregional, and can be billed twice on a reversal.
3. Cross-border and FX fees: charged when the issuer and the merchant are in different countries or regions, or when settlement is not in the local currency. Mastercard introduced a 0.10% non-local currency settlement fee on October 13, 2025, and Visa raised its non-domestic settlement currency volume fee by 0.05% on April 1, 2026.
4. Integrity and behavioral fees: penalties for bad data or bad behavior, such as excessive reattempts, authorizations never cleared, or pre-authorizations left open. Mastercard’s European not-reversed pre-authorization fee is 28 basis points from October 1, 2026 on amounts of EUR 12 or more.
5. Service fees: account updater, address verification, CVV checks, 3-D Secure authentication, tokenization. Visa bundles several of them into a Digital Commerce Services Fee, 1.50 basis points domestic and 3.5 cross-border per card-not-present authorization in Canada from June 1, 2026, and in the EU from April 1, 2027.
6. Registration and program fees: annual fees for high-risk merchant categories, PayFac registration, or monitoring programs. Mastercard’s Specialty Merchant Registration carries a $1,000 annual fee per merchant plus $0.02 and 10 basis points per transaction, in the EU from September 28, 2026.

Scheme fees in numbers (2026)

• Visa: $40.0 billion of net revenue in fiscal 2025, including $17.5 billion of service revenue and $20.0 billion of data processing revenue, on 257.5 billion processed transactions.
• Mastercard: $32.8 billion of net revenue in 2025, up 16%, on $10.6 trillion of gross dollar volume.
• UK: the PSR found that core scheme and processing fees rose by more than 25% in real terms between 2017 and 2023, costing businesses at least £170 million extra per year.
• EU: merchant associations cite a 33.9% cumulative increase in international scheme fees between 2018 and 2022, and a €1.46 billion increase between 2016 and 2021 according to the Commission.
• US: assessments of 0.14% on Visa credit and up to 0.1475% on Mastercard, before processing, cross-border and integrity fees.
• Cross-border Canada: Mastercard’s acquirer cross-border assessment rises from 60 to 100 basis points on July 20, 2026.

What are regulators doing about scheme fees in 2025 and 2026?

In the UK, the Payment Systems Regulator closed its market review on March 6, 2025 with a finding of “ineffective competitive constraints” on Mastercard and Visa, and margins “higher than would be expected in a well-functioning market.” It consulted on remedies in April 2025: clearer fee information for acquirers and merchants, regulatory financial reporting, pricing governance and more publication. By 2026 the PSR had issued two final specific directions, SD22 on fee transparency and SD23 on pricing governance, and was consulting on financial reporting. No price cap. The UK card market remains the most documented test case.

In the EU, the Interchange Fee Regulation capped interchange in 2015 but never touched scheme fees. In May 2025 the European Commission sent a new round of questionnaires to market participants about scheme fees, and merchant associations asked for an IFR review with price controls on scheme fees. Nothing binding had been adopted by November 2026. In the US, scheme fees sit outside Durbin and outside the interchange litigation. Regulation under PSD3 and the PSR does not address them either.

How do scheme fees show on an interchange++ invoice?

On an IC++ statement, each transaction carries its interchange line, its scheme fee line and the acquirer’s markup. The scheme fee line is itself a sum: assessment, authorization fee, cross-border, settlement currency, and any integrity fee triggered by that transaction. Acquirers receive the schemes’ invoices monthly or quarterly, often with a two-month delay for behavioral fees, and re-bill them, sometimes with a markup. That is why reconciling a scheme fee line to a transaction is hard: the fee arrives later than the payment, in a different currency, and is aggregated by fee code rather than by order. Our money-saving guide to processing fees lists the codes worth checking first.

Scheme fees: what changes for PSPs, PayFacs and platforms

Pricing: buy rate, sell rate and pass-through

An operator buys scheme fees at cost from its acquirer and sells them to merchants either at cost (IC++) or inside a blended rate. With blended pricing, every scheme fee increase eats the operator’s margin until the next repricing. With pass-through, the operator needs the fee codes per transaction to bill correctly. Both models need a payment revenue view that separates what the scheme charged from what the operator earned.

Behavior changes the bill

A growing share of scheme fees rewards or punishes behavior. Mastercard’s European Customer Performance Development Fund, from January 1, 2027, charges non-tokenized card-on-file and unauthenticated traffic up to 10 basis points, phased to 2030. Visa’s token facilitation fee and secure credential fees point the same way. Enabling network tokenization, sending correct authentication indicators, closing pre-authorizations and capping reattempts are now pricing decisions as much as technical ones. Wallet payments through Apple Pay and Google Pay add a Visa token facilitation fee of 0.05% online from April 2026 in Europe.

Routing and local acquiring

Cross-border and non-local settlement fees depend on where the acquirer sits. Routing a French card to a French acquirer rather than a Dutch one removes an intraregional fee; settling in the merchant’s local currency avoids the non-local settlement fee. Rules on routing can carry a cost dimension, and the acquirers available per country decide what is possible. For some flows, local schemes or instant account-to-account payments, listed in our real-time payments explorer, cost less than an international card.

Reconciliation and reporting

Scheme fee invoices arrive by fee code, by currency and with delay. Operators need to allocate them to transactions, merchants and brands, compare the expected fee to the billed one, and spot the integrity fees that signal a technical problem. Dashboards that show cost per transaction by scheme, by country and by fee family, such as analytics dashboards, turn a quarterly surprise into a monthly review. Direct scheme access, discussed in full data access as a competitive edge, gives the most detailed view, at the price of more work.

Are scheme fees worth watching in 2026?

Yes, more than interchange. Interchange is capped in the EU and the UK and litigated in the US; scheme fees are not, they grow faster, and a share of them now depends on how the operator processes. For a PSP, PayFac or platform, the work is to buy at cost with full fee codes, pass through or price with margin knowingly, process in the way the schemes reward (tokens, authentication, clean authorizations), route to local acquiring where it pays, and reconcile the invoice every month. The report Payments from a merchant’s perspective in our library is a good primer on how merchants see the same bill.