Visa and Mastercard Swipe Fee Lawsuit: The Interchange Settlements

The Swipe-Fee Fight

Every time a shopper pays with a Visa or Mastercard, the merchant pays an “interchange” or “swipe” fee, set by the card networks and paid to the cardholder’s bank. Merchants have argued for two decades that Visa and Mastercard, which together dominate card payments, fix these fees at inflated levels and impose rules — like requiring stores to accept all of a network’s cards — that prevent competition and steer costs onto businesses and ultimately consumers. The dispute is one of the largest antitrust battles in US retail.

Because nearly every business that takes cards is affected, the stakes run into the tens of billions of dollars.

The Settlements

The litigation produced two very different outcomes. A damages settlement of about $5.5 billion — compensating merchants for card transactions over roughly 2004 to 2019 — was approved, and eligible businesses could file claims for a share. But a separate, forward-looking deal that would have modestly capped future swipe fees was rejected by a federal judge in 2024, who called the projected savings “paltry” relative to what the networks could still charge and faulted it for keeping restrictive card-acceptance rules in place. The parties later floated a revised deal, and the fight over future fees continued.

The distinction matters: past damages have been paid out, but the core question of future fee levels is unresolved.

What Merchants Should Know

Any US business that accepted Visa or Mastercard during the covered period may have been eligible for the damages settlement; check whether your claim window is open through the official claims administrator. Going forward, merchants can watch the ongoing rules fight and understand their options for surcharging or steering, which vary by state and card-network rule.