Payment Processing · Industry
A customer in Manchester buys a $100 item from your online store. A visitor from Toronto taps a Canadian card at your counter. In both cases the card networks treat the sale as cross-border, and in both cases you pay more for it than you would have paid a customer in Ohio. Most merchants know this. What very few know is how much more, where the money goes, and that the interchange — the part everyone assumes is the expensive bit — is not the reason.
The networks publish the answer, and so do the processors. This article puts the numbers side by side, as of September 2026, so you can see what a foreign-issued card costs on an interchange-plus account, what the flat-rate processors charge for the same thing, and which of the levers you have actually move the total.
Acquirer fee schedules define a cross-border transaction as one in which the merchant's country of domicile differs from the country where the card was issued. That is the whole test. Where the customer is standing, what currency the sale is in, and whether the goods ship abroad are all irrelevant to it. An American on holiday in Paris buying from your US website with a Chase card is a domestic transaction. A French tourist buying in your Miami shop with a BNP Paribas card is cross-border.
The consequence is that a business with no international ambitions at all can carry a meaningful cross-border cost. Hotels, restaurants and retailers in tourist cities, universities, and anything that sells to visitors will see the fees below on every statement. So will an online store that has never shipped outside the country, because a share of its customers hold cards issued elsewhere.
Every card transaction carries interchange, which goes to the issuing bank, and a small assessment that goes to the network — 0.14% on Visa credit, in the schedules processors pass through to interchange-plus merchants. On a foreign-issued card the networks add cross-border assessments to that. The figures are consistent across the acquirer fee schedules we read and the processors that publish them:
Add the two Visa fees together and a dollar-settled transaction on a foreign Visa card carries 1.45% in cross-border assessments. Add the two Mastercard fees and the answer is the same 1.45%. That coincidence is the number to remember, because it is the number the flat-rate processors have built their pricing around.
Visa's published US interchange schedule, effective 18 April 2026, has a separate table for cards used at a US merchant but issued outside the US. The base rates are 1.10% for Visa Classic, Gold and Electron cards, 1.85% for Signature and Premium, 1.98% for Infinite, and 2.00% for all commercial products, with no per-item fee. A transaction that fails to qualify for the base rate downgrades to 1.65%, 1.90%, 2.03% and 2.05% respectively.
Now compare a domestic e-commerce sale. The same schedule's card-not-present rate for an ordinary US consumer credit card — the "All Other Products" column — is 1.89% plus $0.10, and a Visa Infinite card that qualifies on spend is 2.60% plus $0.10. The foreign Classic card is cheaper to accept, on interchange, than the domestic one. Even the foreign Signature card, at 1.85%, is roughly where the domestic rate sits.
So when your interchange-plus statement shows a higher effective rate on international volume, the interchange line is not where to look. It is the assessments. Take a $100 online sale on a foreign-issued Visa Classic card, settled in dollars, on an interchange-plus account:
The same $100 sale on a domestic consumer credit card, at the card-not-present base rate, costs $1.89 plus $0.10 in interchange and $0.14 in assessment: $2.13, or 2.13%. The foreign card is 56 cents dearer, and $1.45 of its cost is the two cross-border assessments. Switch the foreign card to a Signature or Premium product and the total is 3.44%; a foreign commercial card is 3.59%. Those are the rates before the processor has taken anything.
A merchant on interchange-plus sees these lines individually — they surface on the statement as ISA, International Acquirer Fee, Cross-Border and Acquirer Program Support, the pass-through block our guide to reading a merchant processing statement walks through. A merchant on a flat rate sees none of them, because the processor has already rolled a number into its published surcharge. As of September 2026 the published figures are:
Set those against the network figures and the pattern is clear. A 1.5% surcharge is, to within five basis points, the 1.45% the networks charge on a dollar-settled Visa or Mastercard transaction. The flat-rate processors are not profiteering on the international add-on; they are passing it through in round numbers. Where they make their margin is on the base rate, and on the conversion fee, which is a separate product with a separate price — from 0.5% at Airwallex to 4.00% at PayPal.
On interchange-plus, with Adyen or Helcim, the assessments arrive at cost and the processor's markup is the same on a foreign card as on a domestic one. Adyen's published US card pricing is interchange plus 0.60% plus $0.13 per transaction; Helcim's online rate starts at interchange plus 0.50% plus $0.25. Neither publishes a separate international rate, because on this model there is nothing separate to publish: the network fees are passed through as the network bills them.
Pricing in the customer's currency is usually the right conversion decision — a shopper who sees a price in pounds converts better than one doing arithmetic — but it is worth knowing that it moves the network fee as well as adding the processor's. Visa's ISA is 1.00% on a transaction settled in US dollars and 1.40% on one that is not; Mastercard's cross-border assessment is 0.60% and 1.00% on the same split. Whether a multi-currency sale on your account falls under the higher rate depends on how your processor settles it with the network, and the right person to ask is your processor. Then the conversion charge stacks on top: 1% at Stripe, 1.5% at Shopify Payments, 4.00% at PayPal.
Two things follow. First, if you take a meaningful share of sales in another currency, the conversion spread is a bigger line than the cross-border assessment, and it is the one to shop on. Second, a like-for-like settlement — receiving euros as euros into a euro account rather than converting on every sale — removes the spread entirely, which is the product Airwallex is selling when it advertises settlement in twenty-plus currencies.
There are only three levers, and two of them are structural.
The lever that does not exist is a targeted surcharge. Visa's rules permit a credit card surcharge at the brand or product level, capped at 3.00% in the US, and require that it be the same for all Visa credit transactions "regardless of the Card's Issuer" — so a higher surcharge on foreign-issued cards is not allowed, whatever the cost of accepting them. Our guide to credit card surcharging covers the rest of the rules. Recover the cost through pricing, currency and acquiring, not through a fee at checkout that the rules do not permit.
If you are on interchange-plus, find the ISA, IAF, cross-border and program support lines and divide them by your international volume: the answer should be 1.45% on dollar-settled Visa and Mastercard volume and 1.85% on the rest, plus whatever Discover and Amex international volume you have. If it is higher, ask why. If you are on a flat rate, the 1.5% is the network's own charge in round numbers, and the question is not that line but the conversion fee beside it — which varies eightfold between the processors above and is the one worth negotiating.
