Scheme Fees (Assessment Fees)

Scheme fees, known in the United States as assessment fees or network fees, are the charges a card network levies on the banks and processors that use it. Visa and Mastercard bill them to acquirers and to card issuers for access to the network, for processing each transaction and for services such as authorisation, clearing, fraud tools and cross-border handling. Acquirers usually pass these on to merchants.

Scheme fees are one of three layers inside a merchant's card cost. The largest layer is usually interchange, which the acquirer pays to the issuer; the network sets interchange rates but does not keep the money. Scheme fees are the network's own revenue. The third layer is the acquirer's markup. In the four-party card model the three are separate, while in a three-party model the network is also the issuer and acquirer, so the fees are bundled into one price.

Picture a shopping mall. Each shop pays the landlord rent for its space, and on top of that the mall charges small fees for using the car park, the loading dock and the security service. Scheme fees are the card network's version of those mall charges: the cost of being plugged into the network that carries card payments from shop to bank and back.

Shoppers never see them, and many merchants only discover them as short, cryptic lines on a monthly statement. Each one is small, often a fraction of a cent or a tiny percentage. But a large merchant processes millions of payments, so the small charges add up. Because the network decides what to charge and when to add a new fee, merchants and their banks have little room to negotiate them.

Networks publish detailed fee schedules, mainly to their member banks rather than to the public. The fees fall into a few broad groups:

• Volume-based assessments. A small percentage of the value of card sales, charged monthly. In the US, processors commonly cite rates around 0.13% to 0.15% of volume for Visa and Mastercard.
• Per-transaction fees. Fixed amounts for each authorisation, clearing record or settlement, sometimes only a fraction of a cent each.
• Cross-border and currency fees. Extra charges when the card was issued in another country or the transaction is in a foreign currency.
• Service and behaviour fees. Charges for fraud and tokenisation services, and penalties for practices such as unmatched authorisations or misuse of transaction data.

Fees differ by card type, so a card-not-present transaction on a foreign card can carry several more lines than a domestic in-store one.

A simple estimate combines the volume-based part and the per-transaction part:

• $F$ is the total scheme fee for the period.
• $a$ is the volume-based assessment rate, written as a decimal.
• $V$ is the value of card sales in the period.
• $n$ is the number of transactions and $f$ is the fixed fee per transaction.

Take an illustrative merchant with $500,000 of monthly credit card sales across 8,000 transactions, an assessment rate of 0.14% and a per-transaction fee of $0.02. Then $F = 500{,}000 \times 0.0014 + 8{,}000 \times 0.02 = 700 + 160 = 860$, so scheme fees come to about $860 for the month, or about 0.17% of sales. The real figure depends on the network's current schedule and the mix of cards.

Under interchange-plus pricing, scheme fees are usually passed through at cost and listed separately, so the merchant can see them. Under flat-rate pricing they are hidden inside one blended rate, the merchant discount rate. Either way, they form part of the effective acceptance cost. Published interchange tables, such as the Visa interchange rates table, do not include scheme fees, which is a common source of confusion when merchants compare quotes.

The EU Interchange Fee Regulation of 2015 capped interchange on most consumer cards at 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit, but it did not cap scheme fees. A study carried out for the European Commission by EY and Copenhagen Economics, published in 2020, found that scheme fees had risen after the caps took effect and recommended monitoring their level, structure and transparency. Retail groups argued the real increases were larger than the study measured.

In 2025 the Commission's competition department sent questionnaires to merchants, payment firms and terminal providers about Visa and Mastercard scheme fees, asking whether merchants had real choice, whether the fees were transparent and how many new fees had been added since 2017. Both networks said their fees reflect the value of their services. As of late 2025 the inquiry was described as ongoing, with no formal charges announced.

• Regulation (EU) 2015/751 on interchange fees for card-based payment transactions, EUR-Lex
• Visa Core Rules and Visa Product and Service Rules