October 2026 Interchange Changes: US and Canada Breakdown

I suppose you also received the October network cost update from your provider. And if you are anything like the customers who reached out to us this week, it brought you more worry than clarity. One of them had already tried the obvious shortcut: paste the whole list into a general-purpose AI and ask whether any of it affects their business. The answer was no. The CFO was not convinced, and was right not to be.
A network update tells you what changed. It cannot tell you what changes for you. That depends on your portfolio, not on Visa or Mastercard. So here is the list, made readable. The impact is a calculation on your own payment data, and it is the only one that counts

This is a breakdown of what changes in North America this October, by territory and by kind of change, written for a vertical SaaS platform above many sub-merchants rather than for a single merchant.

United States: what changes on October 23

No existing US consumer or commercial credit interchange rate moves in this release. The pending Visa and Mastercard settlement, which received preliminary court approval in June, is a separate matter and none of its rate terms are in effect yet. One qualification rule does move, on fleet cards. Everything else is an addition.

Who is most affected

Platforms whose customers pay in installments, or that run installment plans themselves: a new Visa card product arrives with its own interchange grid.
B2B and virtual-card-heavy verticals: a new 0.10% fee on some commercial virtual cards.
Fuel, automotive and repair verticals that take fleet cards: fleet data stops being optional.
Anyone with aggressive retry logic: two response codes become more expensive to retry.

Areas of interest

BNPL moves onto the card rails. Visa is bringing the Visa Installment Credential to the US. A bank or lender approves a consumer for installments and issues them a credential before they shop; the consumer then pays with it like any other Visa card, and the lender collects the installments afterward. Your merchant receives the full amount in one ordinary transaction and carries no repayment risk. There is nothing to integrate, nothing to enable with your processor, and no way to opt out: whether you see these transactions depends on whether your customers’ banks issue the credential. The only difference reaches you in clearing, where the transaction carries its own product code and rates on a new grid.
Virtual cards get their own fee. Visa’s Commercial Embedded Payments fee, 0.10%, applies from October 23 (November 30 in Canada) to card-not-present transactions on commercial virtual cards that Visa flagged as “embedded” when the card program was onboarded. Consumer cards are out of scope, and so are commercial virtual cards without the flag. Nothing in your integration decides whether it applies; the card does, and the flag is set before you ever see it.
Fleet data becomes mandatory. Fleet cards at fuel, automotive and repair merchants (MCCs 5541, 5542, 7531, 7538 and others) can no longer qualify through Mastercard’s general commercial incentive programs. From October 23 they qualify only for the Fleet programs (Commercial Fleet Data Rate I, II, III and Fleet Large Ticket), which require fleet data such as driver number, vehicle number, odometer and fuel detail, and rate at standard commercial without it. The Fleet rates do not change; the data stops being optional.
A card can change category without changing number. Mastercard is opening Account Level Management Product Graduation between World Elite consumer and World Elite for Business, so an issuer can move a cardholder from a consumer to a commercial product without changing the PAN. A card in your portfolio can cross from consumer to commercial interchange with no signal on your side.

What it costs: examples

A US$300 purchase paid in installments. Today the customer pays with a card they already hold, and you pay that card’s rate: US$5.77 to US$7.90 in interchange depending on how premium the card is. From October 23, the same purchase on an Installment Credential costs US$7.60, the price of a premium card, whatever else is in the customer’s wallet. So it costs more if your customers usually pay with basic cards, about the same if they already pay with premium ones, and probably less if they pay through a BNPL provider today, whose fees run above card interchange.
If your platform offers payment plans itself, charging a stored card five times US$60 instead of once, you pay interchange on each of the five: US$4.85 to US$7.15 in total, and a missed payment in month three is yours or your merchant’s problem. The credential replaces that with one transaction at US$7.60 and moves the repayment risk to the lender. So this is not a saving. It is a slightly higher cost per sale in exchange for one transaction instead of five and no collection to chase. Whether that trade is worth it depends on how often your installment customers miss payments today, which is in your data, not Visa’s.

Smaller changes

Mastercard’s Crypto Card Assessment fee, 0.05%, applies from October 19 to transactions funded from a crypto balance; fiat cards with crypto rewards are out of scope.
Visa is reclassifying misused response codes 15, 57 and 12 to 05, which counts toward retry fees, and moving code 57 into its Never Approve category on October 25. If your retry logic treats 57 as retriable today, that becomes a fee.

Canada: what changes on October 23 and 24

Visa dates the consumer credit changes CPD October 24, 2026; most providers apply them to transactions cleared from October 23. Either way, the same weekend.

Who is most affected

Platforms whose customers pay with business credit cards: the one increase in the release, with nothing to offset it.
Platforms with many small merchants: lower Small Merchant rates, and a qualification threshold that more than doubles.
Card-not-present platforms on Mastercard: a new per-authorization fee that also charges for declines.
Anyone considering DCAP: it arrives in Canada with a 10 bps carrot and a 5 bps fee.

Areas of interest

Most of the interchange changes are cuts. Selected domestic consumer credit programs drop by 10 bps, 15 bps on Visa Infinite+, concentrated on the Small Merchant programs (Visa’s lower consumer credit rates for merchants under an annual Visa volume threshold; nothing to do with business cards) and on premium cards. Small Merchant Electronic for a basic card goes from 0.77% to 0.70%, Small Merchant Card Not Present from 1.30% to 1.20%, and the Infinite, Infinite+ and Infinite Privilege equivalents move by the same steps.
The one increase has no lever. Visa Business Credit Standard goes from 2.00% to 2.15%. Business credit in Canada has had a single Standard rate since April 2025, when Visa retired every other business program, so there is no better tier to qualify for by sending more data. For a platform whose customers pay with business cards, this is 15 bps on every transaction with nothing to fix. It simply arrives.
A qualification change you do not control. Visa is raising the annual Visa volume threshold for the Small Merchant program from CA$300,000 to CA$750,000 on the same date. Visa qualifies merchants directly on their own volume; a platform does not choose which sub-merchants qualify and is often not told. For a portfolio of small merchants this may move more cost than any single rate in the table, and it will show up as a change in plan mix, not as a rate change on a plan you already watch.
The fee base moves from captures to authorizations. Mastercard introduces the Network Access and Brand Usage fee (NABU) in Canada on October 19, at US$0.0195 per domestic authorization and US$0.0295 per non-domestic one, with lower rates on reversals, and retires the Clearing Fee (US$0.005 to US$0.0195 per captured transaction, introduced in September 2025) the same day. The Clearing Fee applied to captured transactions; NABU applies to all authorizations, approved and declined, and to reversals. A merchant with a high decline or reattempt rate pays for attempts it used to pay nothing on.
DCAP arrives. Visa introduces DCAP tiers for consumer credit card-not-present on the Small Merchant, Performance and standard CNP programs, at every card level, alongside a 0.05% Digital Commerce Authentication Program fee charged whenever DCAP data is sent. The shape is the same everywhere: tokenized sits 5 bps below the base CNP rate, DCAP 10 bps below, both 15 bps below. I am giving you the relationship rather than the absolute figures on the Small Merchant and Infinite+ tiers because Visa’s published table and the provider notices disagree by exactly the Small Merchant decrease, which suggests one was computed before the other. The rest match to the basis point. What DCAP is and what it is worth net of the fee is covered in the next section.

What it costs: examples

A CA$100 online sale at a small merchant, basic consumer card. Today: CA$1.30 in interchange (Small Merchant Card Not Present). From October 24: CA$1.20. With a network token, CA$1.15. Add DCAP and the tier drops another 10 bps but the 0.05% scheme fee takes 5 back, so about CA$1.10 for token and DCAP together, all in.
The same CA$100 sale on a Visa Business Credit card. Today: CA$2.00. From October 24: CA$2.15.For a business processing over $750K annually they are unable to qualify for the small merchant program therefore no way to reduce the cost of that transaction.
NABU on a merchant with 10,000 Mastercard authorization attempts a month, tickets above US$25. Today, with 5% declines, the Clearing Fee costs about US$185 (9,500 captures at US$0.0195). From October 19, NABU costs US$195 (10,000 authorizations). At a 15% decline rate the old fee was about US$166 and the new one is still US$195: the entire increase is the declines, and the fee is billed in US dollars on Canadian transactions.

Smaller changes

Interac raises its switch fee for Chip and PIN and mobile contactless on November 1, from 0.013985 to 0.014438.
Visa’s Commercial Embedded Payments fee, 0.10% on flagged commercial virtual cards, reaches Ca deploynada on November 30.

What is DCAP?

Visa’s Digital Commerce Authentication Program is an optional program for consumer credit, customer-initiated, card-not-present transactions. The merchant shares additional data during authentication (cardholder IP address, device ID, billing address, and email or phone) through Visa’s data-only flow, and Visa carries it into the authorization message so the issuer can decide with more context. It adds no step for the cardholder (no one-time code, no bank app prompt) and requires no enrollment. Transactions that carry the data qualify for a DCAP interchange tier. The program launched in the United States on April 18, 2026, and launches in Canada on October 24.

The economics are the part worth reading twice. In both countries the DCAP interchange tier sits 10 bps below the base card-not-present rate, and a 0.05% scheme fee applies whenever DCAP data is sent. So DCAP alone is worth about 5 bps net, and DCAP combined with a network token about 10 bps net, because the token discount carries no fee of its own. The exclusions matter for a platform: recurring and merchant-initiated transactions, wallet payments such as Apple Pay, and, in Canada, transactions authenticated with full 3D Secure are out of scope for both the incentive and the fee. Whether you can send the data at all depends on the authentication path your processor supports and on capturing the fields at checkout, which for a platform means an integration decision across every sub-merchant, not a setting.

Three kinds of change hide in one list

If you want to read a network update quickly, sort the lines into three piles first.

Pile one: a rate that moves on a program your merchants already qualify for. This one happens to you. Nobody on your team has to do anything, the new rate applies on the effective date, and the only question is how much volume you have on that plan, merchant by merchant.

Pile two: a new program. This is a rate you might reach, not one you already have. Reaching it usually means sending data you do not send today, or qualifying for something you do not control. Treat it as an optimization with a cost attached, not as a change that arrives on its own.

Pile three: a scheme fee. Not interchange, not optional. It shows up on a separate line of your statement, often replaces a fee that disappears the same day, and is usually billed in a currency your merchants do not trade in. The question here is what it is charged on: captures, authorizations, a card type, a channel.

Sort the October release that way and it stops being two hundred lines. It becomes a handful of questions about your own portfolio.

Why does the same release cost every platform a different amount?

Because nothing in it is a percentage of your volume. The Visa Infinite+ cut is worth nothing if you have no Infinite+ volume and quite a lot if your customers pay with premium cards. The Small Merchant threshold only moves cost for the merchants who cross it. NABU costs more to a merchant with a poor approval rate than to one with a good one. The Commercial Embedded Payments fee costs nothing if you never see an embedded virtual card. DCAP is worth 10 bps if your processor can carry the data and nothing if it cannot. Same table, different portfolio, different bill. And inside your own portfolio, a different bill for every merchant.

Two more things make it harder than simple arithmetic. First, the number on your statement is not the network’s number. It is your processor’s version of it: converted, rounded, renamed, sometimes marked up. So “did the new rate actually arrive” is a question about your processor before it is a question about the plan. Second, a network release is also the moment processors revisit their own pricing. After the October 2025 release we watched one reprice individual card plans while the platform’s blended rate barely moved; you could only see it plan by plan. That is [processor contract drift], and October is when it tends to happen.

So take everything above as a list of things to check, not as a verdict. None of it is a number until it has been applied to your own payment data, merchant by merchant, plan by plan. I can already tell you where it lands for some of our customers: a couple of them are in Canada with a large share of business card volume, and for them the 15 bps on Visa Business Credit is not a footnote, it is a line in next quarter’s margin. From there it stops being an interchange question and becomes a pricing one: absorb it, pass it through, or reprice the segment. That decision is easier to make on your own numbers than on the bulletin, and it is what we are here to help with.

The full change list, with every rate table for both countries, is here: October 2026 network fee changes.

FAQ

Do I need to enroll in DCAP? No. There is no enrollment. A transaction qualifies for the DCAP tier when the required data (device ID, IP address, billing address, email or phone) is sent through the authentication flow your processor supports, and the 0.05% fee applies whenever that data is sent. Whether you can send it at all depends on your processor, not on Visa.

When do the October 2026 interchange changes take effect? The Canadian Visa consumer credit changes take effect CPD October 24, 2026, with transactions cleared October 23 also subject to the new rates. Mastercard’s NABU fee in Canada and its Crypto Card Assessment fee in the US start October 19. The US Visa Installment Credential grid and the Commercial Embedded Payments fee start October 23. Interac’s switch fee changes November 1.

Does the Visa Small Merchant interchange decrease apply to my merchants? Only to sub-merchants Visa has qualified for the Small Merchant program, which Visa does on each merchant’s own annual Visa volume, not at the platform level. The threshold rises from CA$300,000 to CA$750,000 in October, so more merchants may qualify, but you will see it as a shift in which plans your merchants clear under, not as a rate change on a plan you already watch.

What is the Mastercard NABU fee in Canada? The Network Access and Brand Usage fee is a per-authorization scheme fee Mastercard introduces in Canada on October 19, 2026: US$0.0195 per domestic authorization and US$0.0295 per non-domestic one, with reduced rates on reversals. It replaces the Mastercard Clearing Fee, and unlike that fee it applies to declined as well as approved authorizations.